LEXINGTON ASIAN AMERICAN PACIFIC ISLANDER BANNERS
Mural design: CalPoly Pomona
ABOUT
A Bit of Background
In May of 2021, the Town of Lexington proclaimed May as Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
Multiple AAPI cultural groups of Lexington have come together to create public banners that celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islanders’ contributions to our nation. Each banner celebrates either a significant historical event or person who has made a significant contribution to society. The banners will be displayed along Mass. Avenue in Lexington Center, and another set in Cary Library in the month of May. We plan to continue to add more banners and increase representation in future years.
“This project is made possible by the generous support from the Community Endowment of Lexington (CEL) and many community members like you. Thank you!
Bangladeshi Americans of Lexington (BALex)
Chinese American Association of Lexington (CAAL)
Chinese Americans of Lexington (CALex)
Indian Americans of Lexington (IAL)
Japanese Support Group of Lexington (JpLex)
Korean American Organization of Lexington (KoLex)”
Lexington Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Banners
WONG KIM ARK
Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco in 1873, had been denied re-entry to the United States after a trip abroad, under a law restricting Chinese immigration and prohibiting immigrants from China from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. He challenged the government's refusal to recognize his citizenship, and the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, holding that the citizenship language in the Fourteenth Amendment encompassed the circumstances of his birth and could not be limited in its effect by an act of Congress.
In the words of a 2007 legal analysis of events following the Wong Kim Ark decision, "The parameters of the jus soli principle (birthright citizenship), as stated by the court in Wong Kim Ark, have never been seriously questioned by the Supreme Court, and have been accepted as dogma by lower courts."
MARY TAPE
Mary Tape (1857–1934) was a desegregation activist who fought for Chinese-Americans' access to education. In the 1885 case Tape v. Hurley, the Supreme Court of California stated that public schools could not exclude her daughter Mamie Tape for being Chinese-American.
In 1884, Mary Tape's daughter, Mamie, was denied admission at Spring Valley Primary School because of her Chinese heritage. The Tape family filed suit against the principal and board of education. The Superior Court ruling, upheld by the Supreme Court of California in Tape v. Hurley, established the right to public education for Chinese American children.
Tape v. Hurley became a landmark case addressing segregation in public schools. The result of the case gave greater legal foundations for eliminating segregation in the school system later on. About 70 years after Tape v. Hurley, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education finally ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in the United States.
Lexington Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Banners
FILLIPINO SETTLERS- LOUISIANA
The first Asian American settlement was established by Filipino fishermen in the marshlands of Louisiana as early as 1763. The small fishing village of Saint Malo was settled by Filipino sailors and indentured servants who escaped the Spanish Galleons in the 1700s. They were later known in history as the Manilamen after the capital city of the Philippines.
The Manila Galleon Trade was a thriving global trade network between 1565 and 1815 that connected the economies of Asia, the Americas, and Europe. As early as the 16th century, many Filipino sailors and indentured servants jumped ship and settled across land that is now Mexico and parts of the United States.
The fishing village of Saint Malo was a thriving community of houses built on stilts with hat-shaped eaves and balconies similar to the nipa huts found in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. The initial settlement consisted only of men, but throughout history the Manilamen intermarried with other ethnic groups of the region, thereby contributing to a multicultural melting pot of cultural assimilation.
CHINESE RAILROAD WORKERS
From 1863 and 1869, roughly 15,000 Chinese workers helped build the transcontinental railroad. Chinese workers made up most of the workforce for the most difficult section across the Sierra Nevada mountains, roughly 700 miles of train tracks between Sacramento, California, and Promontory, Utah.
The work was tiresome, as the railroad was built entirely by manual laborers who used to shovel 20 pounds of rock over 400 times a day. They had to face dangerous work conditions – accidental explosions, snow and rock avalanches, which killed hundreds of workers, not to mention frigid weather.
They were paid half as much as the white workers and lived in tents, while white workers were given accommodation in train cars. In 1867, 3,000 laborers went on strike to demand equal wages but it failed when the railroad construction chief cut off their food supply.
Despite their extraordinary contributions, the Chinese railroad workers were largely forgotten and never received the recognitions they deserved.
Chinese railroad workers were largely single men, hoping to bring a bride from China. In 1882, President Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting the immigration of Chinese laborers and families. This largely bachelor community aged in place with very low birth rates, eventually dying out without a chance to have a family.
Lexington Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Banners
PATSY TAKEMOTO MINK
1927-2002
Patsy Takemoto Mink, born in Hawaii to Japanese American parents, pursued her education and career of her passion but was hindered by the prejudices against her race and gender. However, she found ways to use her talents to serve for the public.
In 1965, Patsy Mink has become the first woman of color elected to the US House of Representatives and the first Asian-American woman to serve in Congress. She worked tirelessly for civil rights, women's rights, economic justice, civil liberties, peace, and the integrity of the democratic process.
She was one of the authors of the Title IX law that stated that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” The Title IX was enacted into law on June 23, 1972. We celebrate its 50th year of its enactment in 2022.
CHIEN SHIEU WU
Chien-Shiung Wu (吳健雄, 1912–1997) was a Chinese-American physicist who made significant contributions in the fields of nuclear and particle physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, along with Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman and Niels Bohr, where she solved some critical challenges.
Dr. Wu was the first female faculty of the physics department at Princeton University. She is often compared to Marie Curie, with nicknames like the "First Lady of Physics", the "Chinese Madame Curie" and the "Queen of Nuclear Research".
Wu, like most involved physicists in their later years, distanced herself from the Manhattan Project due to its destructive outcome. She said, "Do you think that people are so stupid and self-destructive? No. I have confidence in humankind. I believe we will one day live together peacefully."
Lexington Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Banners
DUKE KAHANAMOKU AND SAMMY LEE
Duke Kahanamoku was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 24, 1890. He is an Olympic gold medalist in swimming and introduced and popularized the sport of surfing worldwide.
Kahanamoku won a gold medal in the 100-meter freestyle and a silver medal in the men's 4×200-meter freestyle relay during the summer Olympics in Stockholm in 1912. During the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Kahanamoku won gold medals in both the 100 meters and in the relay. Then in 1924 Olympics in Paris, Kahanamoku won a silver medal in the 100 meters.
Kahanamoku traveled internationally to give swimming exhibitions where he also incorporated surfing exhibitions. This popularized the sport of surfing and attracted people to surfing in mainland America in 1912 in Southern California. His exhibition in Sydney, Australia in 1914 is seen as the seminal event in the development of surfing in Australia.
Sammy Lee was a Korean-American diver and physician. He was the first Asian American man to win an Olympic gold medal for the United States and the first man to win back-to-back gold medals in Olympic platform diving.
Sammy’s training was challenged by the limited access to the local pool where Latinos, Asians and African-Americans were only allowed to use the nearby pool on Wednesdays, on what was called "international day,” the day before the pool was scheduled to be drained and refilled with clean water. To provide a consistent place to practice, Sammy’s coach created a sandpit in his backyard so that Sammy can practice jumping.
Despite his limited access to the pool, in 1942 Sammy Lee won the United States National Diving Championships in both the 3-meter springboard and the 10-meter platform events, becoming the first person of color to capture the United States national championship in diving. In 1946, he again triumphed at the 10-meter platform event while finishing third at the 3-meter springboard competition at the national diving competition in San Diego.
LARRY ITLIONG
Modesto "Larry" Dulay Itliong (October 25, 1913 – February 8, 1977), also known as "Seven Fingers",was a Filipino-American labor organizer. One of six children of Artemio and Francesca Itliong, Itliong only had a sixth grade education. He immigrated to the United States in 1929 and joined his first strike in 1930; Itliong was only 14 when he came to the United States. He organized West Coast agricultural workers starting in the 1930s, and rose to national prominence in 1965, when he, Philip Vera Cruz, Benjamin Gines and Pete Velasco, walked off the farms of area table-grape growers, demanding wages equal to the federal minimum wage, that became known as the Delano grape strike.] He has been described as "one of the fathers of the West Coast labor movement." He is regarded as a key figure of the Asian American movement for fair wages.
Lexington Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Banners
AMY TAN AND JHUMPA LAHIRI
Amy Tan (1952- ) is an American author who has written bestselling novels, children’s books, and numerous articles about Chinese heritage and the Chinese American experience.
She is best known for writing the novel The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989. The book explored the relationship between four pairs of Chinese women and their Chinese American daughters and became the longest-running New York Times bestseller for that year. The Joy Luck Club received numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Award and has been translated into 25 languages. In 1993, The Joy Luck Club was made into a major motion picture for which Tan co-wrote the screenplay.
Tan has written several other novels, including The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), Saving Fish From Drowning (2005) and The Valley of Amazement (2013), all New York Times bestsellers. She has also written two children's books: The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994). Sagwa became an Emmy-nominated television series for children that was aired worldwide. Tan’s work has been adapted into films, stage plays, operas, and television.
Memorable quote: “When you read about the lives of other people, people of different circumstances or similar circumstances, you are part of their lives for that moment. You inhabit their lives, and you feel what they're feeling, and that is compassion.”
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is an American author known for her short stories, novels and essays in English, and, more recently, in Italian.
Her debut collection of short-stories Interpreter of Maladies (1999) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name.
The Namesake was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and was made into a major motion picture. Unaccustomed Earth (2008) won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, while her second novel, The Lowland (2013), was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. On January 22, 2015, Lahiri won the US$50,000 DSC Prize for Literature for The Lowland. In these works, Lahiri explored the Indian-immigrant experience in America.
In 2014, Lahiri was awarded the National Humanities Medal. She was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University from 2015-2022. In 2022, she was announced to be the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at her alma mater, Barnard College of Columbia University.
Memorable Quote : “"It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying: Listen to me."
LYDIA BROWN
Lydia X. Z. Brown is an advocate, organizer, educator, attorney, strategist, and writer. Their work focuses on addressing state and interpersonal violence targeting disabled people living at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, language, and nation. They are Policy Counsel for Disability Rights and Algorithmic Fairness for the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Director of Policy, Advocacy, and External Affairs for the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network.
Lydia has served on the American Bar Association’s Commission on Disability Rights, chairperson of the ABA Civil Rights and Social Justice Section’s Disability Rights Committee, the Disability Justice Committee represenative to the National Lawyers Guild’s National Executive Committee, Alliance for Citizen Directed Supports, and on multiple advisory boards for organizations including the Transgender Law Center, The Kelsey, Borealis Philanthropy, the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy, the Nonbinary and Intersex Recognition Project, and the Vera Institute for Justice.
Memorable quote:: “You are worth more than your accomplishments, your work, your productivity, and your ability to put your trauma on display. You are worthy.”
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Lexington Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Banners
FRED KOREMATSU
Fred T. Korematsu was a national civil rights hero. In 1942, at the age of 23, he refused to go to the government’s incarceration camps for Japanese Americans. After he was arrested and convicted of defying the government’s order, he appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled against him, arguing that the incarceration was justified due to military necessity.
In 1983, key documents were discovered that consistently showed that Japanese Americans had committed no acts of treason to justify mass incarceration. With this new evidence, Korematsu’s 40-year-old case was reopened on the basis of government misconduct. On November 10, 1983, Korematsu’s conviction was overturned in a federal court in San Francisco. It was a pivotal moment in civil rights history.
Korematsu remained an activist throughout his life. In 1998, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton.
SAL KHAN
Salman Amin Khan (1976- ), known as Sal Khan, is an American educator and the founder of Khan Academy, a free online education platform with the mission of providing a “free world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” He and his organization have produced over 6,500 video lessons teaching a wide spectrum of academic subjects, originally focusing on mathematics and sciences.
In 2004, Khan began tutoring his cousin, Nadia, in mathematics over the internet. When other relatives and friends sought his tutoring, he moved his tutorials to YouTube. The popularity of his educational videos prompted Khan to quit his job as a financial analyst in late 2009 and devote himself full-time to developing his YouTube channel, Khan Academy. His videos received worldwide interest from both students and non-students, and his work has transformed learning by providing free and open access to all.
As of December 2021, the Khan Academy channel has 7.02 million subscribers and its videos have been viewed more than 1.92 billion times. In 2012, Time magazine named Khan in its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In the same year, Forbes magazine featured Khan on its cover, with the story "$1 Trillion Opportunity."
Lexington Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Banners
MARGARET CHO
Margaret Moran Cho was born December 5, 1968 in San Francisco California. She is a Korean-American actress, musician, stand-up comedian, fashion designer, and author. Cho is best known for her stand-up routines, through which she critiques social and political problems, especially regarding race and sexuality. She rose to prominence after creating and starring in the ABC sitcom All-American Girl in 1994, which was initially promoted as the first show prominently featuring an East Asian family.
In 1999, Margaret wrote about her struggles with All-American Girl in her first one-woman show, I'm the One That I Want. That year, I'm the One That I Want won New York magazine's Performance of the Year award and was named one of the Great Performances of the year by Entertainment Weekly. At the same time, Cho wrote and published an autobiographical book with the same title, and the show itself was filmed and released as a concert film in 2000. Her material dealt with her difficulties breaking into show business because of her ethnicity and weight and her resulting struggle with and triumph over body image issues and drug and alcohol addiction.
MINDY KALING
Mindy Kaling (Vera Mindy Chokalingam) is an American actress, comedian, writer, producer, and director] She first gained recognition starring as Kelly Kapoor in the NBC sitcom The Office (2005–2013), for which she also served as a writer, executive producer, and director.] For her work on the series, she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series and five times for Outstanding Comedy Series.
Kaling gained wider attention for creating, producing and starring in the Fox comedy series The Mindy Project (2012–2017). She created the NBC sitcom Champions (2018), also appearing in five episodes, the Hulu miniseries Four Weddings and a Funeral (2019), the Netflix comedy-drama series Never Have I Ever (2020–present), and the HBO Max comedy-drama series The Sex Lives of College Girls (2021–present). Some of Kaling's notable films include This Is the End, Wreck-It Ralph, and The Five-Year Engagement. Kaling was nominated five consecutive times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series as a producer of The Office. In 2010, she received a nomination for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series with Greg Daniels for the episode, "Niagara". The next year, she published a humorous memoir, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?. In 2013, Entertainment Weekly identified Kaling as one of the "50 Coolest and Most Creative Entertainers" Kaling was recognized by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world and in 2022, her company Kaling International made their list of the 100 Most Influential Companies in the World.
Lexington Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Banners
Kamala Devi Harris is the first female vice president and first Black person and Asian American to hold the position. She was also the first US Senator of South Asian descent. Her mother Dr. Shymala Gopalan gave her daughter the name Kamala, which means “lotus” in Sanskrit and is another name for the Hindu deity Lakshmi, in part, to help preserve her cultural identity. The vice president’s middle name, Davi, translates to “goddess” in Sanskrit, another tribute to the Hindu religion. “A culture that worships goddesses produces strong women,” the late Gopalan told the Los Angeles Times in 2004.A neighbor regularly took the Harris girls to an African American church in Oakland where they sang in the children's choir, and the girls and their mother also frequently visited a nearby African American cultural center. Their mother introduced them to Hinduism and took them to a nearby Hindu temple, where she occasionally sang. As children, she and her sister visited their mother's family in Madras (now Chennai) several times. She says she has been strongly influenced by her maternal grandfather P. V. Gopalan, a retired Indian civil servant whose progressive views on democracy and women's rights impressed her. Harris has remained in touch with her Indian aunts and uncles throughout her adult life Harris has also visited her father's family in Jamaica.
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