The California Supreme Court awarded a Chinese immigrant a lawyer's license 125 years after the very same court rejected him because of his race, the San Jose Mercury News reported.
In 1890, Hong Yen Chang was denied a law license because he was Chinese, the result of then state and federal discriminatory laws put in place against immigrants.
Almost 90 years after his death, Chang's descendants have not forgotten the wrongdoing, having worked tirelessly with a law school group since 2011 to get the court to award Chang a license posthumously.
"This case has always stuck in our craw," Rachelle Chong, Chang's grandniece who worked on the case with students from UC-Davis law school, told the Mercury News. "It always bothered us this case was in the books."
The high court overturned its decision on Monday, awarding a license to practice law posthumously to Chang, the nation's first Chinese lawyer.
"Even if we cannot undo history, we can acknowledge it and, in so doing, accord a full measure of recognition to Chang's path-breaking efforts to become the first lawyer of Chinese descent in the United States," the California Supreme Court said according to the Mercury News.
Chang emigrated to the U.S. in 1872, earning an undergraduate degree at Yale, according to the Los Angeles Times. He then attended Columbia Law School in New York and graduated 1886.
New York initially prevented Chang from joining the state bar because he was not a citizen. So a judge made him a naturalized citizen and he was granted a license.
But his law degree from a prestigious institution and the judge's decision was not enough for a license in California, where he moved to provide law services for the state's nascent Chinese community.
The state Supreme Court said in 1890 his status as a naturalized citizen violated immigration laws. By that time, the federal Chinese Exclusion Act was nearly a decade old.
Chang went on to become a successful banker and a diplomat, but he died in 1925 without the right to practice law in California.
His grand-niece, who is a noted California lawyer, one of several in the family, told the LA Times the family is overjoyed by the honor her ancestor finally received.
"We are so excited, you have no idea," Chong told the newspaper.
