Knowing that the article will be paywalled for most, here’s a meaty excerpt from this heartwarming story:

“…Lloyd Dong Sr., a Chinese farmer and gardener who worked at the renowned Hotel del Coronado, came to the city at a time when discriminatory housing covenants made it almost impossible for non-White families to live there. Only one couple would rent to him in 1939: Gus and Emma Thompson, one of the few Black families that owned a home in Coronado. After Gus — a former enslaved person — died, Emma sold the house to Dong.

To the Dongs, the Thompsons’ decision — an unprompted gesture of solidarity across two families’ experiences of discrimination in the United States — paved the way for their American Dream. And it deserved a response, even decades later.

The Dongs are now selling their Coronado home and donating about two-thirds of the proceeds — likely to be around $5 million — to a resource center for Black students at San Diego State University, which they asked to rename in honor of Gus and Emma Thompson.

…Coronado’s history was marked — as it was in neighborhoods across the country — by the emergence of racially restrictive housing covenants that forbade homes from being sold or leased to minorities in the early 20th century. Among the few Black families that remained in Coronado were Gus and Emma Thompson, entrepreneurs who had purchased land in the 1890s and built a home in the city before the racist policies took hold.

…Lloyd Dong Sr., a second-generation Chinese American from Bakersfield, Calif., looked for a home to rent in Coronado so he could avoid the long commute back to San Diego each night. He was rejected at every turn, struggling in the face of both the city’s housing covenants and the national swell of anti-Asian sentiment that followed the Immigration Act of 1924, which cut off Asian immigration into the United States.

In Dong, the Thompsons saw another person of color trying to find a foothold in Coronado. They opened their doors.

Ron Dong was a toddler at the time and said he doesn’t remember much about the Thompsons. But their modest three-bedroom house on a leafy street near the center of Coronado, which the Dongs began renting in 1939 before buying from the Thompsons in 1955, brought Ron and his siblings a comfortable childhood in the affluent town...

The Thompsons ‘enabled the Dong family to survive and thrive…’

…Decades later, as California and other states grapple with the question of whether and how current generations of Black Americans should be compensated for past racial injustices, they saw an opportunity to pay their gift forward…

‘You know, there’s a big thing about reparations now,” Janice Dong said. “This is a personal reparation. … It isn’t any big governmental thing. It just feels right.‘“

85 years later, Chinese family honors the Black couple who rented to them