My desire to join the service was to defend my country and, more specifically, to defend my home. When they took our home, I changed my attitude completely. I could never be hostile to the USA, but I was bitterly disappointed and felt like a man without a country.”
—Fred Yoshihiro Oyama, US citizen, son of Kajiro Oyama
During Oyama’s journey to justice, the United States remained opposed to the large number of Asian immigrants arriving through Mexico, Canada, Hawai‘i, and even the Philippines, which at the time was a US territory. Individual states could no longer enact immigration laws explicitly excluding people because the Fourteenth Amendment forbade it, so started to focus on creating “facially neutral” property laws that would dissuade the new immigrants from settling in the state. One example was California’s Alien Land Law of 1913 (also known as the Webb-Haney Act), which was specifically a response to the thousands of Japanese immigrant farmers who were perceived to be competing with their Anglo-American counterparts. It barred Japanese and other Asian immigrants who were “ineligible to citizenship” from owning agricultural property.38
Similar to the Chinese, early Japanese immigrants encountered discrimination in various aspects of their life. On the federal level, the government started to ban their entry into the country in 1907. On the state level, they were prevented from owning property, and schools started to segregate the children of Japanese immigrants.39 Initially, Japanese immigrants tried to bypass the land laws by purchasing the land in the name of their minor children who were US citizens. Then they could manage the land as the guardians of their childrens’ estate. In response to this tactic, in 1920 California amended the Alien Land Law to make anyone who was ineligible for naturalization also ineligible to serve as guardians to property owners. Furthermore, it specified that the purchase of property in the name of someone else would be presumed to represent an attempt to bypass the Alien Land Law and thereby subject to forfeiture.40
Over time, other states established anti-Japanese land laws, which for the most part were rarely enforced. But during World War II, after the United States rounded up thousands of Japanese and placed them in internment camps, California funded lawsuits to challenge their property ownership.41 The goal of the lawsuits were to show hostility toward the Japanese, extort them into selling their property to the state at less than full value, and dissuade them from returning to California.
With the help of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), in 1945, Kajiro and Fred Oyama challenged the Alien Land Law.42 Born in Japan in 1899, Kajiro Oyama came to the United States in 1914 hoping to study at California Institute of Technology.43 He was ineligible for United States citizenship because, at that time, the process of becoming a naturalized citizen was closed to Japanese individuals on racial grounds. Therefore, because of the Alien Land Law, he also could not own land, so he worked on farms that were leased by his uncle.
In 1923, Oyama bought twenty-three acres in Chula Vista, near San Diego, California, and deeded the property to a white acquaintance, Arthur Glower. Over time, Oyama’s farm prospered. He married and established a family in the United States. In 1934, Kajiro Oyama purchased land in San Diego in the name of Fred Oyama, his son, and served as the guardian of the person and estate of his son.44
Seven years later, on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, requiring the internment of persons of Japanese ancestry along the West Coast. Kajiro did not want to be placed in an internment camp, so he leased some farmland in Utah, and moved there with four other families during the brief period allowed for “voluntary evacuation.”
Although the Oyama family escaped to Utah, California claimed that the purchase of Kajiro Oyama’s property had involved a fraudulent evasion of the Alien Land Law, and that the property consequently now belonged to the state of California.
The Oyamas took this case all the way to the US Supreme Court though they changed their tactics along the way. Instead of arguing that the Alien Land Law was a violation of equal protection for both the immigrant parent and the US citizen child, the case focused on the US citizen child and how he was being deprived of property rights.
In 1948, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Alien Land Law violated Fred Oyama’s equal protection rights as a United States citizen.45 The state of California’s attempted confiscation of Fred Oyama’s property because of his father’s ancestry constituted discrimination based on national origin and race.
At a time when racial discrimination and hostility against the Japanese was at an all-time high, the Oyama family used the legal system to fight for their rights, and for the rights of countless others. The Oyama case helped to turn the tide against the discrimination that continued to be directed recently interned Japanese families. The Oyama case also led to the invalidation of a similar alien land law in Oregon. However, the case missed a critical opportunity to invalidate the racially discriminatory treatment of noncitizens, because it opted to not address the equal protection claim made earlier by Kajiro Oyama, the noncitizen father. This demonstrates the troubling consequences of relying on citizenship as a basis for rights. In so doing, the Supreme Court allowed California to continue to deny land ownership to noncitizens.
The Oyama family never returned to Chula Vista and remained in Utah until 1946.46 Kajiro Oyama eventually owned and farmed three hundred acres in San Diego County and became a US citizen. He died in 1998, when he was ninety-nine years old.
The California Supreme Court finally, in 1953, declared the Alien Land Law unconstitutional in a test case led by another Japanese immigrant, Sei Fuji,47 but California did not repeal the law until 1956. In 1988, Congress finally offered an official apology and individual payments of twenty thousand dollars to Japanese Americans who had been held in internment camps during World War II without charges or trial.48 However, thousands of Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens never received the full value of their land nor compensation for the freedoms they had lost.
Claudia Jones
“The Lady with the Lamp, the Statue of Liberty, stands in New York Harbor. Her back is squarely turned on the USA. It’s no wonder, considering what she would have to look upon. She would weep, if she had to face this way.”
—Claudia Jones
The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act finally lifted racial restrictions on citizenship.49 However, it added many more barriers as well, including but not limited to deportation for criminal conviction, drug trafficking, homosexuality, prostitution, sexual deviance, crimes of moral turpitude, economic dependency, and polygamy. Yet deportations under these new restrictions did not go unchallenged by advocates, who continued to try to carve out exceptions in the law.
Born Claudia Vera Cumberbatch, Claudia Jones is a classic case of an advocate who challenged her politically motivated deportation. She was born in Trinidad in 1915.50 When she was about nine years old, her middle-class parents moved to the United States to pursue better opportunities. A few years later, when her parents experienced discrimination during the Great Depression, Jones started to learn about the Jim Crow oppression that black people suffered in America. At seventeen, Jones contracted tuberculosis, which became a lifelong chronic condition, perhaps contributing to her early death.
In 1936, inspired by how the Communist Party had established the public defender system, Jones joined the Young Communist League (YCL). She quickly rose through the ranks, writing many letters and publications to promote black nationalism among the Marxist ranks. As a black nationalist and communist, Jones put black women at the forefront of class struggle. Jones is part of a long tradition of black American women who regarded their oppression as unique from other women and from black men. She popularized the term “triple oppression” to describe black women’s oppression and articulated a socialist feminism that considered not just race, but the various struggles of all working women.
Jones was arrested
