Most of the Asian students … ate their lunch hiding out on the second floor. A few, though, made the mistake of going to the lunchroom. At 12:31 p.m., a group of predominantly black –students — really, a front of about 70 — moved on the cafeteria. Attackers put up the hoods of their sweatshirts and, surrounded by a crowd of cheering, laughing supporters, crashed on their Asian targets in the hall outside the lunchroom like a wave.
Several Chinese students suffered face and head injuries, and one boy’s nose was smashed, horribly broken and gushing blood. The campaign moved into the lunchroom, where the 70 or so attackers and supporters found a handful more Asian kids. Some in the crowd seemed to serve as pointers, directing the fighters toward new victims. Cafeteria workers, following school policy, pulled down steel doors to shut off themselves and the possibility the fighters could grab kitchen utensils to use as weapons. The school police arrived, but were shielded for several moments from reaching the victims by the crowd around them.
One of the students at South Philly High School that day was Wei Chen, who’d arrived in the U.S. from China at the age of 16, without speaking any English. His first welcome to his new country, he said in a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Sunday, was two punches to the back of the head.
“There was a culture in the school that allowed young people to beat each other,” Chen said. The adults in the school were unable or unwilling to stop the violence that Chen and his fellow Asian students endured daily.
So Chen decided to fight back himself, using a move straight out of the textbook of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—he organized a boycott. He called his fellow students one by one to encourage them to stay away from school. He organized the collection of homework assignments. He wrote a letter for his classmates to take home to their parents explaining their actions. And for eight days, Chen and about 50 of his classmates studied and rallied outside of the school.
Chen’s boycott would bring national attention to the violence facing Asian students at South Philadelphia High School, ultimately resulting in a Department of Justice settlement with the school district that described authorities as “deliberately indifferent to known instances of severe and pervasive ... harassment of Asian students.”
What might be most extraordinary about Chen is that he directed his actions not at the students who attacked him and his classmates, but at the system that enabled those attackers, and failed to protect their victims. As a result, five years later, according to Kevin McCorry of Newsworks, the school is much changed. “For the second year running, Philadelphia's Vietnamese community held its Lunar New Year celebration in the gymnasium at South Philadelphia High School,” reported McCorry, “an event that many in South Philly's Asian community would have thought impossible just five years ago.”
