How a Chinese family faced down racists and bullies to thrive in a US town more than 99% white
- The Tu family moved to San Leandro in 1960 despite its history of racism, and thrived; they helped make it one of America’s most racially diverse communities
David Tu and his family moved to San Leandro, in the US state of California, in 1960. Among the first Chinese to live there, his early years involved being bullied in school, harassed by police and taunted with racial slurs.
The census the year they moved in suggests why. Known informally as the “whitest city west of the Mississippi”, the settlement just across the bay from San Francisco was 99.7 per cent white, and city fathers were keen to keep it that way.
“Our city is not a ‘white spot’ by accident,” councilman Joseph Gancos declared proudly in 1969.
“It was not exactly an American heartwarming welcome,” says Tu, whose family arrived from Shanghai by way of Taiwan and Hong Kong without speaking English. “But five or six years later, we got our revenge when the Asian-Americans won all the scholarships.”
Said property shall not be used or occupied by any person whose blood is not entirely that of the Caucasian race
Tu and his four siblings would go on to become successful entrepreneurs, scholars and philanthropists and, in a dramatic transformation, San Leandro is now among America’s most racially diverse communities, with Asians accounting for more than a third of its 87,000 population – three times California’s average – as the white population has declined to just under 30 per cent.
