Chinese massacre of 1871

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The Chinese massacre of 1871 was a racially motivated riot on October 24, 1871, when a mob of over 500 Anglos and Latinos entered Los Angeles' Chinatown to attack, rob and brutally murder Chinese residents of the city. The riots took place on Calle de los Negros (Negro Alley), which later became part of Los Angeles Street. Practically every Chinese-occupied building on the block was ransacked and almost every resident was attacked or robbed. The county coroner confirmed 18 Chinese deaths at the hands of the mob, although some estimates ranged as high as 23.

Calle de los Negros was situated immediately northeast of Los Angeles’s principal business district, running 500 feet from the intersection of Arcadia Street to the plaza. The unpaved street took its name from the dark-complexioned Californios (pre-annexation, Spanish-speaking Californians) who had originally lived there. Once home to the town’s most prominent families, the neighborhood had deteriorated into a slum by the time Los Angeles’s first Chinatown was established there in the 1860s.

Los Angeles merchant and memoirist Harris Newmark recalled that Calle de los Negros was “as tough a neighborhood, in fact, as could be found anywhere.” Los Angeles historian Morrow Mayo described it as “a dreadful thoroughfare, forty feet wide, running one whole block, filled entirely with saloons, gambling-houses, dance-halls, and cribs. It was crowded night and day with people of many races, male and female, all rushing and crowding along from one joint to another, from bar to bar, from table to table. There was a band in every joint, with harps, guitars, and other stringed instruments predominating.”

Calle de los Negros was incorporated into Los Angeles Street in 1877. The adobe apartment block where the Chinese massacre occurred was torn down in the late 1880s. Today the location is part of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument.

The dead Chinese in Los Angeles were hanging at three places near the heart of the downtown business section of the city; from the wooden awning over the sidewalk in front of a carriage shop; from the sides of two “prairie schooners” parked on the street around the corner from the carriage shop; and from the cross-beam of a wide gate leading into a lumberyard a few blocks away from the other two locations. One of the victims hung without his trousers and minus a finger on his left hand. [1]

The event was triggered by the killing of Robert Thompson, a local rancher. He was caught in the cross-fire during a gun battle between two Chinese factions. This fight was part of a longstanding feud over the abduction of a Chinese woman named Yut Ho.

[edit] Causes

The underlying causes are sometimes said to be economic. A growing movement of anti-Chinese discrimination in California climaxed in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. These root economic causes were the unstable economy after the American Civil War, which led to high unemployment in California and other Western American states. However, some scholars point out that the anti-Chinese movement had not yet taken in root in Los Angeles at the time of the massacre. They maintain that the killings were the product of racism and lawlessness.

Only ten rioters were ever brought to trial. Eight were convicted, but their convictions were overturned on a legal technicality.

The event was well-reported on the East Coast as newspapers there labeled Los Angeles a "blood stained Eden" [2] after the riots. Los Angeles, at the time, was considered a backwater.

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