The Pigtail Ordinance was an 1873 law intended to force prison

Prison

A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...

ers in San Francisco, California

San Francisco, California

San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...

 to have their hair cut within an inch of the scalp. While the law did not discriminate between races, it affected Han Chinese

Han Chinese

Han Chinese are an ethnic group native to China and are the largest single ethnic group in the world.Han Chinese constitute about 92% of the population of the People's Republic of China , 98% of the population of the Republic of China , 78% of the population of Singapore, and about 20% of the...

 prisoners in particular, as it meant they would have their queue

Queue (hairstyle)

The queue or cue is a hairstyle in which the hair is worn long and gathered up into a ponytail. It was worn traditionally by certain Native American groups and the Manchu of Manchuria.-Manchu Queue:...

, a waist-long, braided pigtail, cut off. The proposal passed by a narrow margin through the Board of Supervisors

County board of supervisors

The Board of Supervisors is the body that supervises the operation of county government in all counties in Arizona, California, Iowa, Mississippi, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Sussex County, New Jersey as well as a handful of counties in New York...

 in 1873 but was not enacted until 1876.

Origins

The Pigtail Ordinance was proposed as a solution to the overcrowding of jails due to the 1870 Sanitary Ordinance

Sanitary Ordinance

The Sanitary Ordinance was a law passed in San Francisco, California on July 29, 1870. The purpose of the law was to prevent unsafe tenement conditions as the city grew. Under the law, boarding houses were required to have of air in a room for each occupant...

, which was originally meant to prevent unsafe tenement

Tenement

A tenement is, in most English-speaking areas, a substandard multi-family dwelling, usually old, occupied by the poor.-History:Originally the term tenement referred to tenancy and therefore to any rented accommodation...

 conditions in San Francisco. When in violation of the Sanitary Ordinance, one could either pay a fine or serve a week or more in jail; for thousands of impoverished Chinese immigrants, free room and board was a welcome punishment. Ostensibly to prevent outbreaks of lice

Louse

Lice is the common name for over 3,000 species of wingless insects of the order Phthiraptera; three of which are classified as human disease agents...

 and flea

Flea

Flea is the common name for insects of the order Siphonaptera which are wingless insects with mouthparts adapted for piercing skin and sucking blood...

s, the Supervisors began requiring that all prisoners' heads be shaved. Many equal rights advocates, however, claimed the Supervisors' true intent was to stem the tide of willing Chinese convicts.

Since the beginning of the Qing Dynasty

Qing Dynasty

The Qing Dynasty was the last dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917. It was preceded by the Ming Dynasty and followed by the Republic of China....

 in 1644, Han men in China had been required to wear the queue

Queue

A queue is a particular kind of collection in which the entities in the collection are kept in order and the principal operations on the collection are the addition of entities to the rear terminal position and removal of entities from the front terminal position. This makes the queue a...

 as a sign of submission to the ruling Manchu people. The penalty for refusal was death. By the time the Pigtail Ordinance was passed in the United States, the queue was a symbol of national identity for the Chinese. The power of the Pigtail Ordinance came from the fear of losing this vital symbol; the theory was that Chinese immigrants would be less likely to ignore the Sanitary Ordinance if such a heavy penalty was the result.

Veto and passage

After passage through the Board of Supervisors, the order was immediately veto

Veto

A veto, Latin for "I forbid", is the power of an officer of the state to unilaterally stop an official action, especially enactment of a piece of legislation...

ed by mayor William Alvord

William Alvord

William Alvord was a San Francisco merchant, banker and political leader. He was the 14th Mayor of San Francisco from 1871 to 1873 and served as president of the Bank of California from 1878 until his death.- Biography :...

. In his veto, the mayor stated that "this order, though general in its terms, in substance and effect, is a special and degrading punishment inflicted upon the Chinese residents for slight offenses and solely by reason of their alienage and race." Instead, enforcement of the anti-tenement law was relaxed.

On April 3, 1876 the state of California passed its own law identical to San Francisco's Sanitary Ordinance. The city no longer had the power to ignore the enforcement of the law, so the board made a second proposal of the Pigtail Ordinance. This time the law passed with a vote of 10-2, and was approved by mayor Andrew Jackson Bryant

Andrew Jackson Bryant

Andrew Jackson Bryant was the 17th Mayor of San Francisco serving from December 6, 1875 to November 30, 1879....

.

Lawsuit

As a result of the new law, a Chinese immigrant named Ah Kow was arrested for living space violations and had his queue removed at the jail. He sued the sheriff for damages, claiming that the Pigtail Ordinance caused him irreparable harm

Irreparable damage or injury

An irreparable injury is, in equity, "the type of harm which no monetary compensation can cure or put conditions back the way they were." -The irreparable injury rule:...

. On June 14, 1879 United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Johnson Field

Stephen Johnson Field

Stephen Johnson Field was an American jurist. He was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court of the United States Supreme Court from May 20, 1863, to December 1, 1897...

, sitting in the local federal court—despite much criticism from the general public—found in favor of the plaintiff; his decision held that it was not within the powers of the Board of Supervisors to set such a discriminatory law and that the ordinance was, in fact, unconstitutional. In particular, he cited the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments.Its Citizenship Clause provides a broad definition of citizenship that overruled the Dred Scott v...

 which guarantees equal protection under the law to all persons within its jurisdiction. Ho Ah Kow v. Nunan, 12 Fed. Cas. 252 (1879).