AANHPI Heritage Month: Why every American should know about Mary Tape

In 1885, Mary Tape, right, fought for her children's education.

As we kick off AANHPI Heritage Month, the air is thick with "patriotic" mandates and executive orders designed to sanitize the American story. The administration wants a version of history that feels like a Hallmark card—smooth, comfortable, and entirely devoid of the friction that actually moved the needle on civil rights.

But you can’t talk about the American dream of "education for all" without talking about the woman who fought the system before most of our ancestors even set foot on these shores. If your history book doesn’t mention Mary Tape, it isn't giving you the truth; it’s giving you a curated silence.

"Is It a Disgrace to be Chinese?"

In 1884, Mary Tape wasn’t looking to lead a revolution; she was just a mother trying to enroll her eight-year-old daughter, Mamie, in a San Francisco public school. The school principal refused, citing "the Chinese" as a threat to the moral and physical health of white students.

Mary didn’t back down. She sued. And in a time when the Chinese Exclusion Act was the law of the land, she won. The California Supreme Court ruled in Tape v. Hurley that the state couldn’t deny a child an education based on their race."Is It a Disgrace to be Chinese?"

        FYI: Read more about the Tapes' fight for equal schools

Despite the court win, the San Francisco School Board pulled a classic move: they changed the law to create "separate but equal" schools just to keep Mamie out of the white classroom. Mary’s response was a blistering open letter to the board that should be required reading in every civics class:

"Is it a disgrace to be Chinese?" she wrote. "Are you not all of the same blood? Are you not created by the same God? That you should think your color best...?"

She called out the hypocrisy of a "free" nation that took her family's taxes but barred their children from the schoolhouse door.

View from the edge

The current push to label the history of systemic racism as "divisive" or "anti-white" is a direct insult to Mary’s legacy. Telling her story isn't about shaming anyone; it’s about acknowledging that educational equity wasn't a gift handed down by the founders—it was a right clawed back from the state by immigrants who believed in the American promise more than the government did.

It is important for today's AANHPI communities, especially those who are against affirmative action,  to know that the rights that we enjoy today, including the right to an education, did not come about because of the majority's largesse.We had to fight for those rights. 

The efforts of the Tape family laid early groundwork for desegregation in the United States leading up to the historic Brown v. Board of Education, we erase the proof that Asian Americans have always been at the forefront of the fight for justice.

We don't need a "sanitized" history. We need the raw, uncomfortable, beautiful truth of people like Mary Tape. She didn't divide America; she challenged it to live up to the ideals of the Constitution.

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