Asian American Political Pioneers Who Changed the United States
On July 21, President Joe Biden announced that he won't seek reelection. This was in reaction to a growing sentiment within his party that he would lose to Donald Trump in the November presidential election. He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him as the Democratic nominee.
If Harris secures the Democratic nomination, she’ll become the first woman and person of Black and South Asian descent to be nominated by a major party. This wouldn’t be her first time making history. Before becoming the first female vice president, in 2010, Harris was the first woman elected as California’s Attorney General.
Harris has achieved a lot in her career, subsequently opening more doors for Black and South Asian people alike. But before Harris, politicians like Patsy Mink and Dalip Singh Saund paved the way for Asian Americans to enter politics.
Mink, according to NBC News, became the first woman of color elected to Congress. She was born and raised in Paia, Hawaii, where she graduated from Maui High School in 1944 as class president and valedictorian.
She received her undergraduate degree at the University of Nebraska, which according to NBC News, had a policy of segregating minority and white students into separate dorms. Mink began a student coalition that successfully ended the school’s segregation policies.
Mink later attended law school at the University of Chicago before getting elected into Congress in 1964. While serving as a Congresswoman, she focused on issues that affected Asian Americans, women, and families.
Mink co-authored and sponsored the Title IX Amendment of the Higher Education Act. The law was passed in 1972 and prohibited gender discrimination in education programs in public schools, colleges, and universities. Following Mink’s death in 2002, President George W. Bush renamed the law the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act.
During a speech in 1967, Mink said to the House of Representatives, “America is not a country which needs to demand conformity of all its people, for its strength lies in all our diversities converging in one common belief, that of the importance of freedom as the essence of our country…”
Like Mink, Saund gave a voice to Asian Americans who had no one to represent them. According to Britannica, Saund became the first Asian American, first Indian American, and first Sikh elected into the US Congress. He was born in Chhajjalwaddi, in the Punjab province of northern India. In 1919, he graduated from the University of the Punjab with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. The following year, he emigrated to the US and attended the University of California, Berkeley, for his master’s and Ph.D. in mathematics.
After getting married, according to NBC News, Saund and his family settled down in the farming community of Westmorland, California, where he developed an interest in politics. His ability to participate was limited, however, because he wasn’t a US citizen.
In the 1940s, Saund organized efforts to open citizenship to Indians living in the US. In 1946, Congress passed a bill that allowed Indian immigrants to pursue naturalization. Three years later, Saund became a US citizen. The following year, he ran for a judgeship and won, but the election was canceled because he was a citizen for less than a year. Two years later, he successfully ran again and served for four years.
In 1957, Saund served three terms in the United States House of Representatives as a member of the Democratic Party. He was a supporter of the Civil Rights Act and used his own immigration story to advocate for it.
“No amount of sophistry or legal argument can deny the fact that in 13 counties in one state in the United States of America in the year 1957, not one Negro is a registered voter,” Saund said during a speech in support of the Civil Rights Act. “Let us remove those difficulties, my friends.”