The Real History of the Complex Relationship Between Chinese and Black Americans in the Mississippi Delta

The Real History of the Complex Relationship Between Chinese and Black Americans in the Mississippi Delta

The remarkable success of the movie “Sinners” has sparked a renewed interest in how the two communities wrestled with life under Jim Crow

When I visited Rodell Sing Jr. in 2021, piles of books lined the floors and shelves of his Minnesota assisted living apartment. Among them were the classic American history chronicle Lies My Teacher Told Me, the political thriller Hong Kong, the works of T.S. Eliot and a travel guide about China. On his wall hung a silver piece of artwork featuring a Chinese man holding a string instrument. Beneath it was a framed photo of a Black musician playing a jazz trombone.

The adornments of his life told an unfinished story of an American proud of his Chinese and Black heritage.

Near a black-and-white photo of Barack Obama sat another book, with well-worn, browning pages: Beginner’s Chinese. In it, Rodell had written notes in blue and black pen. Sitting in an easy chair, the 84-year-old spoke with pursed lips as he read some of the lessons aloud, his self-taught Chinese at a simple conversational level: Do you have children? he said in Chinese. How many people are in your family?

Rodell showed me a piece of paper, which he kept inside of a clear sheet protector. It was a “certification of residency” paper for his grandfather, Wong On, approved May 3, 1892. Born in 1844, Wong arrived in California at 16, working on the Transcontinental Railroad. It listed Wong as a Chinese merchant, 5 feet, 6 inches tall with “yellow” complexion and brown eyes. In the bottom corner, it showed a grainy photo of a young Wong, with closely trimmed hair, smiling lightly with closed lips. In 1875, Wong joined 13 other men aboard a steamboat headed to the Mississippi Delta to pick cotton.

---

In recent weeks, the new vampire thriller Sinners, set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, has awakened a new audience to the lesser-known history of Chinese immigrants in the region. The film, written and directed by Ryan Coogler, of Creed and Black Panther fame, introduces a cross-racial friendship between the Chinese character Bo Chow (played by the mononymous actor Yao)—who operates a grocery catering to Black customers in Clarksdale, Mississippi—and twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan), Smoke and Stack Moore. Their relationship is rooted in business and mutual respect. Meanwhile, Bo’s wife, Grace (Li Jun Li) operates a business for white patrons across the street.

Sinners | Official Trailer 2

After discovering a short documentary about the Mississippi Delta Chinese, Coogler connected with the filmmaker, Dolly Li, to be a consultant on Sinners. Coogler, she wrote, was inspired to include the community in the movie after his Black father-in-law learned that he had Chinese ancestry in the Mississippi Delta.

In Coogler’s cinematic and musical world of vampire horror, the Chinese characters are deeply integrated into the Delta’s Black community, dancing alongside Black partygoers. Sinners captures that entwined Black and Chinese history in the caste Jim Crow-era system of the Delta. In one scene, a blues performance conjures ancestors and descendants—weaving visions of traditional Chinese dancers between images of a Black funkadelic guitarist and breakdancers.

Some scenes have also triggered debate and discussion online about Black and Asian tensions and alliances throughout history. Coogler recently clarified the film intended to capture the bonds between the two groups: Grace and the Moores are “family, basically.” Bo and Smoke, he adds: “They love each other.”

Yet the small but significant number of Chinese and Black relationships from that era in Mississippi and the mixed-race descendants who grew up seeking to understand their own lineage reveal a more complex story about how the groups coexisted at a time when society positioned both communities against each other for survival.

---

Wong On’s journey to the American South occurred during an era when Chinese immigrants across the United States faced backlash, threats and violence. “This ugly period of Chinese exclusion was going on at the same time as the vanquishing of Reconstruction in the South, the eradication of Indigenous peoples,” says Michael Luo, whose new book, Strangers in the Land, documents the at times violent attempts to drive the Chinese out of America in the late 19th century. “These histories, which continue to refract through our current moment, all need to be considered along the side of each other.”

The first waves of 300,000 Chinese immigrants came to California between 1849 to 1852 to mine for gold, but many ended up building the railroads instead. In the post-Civil War era, anti-Chinese sentiments on the coasts pushed some to flee and make their way to Southern states like Mississippi.

With slavery abolished in the reconstituted Union, and as newly enslaved populations began to migrate north, cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco planters in the Mississippi Delta lured Chinese contract laborers to their farms. In 1880, according to records surfaced by historian James Loewen in his book The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White, 51 Chinese residents lived in the Mississippi Delta. By 1960, the population had grown to 1,145, though numbers are believed to be higher (and do not count mixed Chinese and Black residents, who were almost always classified as Black).

Plantation owners were “trying to get more cheap labor, because African Americans left the state,” says Joyce Dixon-Lawson, the former manager of research and genealogy at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Not recognized as white or Black, and barred from white neighborhoods or schools, Chinese men found homes in Black neighborhoods. One article published in the Okolona, Mississippi, newspaper The Messenger in April 1904 responded to the increased Chinese labor in the South: “The danger would be that they would leave behind them a progeny known as Chinois, the mixture of Chinese and negro.”

In 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant signed legislation that largely excluded Chinese women from entering the U.S. “Like a rock formation blocking a tree’s root system, it disrupted any chance for a stable Chinese community to form,” writes Luo. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred further Chinese immigration. Those already in the U.S. could not become naturalized. Entire societies of men were cut off from wives and children still in China, or ended up living as bachelors in the U.S. By the early 1900s, Loewen estimated that as many as 30 percent of Chinese men in Mississippi were married to or living with Black women. Rodell’s grandfather was one of these men. Once in Mississippi, Wong met Emma Clay, a Black woman born in 1865 on a plantation. The couple married in 1881, when Emma was 16, and together, they operated a grocery, Charlie’s Store. (Wong also went by the name Charlie Sing.)

Within a year of marriage, Emma gave birth to their first son. They had 13 children together (four did not survive into adulthood). Rodell Sing Sr. was born in 1903. Thirty-four years later, Rodell Jr. was born.

---

It did not take long for some Chinese laborers to begin protesting the exploitative work, sometimes fleeing employers to break their contracts. Chinese workers in the South were beaten and had their wages withheld.

Wong and his crew, meanwhile, decided to form their own business partnership, under the name Shing, to farm and sell cotton independently. Yet white plantation owners blocked the Shing group from finding local buyers for their crops. Some of Wong’s partners died of yellow fever. Others moved away, some back to China.

But Wong stayed in Mississippi, with Emma.

Mississippi Triangle - Trailer - Third World Newsreel

To maintain a life in the Delta, “he had to be careful not to antagonize the planters or any of the whites,” wrote Ruthanne Lum McCunn, who conducted oral interviews with the couple’s daughter for her book Chinese American Portraits. “At the same time, he did not want to upset Blacks by competing for a job in any of the service occupations. He also wanted to earn more than the subsistence wages they were paid.” He needed to find a new line of business.

---

One family photo of Emma still exists. It shows a woman in a bonnet, wearing a dress cinched at the waist, smiling with her right hand on her hip. Emma would learn to grow Chinese vegetables from seed—cabbage, gai choy, bok choy, snow peas. Wong and Emma planted a Chinese persimmon tree and sold sugar, bread and salted pork at their store in Stoneville, Mississippi. They moved into the back quarters of the shop. The 1900 U.S. Census listed Wong, Emma and their children living there. But to accommodate their growing family, they also had a home in nearby Greenville.

Chinese grocers in the Delta sold to Black residents, whom white merchants did not want to serve and who, in the immediate afterlife of slavery (when Black people had to rely on plantation commissaries), had not amassed enough capital to purchase or open stores themselves.

“Small Chinese storekeepers are almost as ubiquitous as in the South Seas,” wrote chronicler of the south William Alexander Percy, a white Mississippi writer whose father, U.S. Senator LeRoy Percy, led a fight against the Ku Klux Klan in Greenville in 1922. In his 1941 autobiography, Percy captured a common sentiment among some white residents: “Barred from social intercourse with the whites, they smuggle through wives from China or, more frequently, breed lawfully or otherwise with the Negro. They are not numerous enough to present a problem—except to the small white store-keeper—but in so far as I can judge, they serve no useful purpose in community life.”

---

When Rodell Sing Sr., was a kid—and, for that matter, when Rodell Jr. was also a kid—Mississippi schools were still segregated, and Chinese students were barred from white schools. Rather than attend the Black schools, some Chinese parents forfeited public education altogether, choosing to send their children to private schools or homeschool them.

In Greenville, a one-room Chinese schoolhouse opened on a grassy knoll near the levee. On the outside, it looked like a single-story, shotgun-style home. Inside, a teacher offered lessons in English to grades 1-12. After school, students attended Chinese language classes.

“They started Chinese schools. They moved out of state to other places where they could send their children to white schools,” says Claire Jean Kim, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who has written about the Mississippi Black and Chinese. Black schools were underfunded, she added: “That’s what happens under Jim Crow, but there’s no question that anti-Blackness was the spirit and the feeling of the Chinese American project here.”

Rodell Sr., meanwhile, attended the Sacred Heart Catholic Parish and School, which opened in 1913 along with Greenville’s Black and mixed-race children. Rodell Jr. and his brother Victor would also attend Sacred Heart. Sylvia Greene Jackson, a Greenville native, spoke to me before her death in 2022. She remembered how her grandmother, Daisy Miller Greene, helped start the Sacred Heart school. For mixed-race children, white, Black, Chinese and Native American, the school became a haven. “At Sacred Heart,” Jackson told me, “everybody was welcome.”

Notably, in 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case brought by Gong Lum, a Chinese immigrant father who sued the government to enroll his Chinese American daughter Martha into a white school in Rosedale, Mississippi, after the board of education decided she should attend a local Black school instead. The court upheld de jure segregation in a defeat for Lum, a result that discouraged Chinese residents from seeking interracial relationships with their Black neighbors and encouraged them to shed their “colored” status, according to Loewen.

At the same time, other community members began to view joining the Baptist church as a way to assimilate into the Delta’s white society. This acclimated white pastors and parishioners to the Chinese presence in the church and served to uplift their societal image. Meanwhile, Black institutions within the Baptist faith remained staunchly segregated.

In time, thanks to efforts by white Baptist Church leaders, Greenville would be the first city in the Delta to admit Chinese children into white schools. More Chinese students followed, after cities across the region passed similar ordinances.

Today, inside the Greenville History Museum, framed class photos hang on walls from Greenville High School. Amid the white faces, visitors can spot a few lone Chinese students. Sue Jean Wong, class of 1955. Frances Seu, class of 1962. This gradual assimilation of Chinese students into white schools began 25 years before Black students were granted such an option.

Dixon-Lawson, who often encountered museum visitors seeking to trace their genealogy, remembers a few years ago assisting one Black woman whose mother told her she had a Chinese grandfather. No one in the family had been allowed to ask questions about this until after her grandmother died. Dixon-Lawson helped the woman trace her family records, which showed “he left his Black wife and met a Chinese wife,” Dixon-Lawson recalls. The woman looked at addresses on the 1930 census and realized the man’s Chinese spouse and family lived just two doors down from where his mixed Black family resided.

Jackson also told me the story of Rodell’s relatives—particularly Rodell Sr.’s sister El Dee Sing. El Dee married a fully Chinese man, Fong Goon Lee. They had three children together, including a son who chose to marry a Black woman.

“[Fong Goon] didn’t tolerate that at all,” Jackson says. “He excommunicated him from the family.” The father ultimately left his son out of his will, even as another son remained as a beneficiary despite marrying a woman who was herself African-American and Chinese

---

On that side of Rodell’s family tree is Christopher Lee, a political scientist at West Los Angeles College, who wrote his dissertation on the Mississippi Delta—in part because of his personal connection to it. He is both a great-grandson of Emma and Wong and a grandson to El Dee and Fong Goon.

As a child, Christopher, whose facial features bear hints of his Chinese ancestry, though he considers himself Black, attended a mostly white Catholic school in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. He believes his peers discriminated against him primarily for being Black.

But the questions about his bloodline, and the contradictions he felt within his own racial identity, pulled him toward Greenville, where Fong Goon had established a grocery store that was in turn passed down to Christopher’s father and then his excommunicated uncle.

Christopher would spend three years traveling back and forth from California to Mississippi, the distance that his great-grandfather, Wong, had traveled more than 100 years earlier. Was Fong Goon’s decision to leave his uncle out of his will motivated by race and social status?

Even now, he told me: “These are touchy issues.”

---

In 2021, I traveled to Greenville with Rodell’s brother Victor Syng, who is now 85 and lives in Los Angeles. Victor and Rodell’s mother, Dorothy Hall Jackson, a Black woman born in Mississippi in 1916, raised them in a house in Greenville on Redbud Street. As a baby, the spelling of Victor’s last name on his birth certificate was altered from Sing to Syng, which Victor believes was an oversight by a midwife who delivered him.

Like his brother, Victor navigated the segregated South as a light-skinned Black man. Yet he often felt the need to prove that he had Chinese ancestry, too. “For years, it was troubling to me,” he said. “My name is Syng.”

People told him: “You don’t look Chinese.”

Victor replied: “Well, I am.”

Victor has visceral memories of white police officers driving him out of Mississippi six decades ago. He remembers the bruises and black eyes he received when officers pulled him off a bus and throttled him with clubs. “My mother was afraid that they would come get me at night and kill me like they did Emmett Till.” Victor pulled out a map and pointed north. “I just knew that there was going to be the end of me, if I didn’t leave.” His finger landed on Minnesota. “That's where I ended up.” Rodell later followed.

Victor remembered how as a kid, Rodell would come home from swimming in the Mississippi River on hot days, crossing through town, daring to drink from the white fountains. As teenagers, Rodell and Victor would sneak across the train tracks and hide under the bleachers to watch the football games at the white high school.

On our trip to Greenville, Victor stopped at a road that divides two burial grounds in town. On one side is the resting place, still, for the Chinese community’s dead. The other, for Greenville’s Black residents.

Visible from where we stood, a white gate appeared locked. A sign at its entrance read: “Chinese Cemetery.” On that side of the road, the grass was freshly mowed, and greener. The slate, granite and marble headstones were shinier, with English letters and Chinese characters.

As we stepped over the graves in the Black cemetery, known as Live Oak, dandelions poked through patches of brown grass, and headstones lay toppled like dominoes. At one grave there, pink plastic roses had withered beside a dead woman’s name veiled by moss. Upright headstones had crumbled, like broken teeth.

Victor got out of his car and stood on the cracked pavement, pausing at the intersection of both.

---

During a visit with Rodell, he told me how he remembered being a child, sitting by his grandfather’s bedside as he lay dying. Wong spoke to his grandson in his native Chinese, inspiring Rodell to travel on his own to China as an adult.

As we spoke, Rodell said he hoped to return to China to try to learn more about his lineage and learn more of the language. “I always felt that this is part of me,” he said. “This is part of who I am.”

Seven months after my visit, a heat wave hit Minnesota. The air conditioner inside of Rodell’s apartment stopped working. Family told me they discovered Rodell’s body, clad only in boxer shorts and socks, inside of his unbearably stifling unit. He had been dead for several hours, but it was still so hot inside that his skin felt warm to the touch.

In the summer of 2022, a small group of Rodell’s family members gathered on a beach on the St. Paul side of the Mississippi River. The eulogy read: “Rodell was a proud Black American who was also proud of his Chinese heritage.”

It had been Rodell’s request to have his remains scattered into the Mississippi River, which begins in Minnesota, winding more than 2,000 miles south. The river along which—some 140 years earlier—his grandfather made his American home.

This story was supported by the Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellowship.