Introduction
Between 1913 and 1925, more than a dozen American states enacted what were called "alien land laws"—legislations that prohibited aliens (foreign nationals) ineligible for citizenship from holding land or other real estate. Despite its deceptively race-neutral language, alien land laws specifically targeted immigrants from Asia, since they were the only groups of immigrants deemed unable to attain citizenship under the Naturalization Act of 1870 and a series of Supreme Court rulings including Ozawa v. U.S. (1922) and U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923).
In the decade leading up to the enactment of alien land laws, people from Asia, especially Japan, immigrated to the United States in growing numbers and established new farming communities. In California, for example, the acreage of Japanese-operated farms increased from 99,254 to 361,276 between 1910 and 1920. Statistics like this fueled racist fears that Asian immigrants would take over the West Coast.1 As California Superior Judge R. L. Thompson later explained, "the purpose of the Alien Land Law and other enactments of our legislature is to protect our rapidly vanishing fertile soil against the invading horde of brown men." Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1905) and its ascendence as a global power in an arena usually dominated by European countries also raised national security concerns, both real and imagined, legitimate and racialized, about the loyalty of Japanese immigrant farmers.
While alien land laws primarily targeted the fast-growing Japanese immigrant community, leading contemporary politicians and observers to call them "anti-Japanese" land laws, these laws affected all Asian immigrant communities. Since the degrees of restrictiveness and effectiveness of these laws varied across the states, Asian Americans evaded, negotiated, and challenged these laws in different and creative ways. This teaching module focuses on one such case: the successful legal challenge by Chinese immigrant merchant Lum Jung Luke against Arkansas’ 1925 alien land act.
Applegate v. Luke
In the summer of 1926, Chinese American merchant Lum Jung Luke walked into his local chancery court in Phillips County, Arkansas. Represented by attorneys Brewer and Cracraft, Lum filed for an injunction against Arkansas Attorney General H. W. Applegate. For some time, the attorney general had threatened to seize his property under the Alien Land Act of 1925. Through District Attorney C. E. Yingling—the prosecutor who had put 122 African Americans on trial just four years prior in the aftermath of the Elaine Race Massacre—Applegate heard about Lum’s prospective land sale to a white lumber businessman, E. M. Allen.
While he was never able to become a U.S. citizen, Lum had resided in the town of Elaine, Arkansas, for "twenty years" and built a successful business venture there. He owned a grocery store, accrued "considerable real estate," and "engaged extensively in the buying and selling of real estate for profit," particularly "in the buying of property… for the purpose of renting the premises to workmen engaged in sawmilling occupations."2 Probate records indicate that Lum had conducted similar transactions before with other local businessmen. Thus, even as Arkansas passed its alien land law in 1925, Lum was still preparing to sell "Lot 12 & 13, Block 1" in Elaine to his business partner E. M. Allen, whom he had previously worked with in 1924.
Perhaps Lum was unaware of the law’s passage; or perhaps he did not expect the state to seriously enforce the law. Indeed, for a state with only twelve Japanese American residents in 1920, Arkansas’ 1925 Alien Land Act was sweeping in its scale. The law deprived "aliens ineligible for citizenship" of the right to "acquire, possess, enjoy, use, cultivate, occupy, transfer, transmit and inherit real property." Additionally, it made not only land ownership, but also "lease-hold" and "cropping contracts" illegal. Finally, to ensure compliance, the law made conspiracy to violate the alien land act a felony, punishable by "not less than one year nor more than five years" of imprisonment. For Lum, losing the lawsuit meant not only the loss of his property, but possibly his freedom as well.
But Lum was also aware of the remedies offered by the law, having most likely navigated the complex immigration legal regime to arrive in the U.S. in the first place. Lum's legal acumen proved crucial in the litigation. Firstly, instead of waiting to respond to Applegate’s lawsuit, Lum and his business partner Allen preemptively filed for injunctive relief in the chancery court. Secondly, even while the injunction was pending in court, Lum proceeded to file a deed of transfer to an intermediary, the Harrison Lumber Company. Finally, rather than relying on the U.S. Constitution, Lum cited "§§ 2, 3, 8, 20, 22 and 29 of article 2 of the Constitution of the State" in his argument. Up to this point, Japanese American litigants had filed and lost several lawsuits in the U.S. Supreme Court on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment; Lum and his lawyers must have been aware that state constitutions offered more potential than the already exhausted U.S. Constitution.
On Aug. 18, Applegate and Yingling filed their response to Lum's lawsuit. As the first lawsuit brought under the Alien Land Act in Arkansas, the case was logged in Applegate's biennial report as a potentially significant "suit to test validity of Act No. 249 of 1925 to prevent certain aliens from owning land in Arkansas."
What ultimately distinguished Lum's case from legal challenges elsewhere, however, was the language of Arkansas’ state constitution itself. Section 20, Article II of the Arkansas Constitution of 1874, a remnant of Reconstruction-era progressivism, explicitly prohibited "distinction… between resident aliens and citizens in regard to the possession, enjoyment or descent of property." Chancellor A. L. Hutchins of the Phillips County Chancery Court thus declared the Alien Land Act "unconstitutional and void" under the state constitution. Applegate subsequently appealed to the Arkansas Supreme Court. But once again, on Mar. 14, 1927, the Court upheld the lower court's ruling, citing Section 20, Article II of the State Constitution. This provision, according to Justice T. H. Humphrey, "contains few words, and is unambiguous." Lum was thus able to keep his land and his freedom.
Unfortunately, Applegate v. Luke did not mark the end of the history of alien land laws in Arkansas. During the Second World War, the relocation and internment of Japanese Americans led to another round of alien land legislations. Amidst the hysteria, Arkansas passed its second alien land law, this time targeting only the Japanese. Alien land laws were only gradually overturned or repealed, state by state, beginning in the 1950s, though the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 rendered many of these legislations moot by making Asians eligible for citizenship. As this teaching module is being written, Asian Americans are fighting against a new wave of anti-Chinese alien land legislations across the U.S.
Suggested Readings
Azuma, Eiichiro. Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Hinnershitz, Stephanie. A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
Ichioka, Yuji. “Japanese Immigrant Response to the 1920 California Alien Land Law.” In Japanese Immigrants and American Law, edited by Charles McClain, 229-50. Vol. 2 of The Alien Land Laws and Other Issues. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Tsu, Cecilia. Garden of the World: Asian Immigrants and the Making of Agriculture in California's Santa Clara Valley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
1. Masao Suzuki, "Important or Impotent? Taking Another Look at the 1920 California Alien Land Law," The Journal of Economic History 64, no. 1 (2004): 131.
2. Stephanie Hinnershitz, A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 29.
Ozawa v. United States