What Harry Hom Dow teaches us about staying true to ourselves
By Khari Thompson
As Frederick Hom Dow bends down to brush off the flower residue and dust from the 1965 Freedom Plaza plaque that bears his father’s name, he points to the first of three Chinese characters, 譚金源, that sit next to the English words, “Harry Hom Dow.”
“譚” is the character for “Hom,” a symbol he also bears proudly on the hat he wears.
Hom, Fred explains, is the family name his grandfather, Hom Soon Dow, brought from China to Massachusetts, where Harry Hom Dow would be born in 1904. In China, the family name goes first and the given name second.
But the immigration officials Hom Soon Dow encountered didn’t honor the difference in naming conventions.
“When my grandfather came over … the immigration people, when they wrote up his papers, said, ‘Okay, you’re a Dow.’ My grandfather and my father said, ‘Okay, that’s fine. We’ll live with that for now.’ But they insisted—at every stage, every generation—you had to put the ‘Hom’ in there.”
That insistence on remembering their family name—of refusing to forget who they were and where they came from—is a central piece of a story that will soon see Fred honored for his commitment to education and civil rights at Embrace Honors Harry Hom Dow on May 21, alongside other heroes of the AANHPI community.
Harry himself grew up in Boston's South End during an era defined by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924—legislation that established strict quotas on non-white immigrants and brought intense scrutiny on minority communities. So, he decided to do something to help. He took night classes at Suffolk Law School while working at the family laundry business during the day, finally becoming the first Chinese American admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1929.
When asked by the Boston Globe what he planned to do with his new license, his answer was quick and to the point: "I'm going to work for the Chinese."
“He found work where he could do that, and that was immigration law,” Fred said of his father.
For years, Harry helped families navigate a system designed to keep them out. He also served as a captain in Army Intelligence during World War II and the Korean War, fighting for a country that didn’t want to accept people like him even as he sought to preserve their rights.
Eventually, the system hit back against him.
In 1958, one of Harry's clients was charged with smuggling undocumented immigrants, and Harry was indicted as part of the investigation. Though the charges were eventually dropped and his name cleared, his law practice didn’t survive the scandal, pushing Harry, Fred, and their family toward poverty.
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Harry Hom Dow. (Photo: Embrace/Suffolk University) |
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But, despite the hardship, Harry’s outlook never changed.
“It’s an example of what you need to do after you've been injured, after things have been taken away from you,” Fred said. “My dad, instead of seeking retribution or getting back at people or being angry, he worked for the community. He helped build so many organizations that helped people with housing, health, and domestic violence. He just knew that we had to create security for our community.”
Rather than disappear, Harry stayed active. He became a pro bono lawyer for the Emergency Tenants Council, fighting displacement in a South End under siege from gentrification. He helped conceptualize the South End Community Health Center. He served on the boards of Greater Boston Legal Services, United South End Settlements, Casa Myrna Vasquez Shelter for Women, and the South Cove Community Health Center in Chinatown, among others. He worked alongside Mel King, Frieda Garcia, Byron Rushing, and Alex Rodriguez—architects of Boston's civil rights movement during its most contested years.
"Black and Brown communities provided the lessons, the strategies, the experience that helped the Chinese community move towards liberation," Fred says. "And it's those bridges that are so important to building resistance. When we learn from each other's communities, that's when we grow."
The cost of Harry's persecution was real and lasting. The family struggled financially for years after he lost the practice. But they remembered the lesson the struggle for the Hom name had taught them: family comes first—both the family you’re born with, and the family you choose.
Today, anti-immigrant sentiment, discriminatory travel bans, cruel immigration law enforcement, and the rollback of civil rights make following Harry Hom Dow’s example as important as ever.
If we want the democracy we say we do—the one he and others honored on the 1965 Freedom Plaza worked for—we must strive to meet the legacy our forebears have left for us. And we must remember that none of us can change the world alone.
"Relationships are what make our movement strong," Fred explained. "And those relationships are based on trust, and solidarity, and a recognition that there's been hurt. … And then moving out from there—to embrace that, and embrace it with love. Because that's how we will find the way."
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