Mamie and Mary Tape: Civil Rights Activists

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage month and this week’s Remarkable Women are Mamie and Mary Tape. 

Mamie was eight years old when she made history. In 1884, her parents, Mary and Joseph Tape, sued a California school system for refusing to admit her because she was of Chinese descent. They won the case, but it was a bittersweet victory. 

On a bright September morning in 1884, Mamie Tape was ready for her first day at Spring Valley Primary School in San Francisco. Wearing a checked dress, her hair neatly braided and tied with a ribbon, she was excited to be joining her friends at the five-room school just a few blocks away from her home.  With her mother, Mary, Mamie set off with high hopes.  

But the principal of Spring Valley, 44-year-old Jenny Hurley, had other ideas. Hurley refused to allow Mamie inside the school.  Spring Valley was for white children only, she told them, and even though Mamie had been born in San Francisco and state law entitled all children in California to a public education, the city laws did not. There’s no account of how Mamie felt at being rejected on such a big day.  But there was no question about Mary’s reaction. 

Mary and her husband, Joseph Tape, did not anticipate that Mamie would be turned away. They were mild mannered people who kept a low profile, but they were not going to accept the decision quietly. As recent immigrants from China, each had overcome incredible obstacles to survive and make a life in the United States. They were not about to give up without a fight.

Joseph Tape had come to the United States 20 years earlier as a young boy. His name was then Jeu Dip. He had been born in 1852 in Guangdong province, an area of southern China that had become the epicenter of migration to the U.S. starting with the gold rush in California in 1848.  Famine, poverty, war, and fantasies of wealth in Gold Mountain, as they called the United States, led to thousands of Chinese men to leave China. 

Determined and clever, Jeu Dip wanted in on that American dream.  With no evidence of family money or support, he made his way alone to Hong Kong where he most likely got a loan for passage on a ship with the promise of repaying the debt in California.  After the four-month voyage, Jeu Dip landed in San Francisco. There was no Gold Mountain but there were lots of other opportunities for work, which he took advantage of over the next decade.  He would learn English well enough to become a translator, an immigration broker and successful small businessman.  Within ten years he had become well regarded and respected in both the Chinese and white communities.

Mamie’s mother, Mary, had come to the US as a young girl of 11, also with no family and no recorded Chinese name. She ended up living in a home run by a Protestant missionary, adopting the name of Mary McGladery, one of the women who ran the Ladies Protection and Relief Society. Like her future husband, Mary became literate in English and adapted well to Western culture. 

In 1875, Mary and Jeu Dip met for the first time.  Since they spoke different Chinese dialects, they courted in English.  They shared the goal of becoming as assimilated as possible into American society, a sure path to wealth and success. They were likely the first “Chinese Americans” who felt more comfortable in their adopted countries than where they were born.  At their wedding, Jeu Dip became Joseph Tape, an Anglicization of his original name.  A year later, Mamie, the first of their four children was born. 

The Chinese consulate was one of Joseph Tape’s best clients, and it was there he first asked for help with getting Mamie into Spring Valley Primary.  The consulate’s white attorney filed a protest with the San Francisco school board. Tape also hired a lawyer, William Gibson, to file a lawsuit on Mary’s behalf.  He argued that barring Mamie from the school violated the state’s school law and the Fourteenth Amendment that guaranteed equal protection and due process to everyone. 

By the end of 1884, the case of Tape v. Hurley was one of the hot button issues in the city, adding to the anti-Chinese sentiment that had been building since before the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.  Besides suspending the immigration of Chinese laborers, the Act banned all Chinese living in the US from becoming naturalized citizens.  More significantly, it stands out even to this day as the only American law to single out a specific group for exclusion.

In January 1885, despite the hostile climate, the California Superior Court ruled in Mamie’s favor. When the school board appealed, the state Supreme Court upheld the ruling. Mamie had won the case, but the battle wasn’t over. 

Anticipating that they might lose, the school board had put pressure on the California state legislature to pass a law creating separate schools for “children of Chinese and Mongolian descent.”  Two months after the ruling in Mamie’s favor, San Francisco announced plans for a Chinese Primary School near the city’s Chinatown.  It would occupy the top two floors above a grocery store. 

In April 1885, four months after the ruling, Mamie went back to Spring Valley, this time with both her parents and two lawyers. Jenny Hurley once again turned Mamie away, claiming she didn’t have the required vaccination documents. And, she said, the school was full, but Mamie could be put on a waiting list.  That evening, the superintendent of the San Francisco public schools spoke publicly about his intention to keep Mamie from attending Spring Valley and pushed for a quick opening of the Chinese school. In essence, he flouted the legal ruling. 

Mary Tape, in a letter to the San Francisco Daily Alta was outraged. “Will you please tell me! Is it a disgrace to be Born a Chinese? Didn’t God make us all!!!...do you call that a Christian act to compel my little children to go so far to a school that is made in purpose for them.”  Why, she asked is Mamie being “persecuted…because she is of Chinese descent?” 

Declaring that her children were assimilated and as American as anyone else, Mary vowed, “Mamie Tape will never attend any of the Chinese schools of your making! Never!!”  Yet a week later, both Mamie and her younger brother, Frank, enrolled at the Chinese Primary School, where they would continue to attend for several more years until the family moved out of the city.  

Mamie Tape wasn’t the youngest plaintiff in a desegregation case in this country.  That honor goes to Sarah Roberts, who was five when her father sued the Boston school system for refusing to admit her because she was African American.  

Mamie also wasn’t the first Chinese child to sue a school system for discrimination. In 1924, Martha and Berda Lum were turned away from attending a Mississippi school because of their ethnicity. Her parents filed a lawsuit and they lost.

But eight-year-old Mamie Tape scored a victory in the long fight to desegregate public schools seventy years before Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 landmark case that declared segregation was unconstitutional. 

Although Mamie never got to attend Spring Valley Primary, the legal victory of Tape vs Hurley led to more Chinese children attending white schools in San Francisco. In 1947, the state law that created separate schools was finally overturned in California.

©2023 Alice Look
Co-founder, Remarkable Women Project.org
Executive Producer, Remarkable Women Project