BY ROCKWELL CHIN
In the struggle for civil rights in the United States, Asian Pacific Americans have not always fought the loudest battles, and their struggles have not often garnered the biggest headlines.

But their efforts nevertheless have had a deep impact on the continuing struggle to rid America of racism, bigotry and discrimination.

Faced with a hostile country in the 1800s, Chinese Americans frequently pooled their resources to hire lawyers. In the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th, dozens of cases were brought on behalf of Chinese, Japanese and other groups. The cases attacked immigration laws, local ordinances depriving Asians of livelihood, laws denying the right to testify in court, discriminatory taxes, laws prohibiting land ownership, laws prohibiting Asians from attending white-only public schools, and laws denying citizenship.

A good number of these were decided by the California and U.S. supreme courts, which both struggled at the time to articulate a rationale sanctioning discrimination.

In People v. Hall (1854), write Philip S. Foner and Daniel Rosenberg, editors of Racism, Dissent and Asian Americans from 1850 to the Present (Greenwood Press, 1993), the "California Supreme Court ruled 2-to-1 that a white man charged with murder had been wrongly convicted because Chinese witnesses had testified against him: Inadmissibility of their evidence ... was covered by the proscription on testimony by blacks and Indians in the California state Constitution. To the court in People v. Hall Chinese were 'constructive blacks' and had no right to testify against whites."

Beyond Black and White

It is ironic that "more contemporary race relations controversies appear to have elevated Asian Americans to the status of honorary whites, particularly in the minds of those who oppose race conscious remedies such as affirmative action," writes Angelo N. Ancheta in Race, Rights and the Asian American Experience (Rutgers University Press, 1998). "Asian Americans are often omitted from protection in affirmative action programs as a matter of course, lumped with whites even in contexts where Asian Americans still face racial discrimination and remain underrepresented."

That continuing paradox illustrates the importance of all Americans understanding that the complexity of race relations today de mands that discussions about race must move beyond "black and white."

Civil Rights Heroism

There is no more famous case in U.S. constitutional history involving Asian Pacific American plaintiffs than Korematsu v. United States (1944), a constitutional challenge to the U.S. policy during World War II of interning some 120,000 Japanese Americans in what amounted to concentration camps.

Fred Korematsu was a Japanese American living in the San Francisco area who sought to evade internment. Eventually, he was arrested, convicted and sent to a Utah internment camp--but not without putting up a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The justices voted 6-3 to uphold his conviction but declined to tackle the underlying question of the constitutionality of the internment policy.

Korematsu, now 80, was finally exonerated when a federal court granted a 1983 coram nobis petition filed by a team of largely Asian American lawyers. Similar petitions were granted on behalf of Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui, who also challenged the internment laws.

In most constitutional law classes today, discussions of Korematsu are limited to its impact on development of the strict scrutiny standard for testing racial restrictions. In fact, Korematsu is far more significant to America's struggle to establish due process and defend civil rights. The coram nobis cases became a powerful tool propelling the political movement for Japanese American redress and reparations for the wartime internments.

Today, increasing numbers of Asian Pacific Americans are taking their places in all segments of the legal profession, the judiciary and government. At the same time, however, we are witnessing a disturbing but familiar rise in anti-Asian violence--most recently in apparent hate crime shootings that killed Yoon Wonjoon, a Korean graduate student in Bloomington, Ind., and Joseph Ileto, a Filipino postal worker in Los Angeles. These incidents might be alarming enough, but we are also witnessing some members of Congress fanning the familiar flames of fear about what used to be referred to as the "yellow peril."

In response, the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, a dozen other Asian Pacific American organizations and a number of individuals submitted a petition in September 1997 to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights complaining that "a climate of racial tension toward Asian Pacific Americans has become aggravated."

As the petition made clear, many battles remain on the civil rights front. "To Asian Pacific Americans, the intensity and level of the [recent] scapegoating and stereotyping is reminiscent of other periods of American history when Asian Pacific Americans were targeted for discriminatory treatment," it stated. "Asian Pacific Americans are all too familiar with the dangers associated with this level of innuendo, scapegoating and stereotyping."

Asian Pacific Americans can claim many heroes. But in the context of civil rights, there are three in particular who stood up tall for all Americans more than 50 years ago at great personal risk, and who continue to inspire us today.

We embrace you, Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui, true American civil rights heroes.