The Chinese-American whose Supreme Court case changed the country.

-Source-Politico- John H. Wise was the scion of an old Virginia family from Accomack County on the Eastern Shore. His relatives were fierce defenders of slaveryespecially his Uncle Henry who as governor had overseen the hanging of the insurgent abolitionist John Brown then served as a Confederate brigadier general in the Civil War. But John Wise left home not long after graduating from the University of Virginia to work as a customs inspector in San Francisco and there were few African-Americans in California to discriminate against at the time. So he became famous for discriminating against another group of people: Chinese immigrants. In 1893 when President Grover Cleveland appointed him collector of customs a job that put him in charge of foreign entries to the biggest port on the West Coast Wise started making up harsher entrance requirements for Chinese entrants than the law required. He made merchants from China produce stacks of sworn statements business documents and photographs at a time when none of that was easy or cheap to obtain. Once as the historian Erika Lee has written he deported a longtime U.S. resident who was trying to re-enter the country to see his fiance. Then he wrote a poem to the mans attorney in Los Angeles gloating: Ive sent him back to China / Where he can eat his mice." By then many white Americans were echoing Wises attitudes. The United States was still a minor player in world affairs but through conquest and coercion it had spread across North America and was on the cusp of becoming a Pacific power. Over the next few years U.S. troops would defeat Spain in war conquer Cuba Puerto Rico and Hawaii and turn the Asian archipelago of the Philippines into a U.S. colony. China lay just beyond. And as has happened throughout American history as the United States expanded its reach brandished its power and gained the wealth of other nations people from those countries started wanting to move to the place their nations wealth was going. Thousands of Chinese people had fled European invasions civil war and economic strife at home to seek work in the U.S. And though they made up only a small fraction of immigrants they were the largest nonwhite group of newcomers which made them targets of fact-free panics over supposed influxes of disease crime and a general degradation of culture. Some called the immigrants an unarmed invasion." And those werent just words. Armed vigilantes attacked Chinese immigrants. In 1871 a Los Angeles crowd killed 17 by hanging in what has been called the largest mass lynching in American history. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. The law prohibited Chinese people from being naturalized as citizens creating a permanent class of aliens on racial lines. The first federal immigration restriction based on race it laid the groundwork for the first large-scale deportation of immigrants in U.S. history. But much to the dismay of Wise and other white supremacists none of that stopped Chinese people from trying to build new lives in America. In 1895 a man named Wong Kim Ark showed up on a boat at the Port of San Francisco. Wong was 22 years old with bright broad features and his hair pulled back in a traditional queue. The son of parents from Taishan on the southern Pearl River Delta he must have looked at first to the customs officials like any other young man from the province they called Canton. But Wong was born in San Francisco. His parents had come to America decades earlier and spent years helping manage a grocery store in Chinatown. They had entered the U.S. before there was a federal immigration service or such a concept as illegal immigration." Yet unable to attain citizenship under the racial laws fearing vigilante violence they had fled with their son back to China in 1890.