Shortly thereafter, the Chinese community departed from the city, and McGraw was voted out of office in the next election.īack in St. McGraw regained control of the city, but as had happened in Rock Springs, it was the sheriff against thousands of his citizens. Sheriff John McGraw responded in force, shots were fired, and both police officers and members of the mob fell in the streets of Seattle, seriously wounded. On February 7, 1886, a huge mob invaded the homes of hundreds of Chinese residents, forcing them to hurriedly pack their belongings before beginning a march to the docks where a steamer waited to take them to San Francisco. Months later, the ethnic cleansing of the entire Chinese population of Seattle ranks as one of the worst incidents of racial violence in America, following similar actions nearby in Tacoma, Washington, in 1885. In a scene that would be repeated throughout the West, the soldiers could do little more than escort the survivors to safety. While in many of the instances of anti-Chinese violence, federal troops were dispatched to the scene, little could be done when the entire white population of the town was behind the violence. Most of the bodies were burned or mutilated. ![]() Perhaps the most infamous was the Rock Springs Massacre on September 2, 1885, when a mob of white miners attacked a Chinese mining settlement, killing at least 28 people if not dozens more in Wyoming. Then there were the massacres and lynching of innocent Chinese immigrants. Jean Pfaelzer, in Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans, has documented over 150 major incidents of violence in American history. And of course, in a pattern seen throughout American history, drug abuse was blamed on a small minority: Opium addiction was blamed on Chinese drug dealers, ignoring the fact, of course, that the opium originally reached the United States from India or Turkey on American- and British-owned ships. While initially Chinese workers were lauded for their hard work, they were now characterized as being lazy and shifty, always looking to steal or swindle from white Americans. Laws passed starting in 1882 restricted immigration and stripped Chinese immigrants of their rights as citizens further laws continued this trend over several generations. This was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, the Court assured, because the penalty for a conviction would still be the same. The ruling reasoned that because historians had posited that Native Americans had crossed over to the Americas via the Bering Straits Land Bridge, and thus were descended from Asians, and because Native Americans were lesser humans, by extension then Chinese were lesser humans as well. Hall that a Chinese man could not testify against a white man in court. Bigotry can be cloaked in pseudo-intellectualism, as well, such as when the California Supreme Court ruled in 1854 in People v. A series of legal decisions and laws passed over the course of the late 19th century assured that Chinese Americans would not be relegated to second-class citizens, but to no citizenship at all. The drug epidemic in China, coupled with the Manchu Dynasty’s flagging fortunes, encouraged emigration.Īt first Chinese immigrants to California, mainly men, were greeted with curiosity, but as economic circumstances changed on the West Coast, they quickly became easy scapegoats for white Americans. China, then ruled by the Manchu Dynasty, was suffering a series of military and diplomatic defeats in the Opium Wars, which allowed for British and American merchants to import the drug into Chinese ports. Louis and the United States in general, we must look to the West Coast, and particularly California, where the twin economic engines of the Gold Rush and the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad encouraged immigration to the newly admitted state. ![]() To understand the Chinese American immigrant story in St. Louis, they endured decades of suspicion and misunderstanding that lasted into the mid-20th century and is well-documented in the pages of newspapers. Forced to live in a single block of downtown St. While the population of Chinese Americans in the city numbered only in the hundreds for most of the 19th century, they faced intense prejudice and discrimination, much of which is now forgotten. The east side of Eighth Street in the Chinatown district between Market and Walnut streets, during the summer 1964.Ĭhinese Americans have been active participants in St.
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