ABSTRACT
In June 1885, immigrant and San Francisco laundryman, Yick Wo, applied for a license for his business to comply with an 1880 city ordinance, which required that business owners obtain licenses for washhouses in wooden buildings or face a $1,000 fine or six months in jail. The ordinance was the most recent in over a dozen codes targeting laundries that the Board of Supervisors had enacted since 1873. Furthermore, though their language was neutral, and intentions were apparently to increase public and occupational safety, they were thinly veiled attempts to harass and disenfranchise Chinese laundry owners and employees. As discussed earlier, Chinese laundries became ubiquitous in several major U.S. cities by the turn of the twentieth century. In the 1880s in San Francisco, Chinese ran about three hundred laundries—the majority of such businesses in the city—and employed approximately three thousand workers. All of them, furthermore, were in wooden buildings. The enforcement of the ordinance revealed its discriminatory intent; in 1885, the board rejected all applications from Chinese, while granting all but one of eighty from non-Chinese. One of the rejected applicants was Yick Wo and, two months after his denial, he was arrested and imprisoned.
