Text
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SuffolkLA
SUFFOLK LAW ALUMNI MAGAZINE | FALL 2008
A Singular CAREER
A Shared ETHOS
Harry Hom Dow JD ’29
A Singular
Career,
[ 10 ]
Suffolk Law alumni Magazine | fall 2008
Ethos
A Shared
By Thomas Gearty + meaghan agnew |
photo montage by anastasia vasilakis
fall 2008 | Suffolk Law alumni Magazine
[ 11 ]
T
The portrait of Harry Hom Dow JD ’29 looks like most yearbook
photos: a glimpse of a fresh haircut under the mortarboard,
a new tie peeking through the neck of the black robe, the soft
illumination of another young face.
But the story of the man in the photo is anything
but typical. In 1929, Dow, a newly minted graduate of Suffolk University Law School, was poised to
make history as the first Chinese American admitted
to the Massachusetts Bar. And though he couldn’t
have known it at the time, he was also on the verge
of a groundbreaking career in public service, one that
would reflect his selfless values, his indomitable spirit,
and the ethos of the institution that first gave him the
chance to succeed.
The script for Dow’s extraordinary life is now at
Suffolk Law. His children have donated Dow’s collected papers to his alma mater—24 boxes of photographs, legal files, letters, press clippings, and other
documents—where they will become part of the
Suffolk University archives.
F
or Suffolk Law Dean Alfred Aman, the papers
represent a vital piece of Suffolk Law’s legacy. “It’s
important to realize that a big part of Suffolk’s history as a law school is that it provided opportunities
for individuals of great ability, like Harry Dow, who
would not have had the chance at any other place,”
Aman says. “This is a wonderful opportunity to learn
more about his life and his career—and how it reflects
back on our institution.”
An Early Promise
T
he early decades of the 20th century
were an era of official prejudice against
Chinese immigrants. The Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited entry
to the U.S. by all Chinese people except merchants,
teachers, students, officials, and existing legal residents. “The coming of Chinese laborers endangers
the good order of certain localities,” the law stated.
[ 12 ]
Suffolk Law alumni Magazine | fall 2008
Initially enacted as a 10-year policy, the act was made
permanent in 1902.
B
ut Hom Soon Dow was a business owner, and so
in 1902 he and his wife Alice immigrated to rural
Hudson, Massachusetts, from the Toisan district of
China. When their first child, Harry, was born in 1904,
the family moved east to the city of Boston, eventually
settling on Shawmut Avenue in the South End.
An ambitious man with an entrepreneurial spirit
and an idea for a new business, Hom Soon Dow
opened H. S. Dow Laundry, the first fully mechanized
wet laundry in Boston, in 1907. With a head start
over the competition and an edge in technology, Hom
Soon’s business began to thrive. Soon he had customers all over Boston and purchased several trucks for
deliveries. His family grew at a similarly rapid rate:
after Harry, the Dows added three girls and two more
boys to their brood.
I
n 1916, Hom Soon Dow died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 40, leaving behind a
cloud of uncertainty over the fate of the family’s lifeblood. In the United States in the early 20th century,
it was rare to find a company owned by a woman,
let alone one run by a Chinese widow with no business experience and six children. But Alice Dow decided not only to manage the laundry—with help from
young Harry—but to expand it.
I
t was a bold decision, but misfortune struck again
almost immediately. Alice Dow forged ahead with
an existing plan to relocate the laundry to a more
modern, up-to-date facility on West Dedham Street.
However, the deal went bad, ostensibly over a contract dispute and other issues; family lore says Alice
and her children were hoodwinked. The Dows were
left practically penniless.
Fourteen-year-old Harry felt the weight of the world
on his slender shoulders. As the eldest son in a Chinese
family, he had a special obligation to assume responsibility for his mother and siblings. Yet despite his best
efforts, the family’s fortunes had sunk even lower.
T
hen and there, the teenage Harry made a vow to
himself: he would study law so that no one would
take advantage of his family, or other families like
his, ever again.
A Merging of Like Minds
O
n the other side of Boston Common,
Suffolk Law School was making a name
for itself as an institution committed
to education for all. Gleason Archer,
Suffolk Law’s founder and dean, was emphatic in his
insistence that Suffolk Law provide “an open door
for opportunity.” By decade’s end, Suffolk Law was
one of the largest law schools in the nation, with an
enrollment of more than 2,000 students. The student
body was made up overwhelmingly of working-class
evening students; Archer also spoke proudly of the
school’s “cosmopolitanism,” a then-current term for
racial and ethnic diversity. It was an institution that
prided itself on reaching out to those who might not
otherwise be given an opportunity to succeed. And it
was the perfect fit for a young man like Harry Dow.
Included in the archival material is Dow’s 1925 law
school application: a one-page, single-sided document
with just enough space to list his educational credentials, employment, and two references, including
one from Suffolk Law trustee and U.S. congressman
Joseph F. O’Connell. Three letters can be discerned
scrawled at the bottom of the page: GLA, the initials
of his interviewer, Gleason Archer, who personally accepted Dow for admission.
T
he young man made the most of the opportunity.
During the day he worked at the family’s laundry, helping to keep it afloat; at night he dove into a full load of
law classes. By his final year of law school, Dow was
holding down a full-time job as a translator for the
U.S. Bureau of Immigration while attending classes
and pitching in at the family laundry whenever he had
a free moment. Dow graduated in 1929; soon after,
he and a few friends rented a cottage outside of the
A Dow family photo from the mid-1920s. Back row, left to right:
Harry Dow, Nellie Dow, Hammie Dow, Howard Dow. Front row,
left to right: Grandmother Dow, Nora Dow, Nettie Dow.
city for a month to study for the bar. Several months
later, Dow found out that he had passed the grueling
exam, thus becoming the first Chinese American ever
to gain admission to the Massachusetts Bar.
In a Boston Globe article celebrating his achievement, Dow was asked what he planned to do next.
“I hope to champion the cause of the Chinese in this
country,” he replied.
Fighting the Good Fight
I
t was, for a time, a dream deferred. After passing the bar, Dow went into government service,
a temporary move that became long-lasting
after the stock market crash of 1929. “It did
fall 2008 | Suffolk Law alumni Magazine
[ 13 ]
not seem prudent to give up the certainty of a monthly
paycheck,” Dow wrote to Joseph E. Warner, his former professor at Suffolk Law, who went on to serve
as the Massachusetts state attorney general and a superior court judge.
D
ow spent nearly two decades in the “government
rut,” as he called it, transferred to the New York office
of the Bureau of Immigration in 1931. Dow was too
old to be drafted when World War II started, but he
enlisted voluntarily in 1942. He served in military intelligence, eventually leaving the service in 1947 with
the rank of captain.
F
inally, Dow could fulfill his pledge to dedicate his
skills full time to the Chinese community. He was
“perfectly positioned,” as his son Fred Dow puts it,
to open his own immigration practice. He was smart,
understood Chinese language and culture, and had
experience inside the Immigration Bureau. Above all,
he knew firsthand what it meant to be given a chance
to succeed.
D
ow’s timing was ideal. The repeal of the Chinese
Exclusion Act in 1943 finally permitted Chinese
Harry Dow, with his ever-present pipe, in the early 1980s.
[ 14 ]
Suffolk Law alumni Magazine | fall 2008
residents to apply for U.S. citizenship, and for wives
and children in China to join their husbands and
fathers in the United States. Even though stringent
quotas permitted only a tiny number of Chinese to
enter the country each year, the cultural climate
was changing, and immigration law services were
increasingly in demand.
“
My practice is almost exclusively among the
Chinese and in the immigration and naturalization
field,” he wrote to Judge Warner, “and since the
Chinese community in New York is larger than that
of Boston, I maintain an office there to draw upon the
greater source of clientele. And so my time is spent
between both places.”
D
ow’s documents from that time vividly attest to
the depth of his professional commitment. Stacks
upon stacks of neatly organized files—many labeled
“App. for Admin,” or “application for admission to the
U.S.”—contain government forms, legal correspondence, handwritten case notes, photos, telegrams, and
money order receipts, all meticulously organized by
date and year. They tell the tales of family men securing passports to travel back to China to retrieve wives
and children; of young boys traveling from Hong Kong
to New York to reunite with their families; of Chinese
American residents petitioning for naturalization. In
one instance, Dow himself gives an affidavit on behalf
of a client in order to help him secure life insurance
from the Veterans Administration.
One file in particular stands out. In April 1951,
Hoey Moy Fong, then 15 years old, saw his passport
application turned down due to “wide discrepancies
regarding material facts concerning which you and
your alleged relatives should have been in agreement.” According to documents, Dow spent the
next two years fighting to prove Fong’s relation to
his family was legitimate and thus secure his U.S.
citizenship. Eventually, Dow traveled with Fong
and several family members to Washington, D.C.,
and spent two days arguing the case in U.S. District
Court. The final judgment in that case—a copy of
which is still contained in Fong’s file—came down on
April 29, 1953, just days shy of Fong’s 18th birthday.
In it, Judge Edward C. Tamm “adjudged, ordered,
and decreed that the plaintiff, Hoey Moy Fong, is
and has been since birth a citizen and national of the
United States.” Dow had won.
But those years were also difficult. Dow struggled
to adjust to the financial roller coaster of private prac-
tice after two decades of government service. “I’d be
better off on relief or collecting unemployment insurance,” he complained in a letter to an army buddy.
Moreover, as a Chinese American working full time
as an attorney in the 1950s, Dow faced an enormous
amount of scrutiny. According to the 1950 U.S. census, there were fewer than 130 Asian American attorneys working in the entire country during that time;
in the Northeast, including New England, there were
fewer than 15. Dow wasn’t just fighting to better the
circumstances of his fellow man; he was working by
example to break down existing prejudices against the
Chinese American community.
B
y 1958, however, Dow had found his professional
footing. He was operating thriving law offices on
Bayard Street in New York City and Chauncy Street
in Boston. His finances had stabilized, and he was in
the process of building a house on Long Island for his
wife and children. He often hosted get-togethers for
his extended family, and had developed a fondness for
fancy suits. The future seemed assured.
A
nd then, for the second time in Dow’s life, the roof
fell in.
Victim of McCarthyism
I
n the early 1950s, perceptions of Chinese
Americans had taken a hard turn. U.S. Senator
Joseph McCarthy had spent the late 1940s
stoking anti-communist sentiment; soon, the
country was in the grip of the Second Red Scare.
Although most historical accounts of this time focus
on the blacklists and the Americans unfairly accused
of harboring communist ties, Chinese Americans
were deeply affected as well. When China became a
communist country in 1949, scrutiny of the Chinese
American community only increased. Many Chinese
residents were unfairly investigated and sometimes
deported without warrant, and businesses and reputations were ruined.
Dow was the victim of such smear tactics. In 1958,
one of Dow’s clients was charged with smuggling illegal immigrants into the United States; Dow was swept
up in the investigation and indicted. He was forced
to spend more than a year defending himself against
charges of collusion, testifying repeatedly in front of
grand juries—and watching a groundbreaking career
30 years in the making crumble into dust.
“
Even though he beat the grand jury indictment,
they pretty much blackballed him at the INS,” recalls
son Fred Dow. “Nobody would return his calls. He
couldn’t get any business done because he was a suspect. He was tainted.”
B
y the time Dow extricated himself from legal peril,
he had already shipped his wife and children back to
Boston to live with his sister at the old homestead on
Shawmut Avenue. He hung on in New York for a while
longer but could not revive his wounded career, and
eventually he followed his family back to the South
End in 1960. It must have all been tragically familiar
to Dow: once again, his family was nearly penniless,
the victims of a prejudiced society. Yet Dow’s belief
system was still firmly intact. And so, with almost
nothing left to give but himself, Dow once more dedicated himself to the disadvantaged.
“Nobody would return his calls.
He couldn’t get any business
done because he was a suspect.
He was tainted.”
A Good Neighbor
I
n the 1960s, the city of Boston was at a crossroads. A decade before, urban renewal had
become Boston’s battle cry, and the Boston
Redevelopment Authority (BRA) was established in 1957 with a broad mandate to remake large
sections of the city.
B
ut renewal was a double-edged sword. When in
1959 the BRA cast its eye on the South End for the
nation’s largest urban renewal project, neighborhood
activists knew they had to be better organized if they
were to resist demolition without relocation. Over the
next two decades, in project after project, South End
residents successfully fought to retain the multiethnic,
economically diverse character of the neighborhood.
A
nd Harry Dow was front and center in the effort.
Mel King, a longtime community activist and lifelong South End resident, recalls Dow’s invaluable
work on behalf of the neighborhood.
fall 2008 | Suffolk Law alumni Magazine
[ 15 ]
“
They [the BRA] were going to do something drastic, but by then we were organized to try to deal with
making sure that there was tenant participation in it,”
King says. “And having someone like Harry with his
background and his legal mind made a substantial difference in the discussions we were having.”
D
ow put his legal skills to particularly good use
as a member of the Emergency Tenants Council
(ETC), formed in 1968 in response to a BRA plan to
tear down a large swath of the South End between
Tremont and Washington streets to build luxury
housing. With Dow’s guidance, ETC was able to
wrest control of the parcel from the BRA and build
Villa Victoria, a low-income housing development
for a largely Puerto Rican community that still exists today.
M
ichael Kane, now the executive director of the
National Alliance of HUD Tenants, says Dow played
a central role in formulating “the very practical,
programmatic solutions that showed other people
how you could do things like build racially integrated housing that was also economically diverse
and attractive.
“
There weren’t too many examples of that around at
that time,” adds Kane, who also calls Dow his mentor.
“And I think the South End, with Harry’s leadership
and others, showed you could do that.”
S
oon Dow expanded the reach of his activism,
focusing on the needs of the poor, the elderly, and
the otherwise underserved. He was elected a board
member of the South End Neighborhood Action
Program (SENAP), which today offers community
development programs such as rental and fuel assistance, family advocacy and counseling, career development and counseling, and an emergency food pantry. (His papers contain reams of notes from monthly
SENAP meetings.) He was also instrumental in the
1969 founding of the South End Community Health
Center, which today serves as a model for private,
community-based health care.
D
ow was also still deeply committed to the local
Chinese American community. In the early 1970s,
Paul M. Yee JD ’74, now a solo practitioner in
Boston, was living in the South End while attending
Suffolk Law. One day, Dow knocked on Yee’s door,
introduced himself, and asked Yee to run for an
at-large seat on the South End Project Area
Committee. Dow explained that this important
[ 16 ]
Suffolk Law alumni Magazine | fall 2008
neighborhood committee needed Chinese voices—
and by the time Dow walked back out the door, Yee
had agreed to run.
“
He was just inspiring. I’ve never run for anything
in my life, and I wasn’t involved in neighborhood politics, but he just had a very gentle, persuasive way,”
Yee recalls, adding with a laugh: “I still scratch my
head and say, ‘Well, how did he do it?’”
I
n his later years, Dow devoted much of his time to
board work, serving on the boards of almost a dozen
organizations, including the South End Community
Health Center, Central Boston Elder Services, United
South End Settlements, the Massachusetts League of
Community Health Centers, Greater Boston Legal
Services, and South Cove Community Health Center,
to name just a few.
Paul W. Lee, a partner at Goodwin Proctor LLP,
served with Dow on the South Cove board. “He
was a very thoughtful councilor. He would listen to
the discussion at the board level, then formulate his
thoughts and conclusions and then speak,” Lee says.
“His opinions were so highly respected that when he
spoke, everybody listened very closely, and what he
recommended based on his knowledge and his years
of experience ended up usually being the structure of
whatever we were working on.”
Dow never resumed a paid legal career, living on
Social Security in a subsidized apartment in the South
End. But even as his previous life as an immigration
attorney faded into memory, Dow reveled in his new
sense of purpose as a community activist.
“I think he really saw the soul of the community,”
Fred Dow says. “He connected with so many people.”
A
nd in that regard, he was again emulating the values of his law school alma mater.
“Harry Dow going on to do public service again
epitomized the founding values and purpose of
Suffolk Law,” says former dean Robert Smith. “I
think his story really resonates with what this law
school is all about.”
An Enduring Legacy
T
ragically, in 1985, Dow was struck and
killed by a truck on Boylston Street in
Boston. He was 80 years old. The outpouring of tributes and accolades was so
intense that it surprised even some family members,
who were unaware of how much Dow had done for
his neighborhood. At Dow’s funeral, friend and fellow
activist Martin Gopen spoke movingly of Dow’s community work. “He did not accept, or find acceptable,
inadequate health services, unsatisfactory housing,
injustice for the poor, lack of respect or dignity for
people, especially senior citizens,” Gopen said in his
eulogy. “His advocacy went beyond ‘what could be’ to
‘what should be.’”
T
hat same year, Paul Lee and several other area
attorneys founded the Asian American Lawyers
Association of Massachusetts (AALAM). It was only
then, Lee says, that he realized the true significance
of Dow’s achievements. Fifty-five years after Harry
Dow became the first Chinese American admitted to
the bar, the AALAM founders could still only find
two dozen Asian lawyers practicing in the commonwealth. When the group’s members decided to establish a legal assistance fund to provide legal services
to the needy, they named the fund after Harry Dow.
F
or almost 25 years, the Harry H. Dow Memorial
Legal Assistance Fund has carried on Dow’s legacy.
The fund works to strengthen the capacity of the
Asian American community through outreach and advocacy work. One of its longest and most substantial
programs is its sponsoring of internships at the Asian
Outreach Unit of Greater Boston Legal Services. This
past summer, the recipients were two Suffolk Law students, third-year student Sean Chen and second-year
student Anna Nguyen, both of whom point to Dow as
an influence.
“
Dow’s life and work have inspired me greatly to
continue to be a part of this ongoing cause to bring
about the social justice and equality to the Asian
American community,” says Nguyen.
In the future, Dean Aman would like to see Dow’s
legacy honored at Suffolk Law with a scholarship for
students interested in pursuing a career in immigration law. “It would be an extraordinarily important
way of honoring his legacy to know that there would
be Dow scholars at the school addressing today’s immigration challenges,” Aman says.
In the meantime, anyone who wants to learn about
Harry Dow’s remarkable achievements can come to
Suffolk Law, and to the archives.
“Life presents itself in many ways,” says Fred Dow.
“I think my father showed the core of his humanity in
responding to life’s conditions and situations.”
Paper Trail
Fortunately for posterity’s sake, Harry Dow felt his handwriting
was “atrocious.” He typed all his letters, frequently starting with an
apology for using the impersonal machine. As a result, his personal papers provide an unusually meticulous record of his life
and career.
Deciding where to house his life’s record, however, was not an
easy task for his family. The University of California Berkeley, known
for its impressive archives on the history of the Asian immigrant
experience, had long hoped to acquire the Dow collection. But former dean Robert Smith felt strongly that the papers belonged at
Suffolk Law.
At a 2002 Harry H. Dow Memorial Legal Assistance Fund fundraising dinner, Smith approached Fred Dow and his siblings and let the
family know Suffolk Law was interested in acquiring the papers.
Over the course of several years, he continued to engage them in
a conversation about how the school could preserve and promote
Harry Dow’s legacy. When Dean Alfred Aman came to the law school
in 2007, he took over the dialogue.
In the end, the Dow family was persuaded.
“After thinking about it, we felt these papers really belonged in
Boston and at Suffolk, because Suffolk opened up the opportunity
for my father,” says Fred Dow. “Suffolk is going to take care of these
papers well—I believe that.” –TG
The archives staff—from left, Derrick Hart, Nicole Feeney, and
Julia Collins—pose with Harry’s sons, Alex Dow and Fred Dow, after
transporting the Dow papers to Suffolk Law in December 2007.
fall 2008 | Suffolk Law alumni Magazine
[ 17 ]
SuffolkLA
SUFFOLK LAW ALUMNI MAGAZINE | FALL 2008
A Singular CAREER
A Shared ETHOS
Harry Hom Dow JD ’29
A Singular
Career,
[ 10 ]
Suffolk Law alumni Magazine | fall 2008
Ethos
A Shared
By Thomas Gearty + meaghan agnew |
photo montage by anastasia vasilakis
fall 2008 | Suffolk Law alumni Magazine
[ 11 ]
T
The portrait of Harry Hom Dow JD ’29 looks like most yearbook
photos: a glimpse of a fresh haircut under the mortarboard,
a new tie peeking through the neck of the black robe, the soft
illumination of another young face.
But the story of the man in the photo is anything
but typical. In 1929, Dow, a newly minted graduate of Suffolk University Law School, was poised to
make history as the first Chinese American admitted
to the Massachusetts Bar. And though he couldn’t
have known it at the time, he was also on the verge
of a groundbreaking career in public service, one that
would reflect his selfless values, his indomitable spirit,
and the ethos of the institution that first gave him the
chance to succeed.
The script for Dow’s extraordinary life is now at
Suffolk Law. His children have donated Dow’s collected papers to his alma mater—24 boxes of photographs, legal files, letters, press clippings, and other
documents—where they will become part of the
Suffolk University archives.
F
or Suffolk Law Dean Alfred Aman, the papers
represent a vital piece of Suffolk Law’s legacy. “It’s
important to realize that a big part of Suffolk’s history as a law school is that it provided opportunities
for individuals of great ability, like Harry Dow, who
would not have had the chance at any other place,”
Aman says. “This is a wonderful opportunity to learn
more about his life and his career—and how it reflects
back on our institution.”
An Early Promise
T
he early decades of the 20th century
were an era of official prejudice against
Chinese immigrants. The Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited entry
to the U.S. by all Chinese people except merchants,
teachers, students, officials, and existing legal residents. “The coming of Chinese laborers endangers
the good order of certain localities,” the law stated.
[ 12 ]
Suffolk Law alumni Magazine | fall 2008
Initially enacted as a 10-year policy, the act was made
permanent in 1902.
B
ut Hom Soon Dow was a business owner, and so
in 1902 he and his wife Alice immigrated to rural
Hudson, Massachusetts, from the Toisan district of
China. When their first child, Harry, was born in 1904,
the family moved east to the city of Boston, eventually
settling on Shawmut Avenue in the South End.
An ambitious man with an entrepreneurial spirit
and an idea for a new business, Hom Soon Dow
opened H. S. Dow Laundry, the first fully mechanized
wet laundry in Boston, in 1907. With a head start
over the competition and an edge in technology, Hom
Soon’s business began to thrive. Soon he had customers all over Boston and purchased several trucks for
deliveries. His family grew at a similarly rapid rate:
after Harry, the Dows added three girls and two more
boys to their brood.
I
n 1916, Hom Soon Dow died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 40, leaving behind a
cloud of uncertainty over the fate of the family’s lifeblood. In the United States in the early 20th century,
it was rare to find a company owned by a woman,
let alone one run by a Chinese widow with no business experience and six children. But Alice Dow decided not only to manage the laundry—with help from
young Harry—but to expand it.
I
t was a bold decision, but misfortune struck again
almost immediately. Alice Dow forged ahead with
an existing plan to relocate the laundry to a more
modern, up-to-date facility on West Dedham Street.
However, the deal went bad, ostensibly over a contract dispute and other issues; family lore says Alice
and her children were hoodwinked. The Dows were
left practically penniless.
Fourteen-year-old Harry felt the weight of the world
on his slender shoulders. As the eldest son in a Chinese
family, he had a special obligation to assume responsibility for his mother and siblings. Yet despite his best
efforts, the family’s fortunes had sunk even lower.
T
hen and there, the teenage Harry made a vow to
himself: he would study law so that no one would
take advantage of his family, or other families like
his, ever again.
A Merging of Like Minds
O
n the other side of Boston Common,
Suffolk Law School was making a name
for itself as an institution committed
to education for all. Gleason Archer,
Suffolk Law’s founder and dean, was emphatic in his
insistence that Suffolk Law provide “an open door
for opportunity.” By decade’s end, Suffolk Law was
one of the largest law schools in the nation, with an
enrollment of more than 2,000 students. The student
body was made up overwhelmingly of working-class
evening students; Archer also spoke proudly of the
school’s “cosmopolitanism,” a then-current term for
racial and ethnic diversity. It was an institution that
prided itself on reaching out to those who might not
otherwise be given an opportunity to succeed. And it
was the perfect fit for a young man like Harry Dow.
Included in the archival material is Dow’s 1925 law
school application: a one-page, single-sided document
with just enough space to list his educational credentials, employment, and two references, including
one from Suffolk Law trustee and U.S. congressman
Joseph F. O’Connell. Three letters can be discerned
scrawled at the bottom of the page: GLA, the initials
of his interviewer, Gleason Archer, who personally accepted Dow for admission.
T
he young man made the most of the opportunity.
During the day he worked at the family’s laundry, helping to keep it afloat; at night he dove into a full load of
law classes. By his final year of law school, Dow was
holding down a full-time job as a translator for the
U.S. Bureau of Immigration while attending classes
and pitching in at the family laundry whenever he had
a free moment. Dow graduated in 1929; soon after,
he and a few friends rented a cottage outside of the
A Dow family photo from the mid-1920s. Back row, left to right:
Harry Dow, Nellie Dow, Hammie Dow, Howard Dow. Front row,
left to right: Grandmother Dow, Nora Dow, Nettie Dow.
city for a month to study for the bar. Several months
later, Dow found out that he had passed the grueling
exam, thus becoming the first Chinese American ever
to gain admission to the Massachusetts Bar.
In a Boston Globe article celebrating his achievement, Dow was asked what he planned to do next.
“I hope to champion the cause of the Chinese in this
country,” he replied.
Fighting the Good Fight
I
t was, for a time, a dream deferred. After passing the bar, Dow went into government service,
a temporary move that became long-lasting
after the stock market crash of 1929. “It did
fall 2008 | Suffolk Law alumni Magazine
[ 13 ]
not seem prudent to give up the certainty of a monthly
paycheck,” Dow wrote to Joseph E. Warner, his former professor at Suffolk Law, who went on to serve
as the Massachusetts state attorney general and a superior court judge.
D
ow spent nearly two decades in the “government
rut,” as he called it, transferred to the New York office
of the Bureau of Immigration in 1931. Dow was too
old to be drafted when World War II started, but he
enlisted voluntarily in 1942. He served in military intelligence, eventually leaving the service in 1947 with
the rank of captain.
F
inally, Dow could fulfill his pledge to dedicate his
skills full time to the Chinese community. He was
“perfectly positioned,” as his son Fred Dow puts it,
to open his own immigration practice. He was smart,
understood Chinese language and culture, and had
experience inside the Immigration Bureau. Above all,
he knew firsthand what it meant to be given a chance
to succeed.
D
ow’s timing was ideal. The repeal of the Chinese
Exclusion Act in 1943 finally permitted Chinese
Harry Dow, with his ever-present pipe, in the early 1980s.
[ 14 ]
Suffolk Law alumni Magazine | fall 2008
residents to apply for U.S. citizenship, and for wives
and children in China to join their husbands and
fathers in the United States. Even though stringent
quotas permitted only a tiny number of Chinese to
enter the country each year, the cultural climate
was changing, and immigration law services were
increasingly in demand.
“
My practice is almost exclusively among the
Chinese and in the immigration and naturalization
field,” he wrote to Judge Warner, “and since the
Chinese community in New York is larger than that
of Boston, I maintain an office there to draw upon the
greater source of clientele. And so my time is spent
between both places.”
D
ow’s documents from that time vividly attest to
the depth of his professional commitment. Stacks
upon stacks of neatly organized files—many labeled
“App. for Admin,” or “application for admission to the
U.S.”—contain government forms, legal correspondence, handwritten case notes, photos, telegrams, and
money order receipts, all meticulously organized by
date and year. They tell the tales of family men securing passports to travel back to China to retrieve wives
and children; of young boys traveling from Hong Kong
to New York to reunite with their families; of Chinese
American residents petitioning for naturalization. In
one instance, Dow himself gives an affidavit on behalf
of a client in order to help him secure life insurance
from the Veterans Administration.
One file in particular stands out. In April 1951,
Hoey Moy Fong, then 15 years old, saw his passport
application turned down due to “wide discrepancies
regarding material facts concerning which you and
your alleged relatives should have been in agreement.” According to documents, Dow spent the
next two years fighting to prove Fong’s relation to
his family was legitimate and thus secure his U.S.
citizenship. Eventually, Dow traveled with Fong
and several family members to Washington, D.C.,
and spent two days arguing the case in U.S. District
Court. The final judgment in that case—a copy of
which is still contained in Fong’s file—came down on
April 29, 1953, just days shy of Fong’s 18th birthday.
In it, Judge Edward C. Tamm “adjudged, ordered,
and decreed that the plaintiff, Hoey Moy Fong, is
and has been since birth a citizen and national of the
United States.” Dow had won.
But those years were also difficult. Dow struggled
to adjust to the financial roller coaster of private prac-
tice after two decades of government service. “I’d be
better off on relief or collecting unemployment insurance,” he complained in a letter to an army buddy.
Moreover, as a Chinese American working full time
as an attorney in the 1950s, Dow faced an enormous
amount of scrutiny. According to the 1950 U.S. census, there were fewer than 130 Asian American attorneys working in the entire country during that time;
in the Northeast, including New England, there were
fewer than 15. Dow wasn’t just fighting to better the
circumstances of his fellow man; he was working by
example to break down existing prejudices against the
Chinese American community.
B
y 1958, however, Dow had found his professional
footing. He was operating thriving law offices on
Bayard Street in New York City and Chauncy Street
in Boston. His finances had stabilized, and he was in
the process of building a house on Long Island for his
wife and children. He often hosted get-togethers for
his extended family, and had developed a fondness for
fancy suits. The future seemed assured.
A
nd then, for the second time in Dow’s life, the roof
fell in.
Victim of McCarthyism
I
n the early 1950s, perceptions of Chinese
Americans had taken a hard turn. U.S. Senator
Joseph McCarthy had spent the late 1940s
stoking anti-communist sentiment; soon, the
country was in the grip of the Second Red Scare.
Although most historical accounts of this time focus
on the blacklists and the Americans unfairly accused
of harboring communist ties, Chinese Americans
were deeply affected as well. When China became a
communist country in 1949, scrutiny of the Chinese
American community only increased. Many Chinese
residents were unfairly investigated and sometimes
deported without warrant, and businesses and reputations were ruined.
Dow was the victim of such smear tactics. In 1958,
one of Dow’s clients was charged with smuggling illegal immigrants into the United States; Dow was swept
up in the investigation and indicted. He was forced
to spend more than a year defending himself against
charges of collusion, testifying repeatedly in front of
grand juries—and watching a groundbreaking career
30 years in the making crumble into dust.
“
Even though he beat the grand jury indictment,
they pretty much blackballed him at the INS,” recalls
son Fred Dow. “Nobody would return his calls. He
couldn’t get any business done because he was a suspect. He was tainted.”
B
y the time Dow extricated himself from legal peril,
he had already shipped his wife and children back to
Boston to live with his sister at the old homestead on
Shawmut Avenue. He hung on in New York for a while
longer but could not revive his wounded career, and
eventually he followed his family back to the South
End in 1960. It must have all been tragically familiar
to Dow: once again, his family was nearly penniless,
the victims of a prejudiced society. Yet Dow’s belief
system was still firmly intact. And so, with almost
nothing left to give but himself, Dow once more dedicated himself to the disadvantaged.
“Nobody would return his calls.
He couldn’t get any business
done because he was a suspect.
He was tainted.”
A Good Neighbor
I
n the 1960s, the city of Boston was at a crossroads. A decade before, urban renewal had
become Boston’s battle cry, and the Boston
Redevelopment Authority (BRA) was established in 1957 with a broad mandate to remake large
sections of the city.
B
ut renewal was a double-edged sword. When in
1959 the BRA cast its eye on the South End for the
nation’s largest urban renewal project, neighborhood
activists knew they had to be better organized if they
were to resist demolition without relocation. Over the
next two decades, in project after project, South End
residents successfully fought to retain the multiethnic,
economically diverse character of the neighborhood.
A
nd Harry Dow was front and center in the effort.
Mel King, a longtime community activist and lifelong South End resident, recalls Dow’s invaluable
work on behalf of the neighborhood.
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“
They [the BRA] were going to do something drastic, but by then we were organized to try to deal with
making sure that there was tenant participation in it,”
King says. “And having someone like Harry with his
background and his legal mind made a substantial difference in the discussions we were having.”
D
ow put his legal skills to particularly good use
as a member of the Emergency Tenants Council
(ETC), formed in 1968 in response to a BRA plan to
tear down a large swath of the South End between
Tremont and Washington streets to build luxury
housing. With Dow’s guidance, ETC was able to
wrest control of the parcel from the BRA and build
Villa Victoria, a low-income housing development
for a largely Puerto Rican community that still exists today.
M
ichael Kane, now the executive director of the
National Alliance of HUD Tenants, says Dow played
a central role in formulating “the very practical,
programmatic solutions that showed other people
how you could do things like build racially integrated housing that was also economically diverse
and attractive.
“
There weren’t too many examples of that around at
that time,” adds Kane, who also calls Dow his mentor.
“And I think the South End, with Harry’s leadership
and others, showed you could do that.”
S
oon Dow expanded the reach of his activism,
focusing on the needs of the poor, the elderly, and
the otherwise underserved. He was elected a board
member of the South End Neighborhood Action
Program (SENAP), which today offers community
development programs such as rental and fuel assistance, family advocacy and counseling, career development and counseling, and an emergency food pantry. (His papers contain reams of notes from monthly
SENAP meetings.) He was also instrumental in the
1969 founding of the South End Community Health
Center, which today serves as a model for private,
community-based health care.
D
ow was also still deeply committed to the local
Chinese American community. In the early 1970s,
Paul M. Yee JD ’74, now a solo practitioner in
Boston, was living in the South End while attending
Suffolk Law. One day, Dow knocked on Yee’s door,
introduced himself, and asked Yee to run for an
at-large seat on the South End Project Area
Committee. Dow explained that this important
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neighborhood committee needed Chinese voices—
and by the time Dow walked back out the door, Yee
had agreed to run.
“
He was just inspiring. I’ve never run for anything
in my life, and I wasn’t involved in neighborhood politics, but he just had a very gentle, persuasive way,”
Yee recalls, adding with a laugh: “I still scratch my
head and say, ‘Well, how did he do it?’”
I
n his later years, Dow devoted much of his time to
board work, serving on the boards of almost a dozen
organizations, including the South End Community
Health Center, Central Boston Elder Services, United
South End Settlements, the Massachusetts League of
Community Health Centers, Greater Boston Legal
Services, and South Cove Community Health Center,
to name just a few.
Paul W. Lee, a partner at Goodwin Proctor LLP,
served with Dow on the South Cove board. “He
was a very thoughtful councilor. He would listen to
the discussion at the board level, then formulate his
thoughts and conclusions and then speak,” Lee says.
“His opinions were so highly respected that when he
spoke, everybody listened very closely, and what he
recommended based on his knowledge and his years
of experience ended up usually being the structure of
whatever we were working on.”
Dow never resumed a paid legal career, living on
Social Security in a subsidized apartment in the South
End. But even as his previous life as an immigration
attorney faded into memory, Dow reveled in his new
sense of purpose as a community activist.
“I think he really saw the soul of the community,”
Fred Dow says. “He connected with so many people.”
A
nd in that regard, he was again emulating the values of his law school alma mater.
“Harry Dow going on to do public service again
epitomized the founding values and purpose of
Suffolk Law,” says former dean Robert Smith. “I
think his story really resonates with what this law
school is all about.”
An Enduring Legacy
T
ragically, in 1985, Dow was struck and
killed by a truck on Boylston Street in
Boston. He was 80 years old. The outpouring of tributes and accolades was so
intense that it surprised even some family members,
who were unaware of how much Dow had done for
his neighborhood. At Dow’s funeral, friend and fellow
activist Martin Gopen spoke movingly of Dow’s community work. “He did not accept, or find acceptable,
inadequate health services, unsatisfactory housing,
injustice for the poor, lack of respect or dignity for
people, especially senior citizens,” Gopen said in his
eulogy. “His advocacy went beyond ‘what could be’ to
‘what should be.’”
T
hat same year, Paul Lee and several other area
attorneys founded the Asian American Lawyers
Association of Massachusetts (AALAM). It was only
then, Lee says, that he realized the true significance
of Dow’s achievements. Fifty-five years after Harry
Dow became the first Chinese American admitted to
the bar, the AALAM founders could still only find
two dozen Asian lawyers practicing in the commonwealth. When the group’s members decided to establish a legal assistance fund to provide legal services
to the needy, they named the fund after Harry Dow.
F
or almost 25 years, the Harry H. Dow Memorial
Legal Assistance Fund has carried on Dow’s legacy.
The fund works to strengthen the capacity of the
Asian American community through outreach and advocacy work. One of its longest and most substantial
programs is its sponsoring of internships at the Asian
Outreach Unit of Greater Boston Legal Services. This
past summer, the recipients were two Suffolk Law students, third-year student Sean Chen and second-year
student Anna Nguyen, both of whom point to Dow as
an influence.
“
Dow’s life and work have inspired me greatly to
continue to be a part of this ongoing cause to bring
about the social justice and equality to the Asian
American community,” says Nguyen.
In the future, Dean Aman would like to see Dow’s
legacy honored at Suffolk Law with a scholarship for
students interested in pursuing a career in immigration law. “It would be an extraordinarily important
way of honoring his legacy to know that there would
be Dow scholars at the school addressing today’s immigration challenges,” Aman says.
In the meantime, anyone who wants to learn about
Harry Dow’s remarkable achievements can come to
Suffolk Law, and to the archives.
“Life presents itself in many ways,” says Fred Dow.
“I think my father showed the core of his humanity in
responding to life’s conditions and situations.”
Paper Trail
Fortunately for posterity’s sake, Harry Dow felt his handwriting
was “atrocious.” He typed all his letters, frequently starting with an
apology for using the impersonal machine. As a result, his personal papers provide an unusually meticulous record of his life
and career.
Deciding where to house his life’s record, however, was not an
easy task for his family. The University of California Berkeley, known
for its impressive archives on the history of the Asian immigrant
experience, had long hoped to acquire the Dow collection. But former dean Robert Smith felt strongly that the papers belonged at
Suffolk Law.
At a 2002 Harry H. Dow Memorial Legal Assistance Fund fundraising dinner, Smith approached Fred Dow and his siblings and let the
family know Suffolk Law was interested in acquiring the papers.
Over the course of several years, he continued to engage them in
a conversation about how the school could preserve and promote
Harry Dow’s legacy. When Dean Alfred Aman came to the law school
in 2007, he took over the dialogue.
In the end, the Dow family was persuaded.
“After thinking about it, we felt these papers really belonged in
Boston and at Suffolk, because Suffolk opened up the opportunity
for my father,” says Fred Dow. “Suffolk is going to take care of these
papers well—I believe that.” –TG
The archives staff—from left, Derrick Hart, Nicole Feeney, and
Julia Collins—pose with Harry’s sons, Alex Dow and Fred Dow, after
transporting the Dow papers to Suffolk Law in December 2007.
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