Lawful Extremism: The Chinese Exclusion Act
| by Beth Daviess and J.M. Berger
The first paper in the “Lawful Extremism” series considered whether the 1856 Dred Scott decision that denied Black people citizenship and constitutional rights functioned as an extremist ideological text. This paper uses the same framework to examine the Chinese Exclusion era, covering roughly 1870-1943, and the anti-Chinese movement that traveled from the fringes to the mainstream, becoming the driving force behind the enaction of the Act.