Stephanie Hinnershitz, “A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South” (UNC Press, 2017)

In her recent book, A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Stephanie Hinnershitz (Cleveland State University) examines the important but overlooked contributions of Asian Americans to civil rights activism in the U.S. South. Hinnershitz takes a thematic focus across the long 20th century to show how Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and South Asians contested discrimination in land ownership, education, sexual relations and marriage, and business entrepreneurship. From “self-Orientalizing” as non-colored people to invoking their privileges as foreign nationals or refugees, the strategies and arguments that Asian Americans employed in the long and uneven struggle for equality were as varied as they were creative. Hinnershitz uses a wide-ranging source base including legal opinions, newspapers, and oral histories to narrate heartbreaking losses as well as surprising victories, such as the injunction against Klan violence that Vietnamese fishermen won in Texas in 1981. A Different Shade of Justice will interest readers of 20th-century US history, legal history, southern history, and Asian American history.

Ian Shin is C3-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the History Department at Bates College, where his teaching and research focus on the history of the U.S. in the world and Asian American history. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the politics of Chinese art collecting in the United States in the early 20th century. Ian welcomes listener questions and feedback at kshin@bates.edu.

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