Immigrants looking for the gold of the American Dream become the forgotten victims of the largest mass lynching in American History. Now That Should Be A Movie.
Today’s book I would like to pitch as a movie is The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 by Scott Zesch, from Oxford University Press.
The story of the Chinese and other East Asians in America is an odyssey of tragedy and triumph that gets far less attention than it deserves. For example, the name Chinatown is synonymous with cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. However, the creation and history of these ethnic enclaves is less known. Today I would like to pay attention to the Chinatown in La La Land and the events of October 24, 1871.
When the first Chinese immigrants arrived in the wild west town that was 1850s Los Angeles, they settled in the oldest buildings. The area where these buildings stood was called Calle de los Negros, or in the common vernacular, Negro or nigger alley. The country around them was wild, with gunfights, lynchings and vigilante committees fairly common despite the presence of a civil government. By the 1870s, some of the Chinese were involved in this violence to the point that they offered blood money for the death of a sheriff. An American collected.
However, most of the Chinese, who were mainly from southern China, had come to Gold Mountain, as they called America, to earn enough honest money to return home and claim a bride. They brought with them aspects of their home culture. One aspect was the huiguan, a social organization similar to the Lions Club. Called companies by American newspapers, the members of huiguans would provide loans, find jobs and even send the bodies of their associates home. On the downside of being part of a huiguan, a Chinese man could be beat up or robbed simply because he belonged to the same company as the person who offended his assailant. The working class See Yup company became the strongest one in Los Angeles in the late 1860s.
The huiguan were often confused by the Americans with the tongos, which were more like the mafia. While their original purpose was beneficial, they eventually morphed into secret societies that trafficked in extortion, gambling, opium and prostitution. Called the fighting tongos, they often engaged each other in gunfights and street battles. Assassins known as highbinders were on their payroll. The huiguan opposed the tongos, often paring up with American officials to stop the trafficking of women. The feuds that arose between the tongos and huiguans did not help the Chinese image in the eyes of an increasingly suspicious American public.
The American public began to see all the Chinese as tongos, in the same way some see as Hispanic immigrants as MS-13 gang members. Since the Chinese were more than willing to work, they were accused of stealing jobs. All the ethnic groups in Los Angeles, white, black, Hispanic, even Native American, openly despised them. It was not uncommon for any member of those groups to abuse a Chinese man in public without consequence. A column appeared the San Francisco newspaper, The Daily Alta Californian, entitled “A Dream of an Anti-Chinese Riot.”
We had a dream. We saw that most horrid of horrors, a mob in their frenzy, drunk with blood and whiskey, headed by two notorious demagogues, who called upon the multitude in the name of Christianity and civilization to drive the Chinamen from San Francisco…The leaders of the mob said the day had been a splendid success…The name of the city bore a stain that never could be washed out.
It took the Burlingame Treaty between the United States and the Qing Dynasty China to give some basic protections to Chinese immigrants in 1868. However, being able to testify in court was not one of those. In 1854 in The People Vs Hall, the California Supreme Court rule that the Chinese could not testify in court against white people. This ruling was overturned in 1873, but it would be two late for the victims of what came to be known as The Night of Horrors.
On the evening of October 24 one of the San Francisco highbinders, Ah Choy, was eating on the east side of Calle de los Negros when he heard a commotion outside. He stepped out to have a look and was shot and killed by one of Yo Hing’s henchmen. A policeman, Jesus Bilderrain, with the help of other officers and some bystanders, nearly all Hispanic, rushed to the scene and arrested the gun men. As they were escorting the highbinders out of the area, the Chinese began firing on them and at each other. Bilderrain tried to capture one of the shooters and was shot in the shoulder. A civilian, Robert Thompson, rushed to the scene to assist the lawmen. As he foolishly entered one of the buildings, he was shot right above the heart.
Thompson, a rancher, had many friends, so as word of his wounding, and later death, spread throughout the area, tempers flared. Men who had personal grievances against the criminal elements of the Chinese saw their chance for revenge. The sheriff and marshal arrived and set up a guard around the alley to keep the Americans out and the Chinese in. With orders to shoot any Chinese who left the alley if they did not obey the command to halt, they left their deputies in charge. One Chinese man, Ah Wing, tried to get through the mob. He was taken into protection by the police, but the mob seized him while physically restraining the lawmen. They took him to Tomlinson’s Corral and Lumber yard. Someone ran up with a rope and a boy scurried up the frame of the corral’s wide doors to help tie the noose. Ah Wing would be the first victim on what would come to be known as the Black Tuesday.
After waiting for the Chinese to try to escape the area, the mob, believing wild rumors that the foreigners were “killing white men by the whole,” rushed one of the main buildings, the Coronel. They climbed on top and begin braking holes in the ceiling. Then they began firing down at the people inside. Someone suggested burning the Chinese out. The Chicago Fire, which had occurred two weeks earlier, was fresh on the crowd’s mind, so they brought a firehose to contain the fire. When cooler heads prevailed against burning the Chinese out, the mob instead tried to flush them out with the firehose.
By 8:45 pm, the mob, tired of waiting and enflamed by rumors of gold in the Chinese stores, tore into the alley. The police tried to control the situation and save some of the people, but the mob’s strength was too great. They hauled off men, claiming they were taking them to the jail house. Instead they took them to Tomlinson’s corral, where they hung them alongside Ah Wing. The mob used the awning of John Goller’s wagon shop as gallows, despite Mr. Goller’s pleas to the contrary. The mob hung others from a wagon tongue on Commercial Street. A Chinese doctor, Chee Long “Gene” Tong, pleaded in English that he was innocent. He was shot in the mouth and then hung. Some Chinese did fight back. A woman picked up a rifle that was dropped by one of the Americans and began firing, but the rioters cut holes in the roofs of the building and flushed her and the rest of the Chinese out. The mob was a mixture of Anglo-Saxon, Irish, German and Hispanic. Even women cheered the lynch mob on.
As with every dark moment in history, some lights of humanity shown. Some residents spoke out against the violence, but where told to shut up at the threat of their lives. Henry Hazard was even shot at, but that did not stop him from shaming some vigilantes into releasing their captive. Robert Widney organized a group which took Chinese from the mob at gun point. The policemen put the Chinese in the city jail for safety. When the mob approached, the police would say “they’re all women,” and the rioters passed on. Other residents of Los Angeles hid Chinese in their homes and stores. The Justice of Peace, William H. Gary, known for treating the Chinese fairly, hid several in his cellar.
By the time Black Tuesday was over, twenty percent of L. A.’s Chinese population was dead. None of those who were killed were members of the feuding companies. Some had only been in the town a few days. Their names were Ah Wing, Dr. Chee Long “Gene” Tong, Chang Wan Leong Quai, Ah Long, Wan Foo, Tong Won, Ah Loo Day Kee, Ah Waa, Ho Hing, Lo Hey, Ah Won, Wing Chee, Wong Chin, Johnny Burrow, Ah Cut and Wa Sin Quai.
The city fathers were embarrassed by the behavior of the citizenry. Newspapers declared to the nation that the City of Angels was a blood soaked Edan. Ten members of the mob were arrested and prosecuted. Only eight – Esteban Alvarado, Charles Austin, Refugio Botello, L. F. Crenshaw, A. R. Johnson, Jesus Martinez, Patrick M. McDonald and Louis Mendel – were convicted. All the convictions were overturned within three years due to legal technicalities.
The coming years would see a rise in racial animosity toward East Asians known as the Yellow Peril. This unfounded fear climaxed in the Page Act of 1875 which barred Chinese women and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which banned all Chinese laborers from migrating to America. Asian-Americans would experience injustice and oppression along the West Coast similar to what African-Americans faced in the Jim Crow South. They would finally receive the right to vote in 1943 with the passage of the Magnuson Act, which overturned the Exclusion Act.
Sadly, the Los Angeles massacre would not be the last instance of violence against Chinese Americans. The Hells Canyon massacre in May of 1887 left ten to thirty-four Chinese dead. The Rock Springs massacre in Wyoming which left about thirty Chinese dead. The San Francisco riot of 1877 which left four dead. The Seattle riot of 1886 which resulted in the removal of the city’s entire Chinese population. The Tacoma riot of 1885 would also end in the expulsion of the Chinese populace. And the year 1907 saw a series of anti-Asian race riots take place along the Pacific Coast.
The location of the Calle de los Negros now lies under the asphalt and concrete of the city. One of the ironies of the Chinatown Massacre is that the location of the crime is now covered by the Hollywood Freeway in the shadow of City Hall. The rest is covered by North Los Angeles Street and Union Station. Another irony is that one of the lynching locations is now in the shadow of a federal justice building. Beside from a three-square foot plaque in the sidewalk and an annual candlelight vigil, little remains to remind Angelenos of one of the most important events in the city’s history.
There has been a film, The Jade Pedant, which features the massacre. However, the film is low budget, cringy, boring and poorly acted. Worse, the massacre does not transition well into the storyline, giving it a tacked-on feeling. Based on a novel, the fictional love story is nowhere as interesting as the true one. I think there should be a movie that focuses exclusively on the victims.
I particularly believe that a movie about The Chinatown Massacre would open up possibilities for other stories from the Asian-American experience to be explored in film. From the story of the original Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker, through western settlement, to the movement for civil rights and the service of Asian-Americans in the US armed forces (See the story of Ching Lee in The Last Stand of Fox Company), there is plenty of material to draw from. There were even Chinese on both sides of the American Civil War. Hmm, how about a parody of The Last Samurai where a Chinese guy has to teach a bunch of backwoods southern folks to defend themselves against the blue clad soldiers of an industrialized central power? Like Tom Cruz’s movie, it’s kind of based on truth.
Another reason I think there needs to be a movie about the Chinatown Massacre is because Hollywood doesn’t like to confront the sins of Los Angeles like it does those of the American South and Heartland (Slavery, Jim Crow, the American Indian Wars). Besides from films about the Black Dahlia, Charles Manson and the racial tensions of the 1990s, and of course film history, a lot of Lost Angeles history hasn’t made it on to the big screen. In particular the gritty and grisly place the City of Angels was during the frontier period and 19th century has not been, with the exception of the Zorro movies, featured in any major films recently. I believe the story of Victorian Lost Angeles and the Chinese Massacre of 1871 deserves the same kind of treatment that Martin Scorsese gave New York in Gangs of New York. And even though a ending scene with the skyline changing over the course of time might seem a rip-off, I would see it as fitting since the terrible night of October 24, 1871 has vanished from memory.
So that the victims of the night of horrors will never be forgotten and the story of Chinese-Americans would become more widely known and understood, I believe that The Chinatown War by Scott Zesch should be a movie.
