Building the Cultural Bridge: Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese Student Social Activism in the United States

What role did foreign students in American universities play in social movements and the struggle for civil rights between 1915 and 1968?   Although Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese students who came to America to obtain a college education were only “visitors,” they became deeply involved in a multitude of social movements such as labor organization, anti-imperial protests, and the promotion of immigrant rights along the West Coast.  My work makes use of student publications, yearbooks, and memoirs to explore for the first time how visiting students from China, Japan, and the Philippines created an ideological strategy for dismantling racism in the United States.  This strategy rested on cultural exchange and, in turn, influenced a multicultural movement for civil rights in America. While historians have discussed the role of human rights in producing a more globally-minded civil rights movement in America during the Cold War era, I argue that the push for civil rights during the twentieth century was international, multicultural, and multiracial long before the Cold War and even World War II. The ideologies and actions of Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese students prove that the term” civil rights” embraced multiple issues.  Understanding the activist history of Asian students in the United will offer a new understanding and conceptualization of civil rights movements in American history.