American students came at the hands of the U.S. government. Unlike the Chinese experience, California's Japanese attended regular public schools at the turn of the century. In 1906, when San Francisco officials told Japanese students to attend the separate Chinese school, Japanese families filed suit. After intervention by the federal government, which wanted to avoid a diplomatic crisis with Japan, San Francisco agreed to drop its segregation policy. After a new phase of anti-Japanese sentiment emerged amid the nativism of the World War I period, the California legislature in 1921 gave districts the authority to segregate Japanese.
Some historians suggest that relatively few districts actually set up separate schools, however.
The most dramatic school segregation of Japanese-American students came at the hands of the U.S. government, not California lawmakers. When the camps shut down in 1945 as World War II ended, Japanese-American children returned to integrated schools. In 1921, the California legislature gave school districts the right to segregate Japanese-American students in a period of growing nativism in the United States. That sentiment continued to grow, and just two years later, a Hollywood residents' group began a campaign to force Japanese from the community. And though study of Asian-American school segregation centers on California, the 1927 Supreme Court ruling in Gong Lum v. Rice is an early instance in which the issue surfaced elsewhere.