From the recorded history of December 4, 1785, when three Chinese sailors arrived in the port of Baltimore, Maryland, on the ship Pallas[1], to the 19th-century California Gold Rush that attracted a large number of Chinese laborers to San Francisco, to the massive influx of Chinese workers needed for the construction of the transcontinental railroad across North America, to the present-day population of approximately 5 million Chinese Americans, California, as the place with the largest population of Chinese descent, has witnessed numerous influential civil rights movements throughout its immigration history of over two centuries.
This article focuses on a retrospective of the major Asian American civil rights movements that took place in California from 2012 to 2022.