When a Chinese family in Coronado, Calif. was unable “to rent a house amid racially restrictive housing laws that favored white buyers and renters,” a Black couple saved the day.
Gus and Emma Thompson rented out and eventually sold their property to the Dong family when no one else would. Now, eighty-five years later, the Dongs are paying it forward and making a $5 million donation “to Black college students using proceeds from the sale of the house.”
Gus, who was formerly enslaved, left Kentucky and traveled to California, for a job working at Hotel Del Coronado. According to NBC News, “[h]e built the house and barn on C Avenue in 1895, before the city’s racial housing covenants took effect making him exempt from the restrictions. Thompson converted his barn into a boarding house for the vulnerable.”
During the late 1930s, “[t]he Chinese Exclusion Act was still in play, excluding many from U.S. citizenship, and attitudes about Chinese Americans were often unwelcoming at best,” The Coronado Times reports.
Indeed, Gus’ boarding house, located on the top floor of their barn, was the only place immigrants and minorities were permitted to stay in Coronado at that time.
This lines up with local historian Kevin Ashley’s account that, “Gus and Emma Thompson didn’t back down from anything…They did the right thing to lift up the community, and they weren’t afraid to speak up.”
Ron Dong is the son of Lloyd and Margaret Dong, who needed a place to live. Ron said, “At that time, this was the only place my Chinese parents could rent in Coronado.”
“If it wasn’t for the Thompsons, my family would not have been able to live in Coronado where my father worked as a gardener,” Ron added.
Lloyd Dong, Jr. attributes giving their family a start to the Thompsons, and they want to be able to help others in a similar fashion. “Without them, we would not have the education and everything else,” says Lloyd, Jr.
Jo Von M. McCalester, a political science professor at Howard University who grew up in San Diego, says “It was just something understood that marginalized people in San Diego had to rely very heavily on one another.”
The generosity of the Thompsons has now spanned to the next generation, with the Dongs’ generous donation. Lloyd and Ron are the only Dong children still alive, and they are giving “their portion of the proceeds from the sale of the property, which encompasses two lots…to the Black Resource Center of San Diego State University.” In addition, if the SDSU senate approves, “the center will be renamed the Gus and Emma Thompson Black Resource Center.”