Ben Fee
American activist
Ben Fee (张恨棠/木云) (September 3, 1908 – July 3, 1978) was an American writer and labor organizer who rose to prominence in the Chinatowns of San Francisco and New York in the mid-twentieth century. He was president of the Chinese Workers Mutual Aid Association and leader of the Chinese section of the United States Communist Party.
Early years
Fee was born in Canton, China. Fee's mother was "known as a 'bomb thrower' . . . and [his] father . . . a 'draft-dodger'"; he grew up reading Marx and Lenin, and from his early years was aware of racism against California's Chinese population and felt that organized labor could be a solution.
In 1924, when the San Francisco restaurant Almond Blossom refused to serve Fee because he was Asian and other customers might object, he returned the next day with ten white friends who each ordered porterhouse steak, the most expensive item on the menu. Then Fee came in and was refused service on the same grounds given the day before. Fee then confronted the "customers" who, upon learning of the restaurant's policy, walked out of the restaurant, leaving the steaks cooking, unpaid for.
Labor organizer
The son of a Chinese-American interpreter Fee moved to the United States at the age of 13.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ben Fee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.