One unexpected and controversial legacy of ABC activism in Chinatown was the growth of the bilingual education system in the United States. During the 1960s, Chinese immigrant parents in San Francisco had complained that their children were unable to follow classroom instruction in English. The Chinese for Affirmative Action, founded in 1969 to fight racial discrimination against Chinese and other Asian Americans, helped ethnic Chinese students file a class action lawsuit against education officials to get them to address their language needs in the public schools. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which in 1974, in Lau v. Nichols, overruled a lower court decision, not on constitutional grounds but instead by finding, “It seems obvious that the Chinese-speaking minority receive fewer benefits than the English-speaking majority from respondents’ school system, which denies them a meaningful opportunity to participate in the educational program—all earmarks of the discrimination banned by [H.E.W] Regulations. In 1970 H.E.W. issued clarifying guidelines which include the following: ‘Where inability to speak and understand the English language excludes national origin-minority group children from effective participation in the educational program

offered by a school district, the district must take affirmative steps to rectify the language deficiency in order to open its instructional program to these students.’ ” The Supreme Court concluded that it was a “mockery of public education” to demand that all children possess basic skills in English before availing themselves of a public education. This decision paved the way for historic language reforms within the American education system.

(Chang 272-273)