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lbert Armendariz, broke and eager to start practicing law, arrived home in El Paso, Texas on a hot June afternoon in 1950, bringing with him his young wife and two sons, a USC law degree, and the dusty 1935 Plymouth which had reliably carried the family back and forth from Los Angeles to El Paso for the past three years. His proud father embraced him and, speaking in Spanish, gave him this charge: “The Lord did not make you a lawyer to serve yourself. You have a duty to serve your country and especially the oppressed group of people of which youare a member. If a people ever needed true and honest representation, it is the Mexican-American.” In addition to the advice, his father loaned him $40 to pay the first month’s rent on his El Paso law office.
Forty-eight years later, Albert Armendariz still works less than four blocks from his childhood home, where he now practices law with his son. Though he has long since repaid the $40 loan, he has never forgotten his father’s advice.
Albert Armendariz’s experience was, in many ways, a shared one. From 1900 to at least 1950, the typical USC law student was the first person in his or her family to attend college and the first to graduate from law school. Coming from families of modest economic means, most worked while attending law school. And, for virtually all students, the study of law was an intellectually demanding experience.
But what distinguishes Albert Armendariz and the three other graduates described in this article – You Chung Hong, Crispus A. Wright and Frank Chuman – is the additional challenge which each faced in his professional life: racial prejudice. And what further links these four men is their ability to rise above stifling personal and societal barriers and turn intellectual promise and academic talent into professional success in the service of his community.
Legal Unprecedent
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he life of You Chung Hong (1898-1977), the first Chinese student to graduate from the USC Law School, was a model of educational success, professional accomplishment, civic engagement and philanthropic largess. The son of poor Chinese immigrants, Hong was the first person in his family to enter college and the first to study law; his achievements as a Los Angeles attorney earned him financial reward and civic regard in ways that were unimaginable to his parents.
Like many 19th-century Chinese, You Chung Hong’s father arrived in California to work as a laborer on railroad construction and in the state’s borax mine. Death came in 1903 to the senior Hong, leaving his son Y.C. and a sister in the care of their mother who, having never learned English, eked out a living in San Francisco as a cigar roller and seamstress. Following his high school graduation in 1915, Y. C. Hong founded an English language school for Chinese immigrants while working as a bookkeeper in several Chinese restaurants. Moving to Los Angeles around 1918, he began translating for the United States Immigration Service. There, a Japanese interpreter who was attending the USC Law School extolled the benefits of studying law, especially with an eye toward practicing immigration law.
In 1920, Hong enrolled in USC’s four-year night program, held in the Tajo Building at First and Broadway. The sole support of his family, Hong was so poor he could not afford to purchase textbooks; he depended upon the kindness of classmates willing to loan their books, as well as his ability to recall, sentence-by-sentence, law school lectures. He passed the Bar in 1923, becoming the first Chinese-American to practice law in California. Law School Dean Frank M. Porter nonetheless persuaded Hong to finish not one but two degrees in law at USC; and after completing an LL.B. in 1924 and a LL.M. in 1925, Hong established a practice in Chinatown.
Both immigration law and his tireless work on behalf of Chinese-American civil rights were central to Y.C. Hong’s practice and life. For 50 years, Chinese-Americans regarded him as the country’s foremost Chinese attorney, a reputation based on his relentless work to repeal the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. He testified before the U.S. Senate Hearing Committee on immigration laws before he was 30 years old and, at the age of 28, he was elected president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Chinese-American Citizens Alliance (C.A.C.A.), which was founded in 1895 to “quicken the spirit of American patriotism, to insure the legal rights of its members and to secure equal economical and political opportunities for its members.” The Chinese Times, the journal of C.A.C.A., was the popular medium through which Hong advanced his views on Chinese community affairs.
Hong was keenly involved in the construction of New Chinatown in 1938, providing legal advice and personal investments. Moving his practice to 445 Ginling Way represented the confluence of law, community and wealth. Here he gave flight to his philanthropic side, especially but not exclusively for the Chinese community. The Law School, for example, continues to benefit from his happy association with USC. Presently two scholarship funds, one managed by the Southern California Chinese Lawyers’ Association, provide assistance for law students in Y.C. Hong’s honor; and the education of several USC law students was financed by Y. C. Hong awards, a testament to the school which so shaped his life in law and community. Two sons attended USC: Nowland, a 1959 graduate of the Law School, and Roger, who earned degrees in architecture (1965) and urban and regional planning (1968).
The Bamboo Attorney
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ncomfortable, tense” are the words Frank Chuman uses to describe his feelings when his first client, a blond Caucasian woman, walked into his rented office on the fifth floor of the Douglas Building on Spring Street one morning in June 1947. She gasped when she saw Chuman, a Japanese-American; he barely suppressed a gasp of his own. At that critical instant, Chuman was “overcome by a keen sense of being Japanese-American,” which he found both humiliating and infuriating.
The woman’s powerful, reflexive response to Chuman’s Asian face posed the question which all non-Caucasian attorneys invariably must answer: was Chuman an attorney or a Japanese-American attorney? Could he, a man whose life had been severely disrupted by internment in the Manzanar Relocation Center, provide responsible counsel to a Caucasian client? Chuman and the young woman answered the question quickly when she chose him as her counsel. It was the right decision: Chuman won her case.That Frank Chuman’s first client session was dominated by his conflicting feelings of humiliation, gratitude and intense anger is understandable. His life as a USC law student had ended abruptly in March 1942 when he was interned at the Manzanar Relocation Center, the isolated high-desert enclosure that housed 10,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II. Through sponsorship of the American Friends Committee, Chuman left Manzanar in the fall of 1943 to continue his legal studies, first in Ohio, then at the University of Maryland Law School, from which he graduated in 1945.
Frank Chuman’s subsequent life in the law – he practices still – expanded his sense of himself as attorney and person; he is well recognized in professional circles as one whose work, particularly on citizenship issues, has greatly benefited the Japanese-American community.
The son of Japanese immigrants – his father managed a Montecito, California estate and his mother was a “picture bride” – Chuman graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1934 and from UCLA in 1938, and enrolled in USC’s Law School in 1940. While a law student, he worked at the Los Angeles County Probation Department until the infamous Evacuation Order No. 9066 appeared in February 1942. Around March 14, Chuman attended his last class at USC; a week later – March 21 – he was appointed chief administrator for the Manzanar Hospital.
In 1945, Chuman returned to Los Angeles as a researcher for the law firm Wirren, Rissman & Okrand, where Fred Okrand was a 1940 USC law graduate. The firm was then of counsel to the ACLU, and special counsel to the Japanese-American Citizens League on constitutional issues related to the Japanese-American relocation. Chuman recalls with amusement that his most difficult class at USC was Pendleton Howard’s constitutional law course; ironically, after Manzanar, constitutional law was at the center of his practice, both as a reaction to his internment experience and as an integral aspect of immigration law.
Frank Chuman was not the first Japanese-American student to attend the Law School. Several Japanese nationals studied law at USC as early as 1908; most returned to Japan because, as foreign nationals, they were prohibited from practicing law in California. Sei Fujii LL.B. ’11 (1882-1954), however, remained in Los Angeles.
In many ways, as a USC Law School student, engaged civil rights activist, community builder and philanthropist, Fujii anticipated Frank Chuman’s life. Fujii founded and edited the leading Los Angeles bilingual Japanese language newspaper, the California Daily News. In those pages, Fujii urged an integrationist posture, counseling Japanese readers on the mysteries of American customs and language. Simultaneously, he bolstered institutions serving the Los Angeles Japanese community. In 1924, Fujii’s plan to build and incorporate a Japanese hospital in East Los Angeles owned by Japanese physicians was denied by the State of California. With legal representation by Fujii’s law school classmate J. Marion Wright ’13, the Japanese hospital group won a Supreme Court ruling in 1928 allowing construction of the hospital. In April 1952, Fujii v. The State of California overturned the California Alien Land Act of 1913 as a violation of the 14th Amendment.
Other early Japanese-Americans who studied law at USC include Masanosuki Oyuki LL.M. ’16, Gongoro Nakamura LL.B. ’22, Kiichi Iwanaga LL.B. ’25 and John Maeno LL.B. ’32, who worked closely with J. Marion Wright on civil rights cases important to the local Japanese community.
Frank Chuman’s 50-year life as an attorney engaged in and on behalf of the Los Angeles Japanese-American community had precedents in men like Sei Fujii and John Maeno. Like them, he spent his life serving the local Japanese-American community. He worked on internment and immigration law, and was national president of the Japanese-American league. He is also an historian of the Japanese-American experience in the United States. His provocative book, The Bamboo People: The Law and Japanese-Americans (1971), describing the resilience of the Japanese-Americans in the face of powerful anti-Asian laws, is the definitive work on the subject.
A philanthropist as well as an activist, Chuman has created a foundation which will provide law scholarships at the USC Law School and at other institutions.
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