“Readable and engaging, and recommended to anyone interested in the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, and labor in the United States.” — Arkansas Historical Quarterly
“An important addition to southern civil rights history . . . [a] careful, accessible study of Asian American legal and organizational challenges to Jim Crow laws and de facto practices.” — CHOICE
“Using a rich set of archival sources, legal records, oral histories, and interviews, and focusing on a range of cases from the 1880s to the late twentieth century, Hinnershitz tells the story of how Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Indian Americans challenged southern racial discrimination and fought for their rights.”—American Historical Review
“Provides a welcome addition to a flourishing body of scholarship on the experiences of Asian Americans and other immigrant groups in the U.S. South. This scholarship has challenged assumptions that the South was largely excepted from national histories of immigration, and it complicates understandings of racial identity in the region.”—Journal of Southern History
“This valuable work presents sophisticated and nuanced insight about Asians in the post-Civil War South. . . . A welcome volume.”—Journal of American History
“Hinnershitz explores the struggles for civil rights and equal justice among Asian Americans from the first Chinese laborers in the south . . . to more recent efforts by Indian immigrants to flourish in the hospitality industry in the south. Framing this history in the 'interstitial identity' of Asian Americans . . . Hinnershitz argues that Asians found both opportunities and challenges in the American south.”—Journal of North Carolina Association of Historians
“A Different Shade of Justice is a marvelous accomplishment of shaping a mountain of archival work into a set of narratives that help depict Asian American struggles for civil rights in the South, stories that have, until now, been largely invisible in civil rights history.”—Daryl Joji Maeda, author of Chains of Babylon
“Accessible, well written, and thoroughly researched, this study elucidates a little-known archive of legal cases involving Asian Americans in the U.S. South. Demonstrating how Asians challenged racial discrimination through the court system, Hinnershitz’s innovative scholarship expands our notions of civil rights and racial justice under legal segregation and its legacy.” — Leslie Bow, author of Partly Colored
