Education
A Chinese-American family donated $5 million to the University of California to thank a black family for hiring them
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Gus and Emma Thompson, who were able to purchase property in Coronado before racial restrictions on renting and buying homes, rented to Lloyd Dong Sr. and his family in the early 1900s.
A Chinese-American family has donated $5 million to a California college in honor of two black homeowners who rented apartments to their parents 85 years ago during racist housing practices in the early twentieth century.
According to Los Angeles Times, Gus and Emma Thompson – a black couple who managed to purchase real estate in Coronado, California before racial restrictions on renting and buying homes – bravely rented one of their houses to Lloyd Dong Sr. and his wife. The Dongs finally owned it.
Ron Dong and Lloyd Dong Jr., sons of Lloyd Dong Sr., are donating $5 million to the Black Resource Center at San Diego State University from their share of the proceeds from the sale of the property.
Principal Brandon Gamble said the gift would expand scholarships for black students and fund future renovations to the center.
“I don’t know how to describe the feeling in my chest, but people know the feeling of racism; you might not be able to describe it all the time,” Gamble said. “It’s the complete opposite and we don’t have enough access to it.”
Gus Thompson was born into slavery in Kentucky in 1859, two years before the Civil War, and moved to Coronado at the age of twenty in search of work and a recent starting.
He quickly gained respect in the San Diego area and founded the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge for middle-class black men to gather and discuss civil rights. In 1893, he married Emma, who ran a coffee tent in the Coronado tent city where locals and visitors went to eat, shop, and sleep.
The Thompsons were amongst the few black real estate investors in Coronado who purchased multiple properties before the National Association of Real Estate Boards formally implemented racial discrimination procedures in the Nineteen Twenties.
They used their influence as leaders of the Black community in greater San Diego to help Asian Americans in Coronado, who were also victims of racist acts during that era.
“It’s just something you do because there was a lot of oppression, so you also help people who were at risk,” said the Thompsons’ great-grandson, Ballinger Gardner Kemp, 76. “The beautiful thing to me is that it wasn’t considered something like that great.”
In 1939, the Thompsons rented their house to Lloyd Dong Sr. and his wife under a lease-to-own arrangement. They also rented a room in another of their properties to Lloyd Dong Sr.’s younger brother, George, after he returned from serving in World War II.
Eight years after Gus Thompson’s death in 1947, Emma Thompson sold one property to George Dong and two to Lloyd Dong Sr., including a stable built in 1902 that served as a boarding house for Blacks.
In 1957, Dong Sr. converted the stables into an apartment building, which, including the house, is now valued at over $7 million.
The Dong children are too young to remember the Thompsons, but they have memories of growing up in Coronado that include experiencing discrimination because they are Asian. They knew they wanted to donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the property to the community when an area historian contacted them in 2022 and learned of the Thompson family connections.
“We have other property and my nieces and nephews already have a place,” Lloyd Dong Jr. said, “so I thought I’d give it to someone who could benefit from it.”
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