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CALIFORNIA
This California town ran its Chinese residents out. Now the story is finally being told
Mary Chin stands beside a mural in downtown Eureka, Calif., depicting her late husband, Ben Chin, who was said to be the first Chinese American to move to the town in seven decades. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
BY HAILEY BRANSON-POTTSSTAFF WRITER
NOV. 12, 2022 5 AM PT
EUREKA, Calif. — Beauty drew Brieanne Mirjah D’Souza to Eureka.
In 2018, she and her husband — Michigan natives who had been living for a spell in the Bay Area — moved up to this chilly old timber town to build a life beneath the redwoods and by the sea.
But last winter, pregnant with her first child, D’Souza began reflecting on this pretty place she would bring her son into.
D’Souza, a 32-year-old digital marketer, is of Chinese and West Indian descent. And Humboldt County is very white.
As D’Souza’s belly grew and the headlines told of a dramatic surge in anti-Asian hate crimes amid the COVID-19 pandemic, D’Souza set out to find other people who looked like her.
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A fledgling group started meeting over Zoom and trading emails. They learned there had once been a Chinatown in Eureka. Maybe they could commemorate it with a plaque, they figured.
But where had it gone?
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In the late 19th century, Chinatown occupied a single block in the middle of the remote, misty port town.
A historical photo is held up at the corner of 4th and E Streets in Eureka during a guided tour of the city’s old Chinatown, which stood on the right in both images. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
A few hundred Asian immigrants — mostly men — lived in Eureka after a federal law barred immigration from China in 1882.
They toiled in redwood logging camps, laundries and restaurants. They were nannies and household servants and vegetable growers. They were former gold prospectors priced out of the work because of a predatory state tax on foreign miners.
When the economy soured in the 1880s, white people blamed them, claiming they stole jobs. Newspapers whipped up anti-Chinese sentiment.
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“There were a lot of stereotypes: that Chinese people were diseased, they were morally corrupt, they would not assimilate to the rest of American society at the time,” said Katie Buesch, a former director and curator at the Clarke Historical Museum in Eureka.
That sentiment was par for the course in the Golden State at the time.
Some California city officials are now acknowledging the ugly past — a counter-movement to red-state politicians pushing to ban books and limit the teaching of history that involves race.
Antioch and San Jose apologized last year for burning their Chinatowns in the late 1800s. San Francisco apologized for barring Chinese children from public schools.
Los Angeles is working on a memorial to commemorate an 1871 massacre in which at least 18 Chinese people were fatally shot or hanged. And in Pacific Grove earlier this year, organizers canceled a pageant that had long featured performers in yellowface.
In Humboldt County, Buesch, who had put together a small museum exhibit on Eureka’s Chinese community just before the pandemic, was struck by an 1885 article in the Daily Times-Telephone newspaper about Chinatown.
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“The time has come when these plague spots should be removed,” the newspaper wrote.
On Feb. 5, 1885, the newspaper, which called the Chinese neighborhood a violent, drug-addled “leper’s colony,” wrote that it would probably be “goodbye to Chinatown” if an “unoffending white man” were killed there.
A Chinese vegetable merchant carries his goods in Eureka before the Chinese expulsion in 1885.(Courtesy of Jean Pfaelzer)
The very next day, a white Eureka city councilman who lived near Chinatown was walking past. Shots rang out between what is said to be two Chinese men, although details are scant. A stray bullet killed the councilman.
An angry mob of more than 600 white people — loggers, fishermen, miners and merchants — filled the streets, said Jean Pfaelzer, author of “Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans.”
A gallows was erected. An effigy of a Chinese man swung from a noose.
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Someone suggested slaughtering the Chinese, but that was deemed un-Christian, Pfaelzer said. Others said they should burn Chinatown, but its scrap wood buildings belonged to a white man, since the Chinese were not allowed to own property.
They instead appointed a committee of 15 men to go into Chinatown and order everyone to leave. The sheriff commissioned wagons to gather their belongings. Armed vigilantes roamed on horseback.
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According the the Clarke Museum website, a group of Chinese and Japanese people were secretly brought in to work in a local cannery but were expelled after being found out. They were sent by barge to an island in Humboldt Bay before catching a ship back to Washington. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The next morning, about 300 Chinese people were marched to the wharf and eventually loaded onto two steamships: The Humboldt and The City of Chester.
They were shipped to San Francisco, where no one knew they were coming, Pfaelzer said. They disembarked and fled.
A few dozen sued the city of Eureka, but a judge tossed out their lawsuit.
The purge, which became known as the “Eureka method,” was copied in other towns across California and hailed by white people as nonviolent.
By 1890, the business directory for Humboldt County was boasting that it was “the only county in the state containing no Chinamen.” A Eureka law, in effect until the mid-20th century, banned Chinese people from working in the city.
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Eureka’s Chinatown consisted of one square block, bottom center, in what is now the city’s downtown. The city forced expelled its Chinese residents in 1885 after the shooting death of a white city councilman. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
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In the spring of 2021, a gunman killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, at three Atlanta-area spas.
The shootings sparked an outpouring of activism and calls to #StopAsianHate. They followed months of heightened attacks on Asian Americans amid a political climate in which then-President Trump was calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu.”
Around that time, D’Souza had set up an Instagram account she called APA Humboldt.
D’Souza quickly heard from a local group of Asian Americans who had organized a series of Japanese taiko drum performances before the pandemic.
They began meeting virtually. Their numbers grew. There was a real hunger for community in this county where only 3% of the population is Asian or Pacific Islander.
The group delved into local history, poring through legal briefs, census data, letters, maps and journals to piece together the little-known story of Eureka’s Chinatown, which had been told mostly from a white perspective.
“We all had an awakening of sorts,” D’Souza said. “There was no awareness that there was once a thriving Chinese community here … and they faced the same kind of discrimination and racism that we’re still facing today.”
D’Souza figured they would install a plaque before her baby came, and that would be that.
Eureka’s Chinatown, pictured in the late 19th century.(Courtesy of Jean Pfaelzer)
But what became known as the Eureka Chinatown Project — the work of the group now called Humboldt Asians & Pacific Islanders in Solidarity — blossomed.
With support from the city, they erected signs describing the expulsion in Historic Chinatown — which, today, is a downtown business district with banks, parking lots and no trace of the neighborhood that once stood.
There are plans for a monument.
And — with a mural and a renamed roadway — the Eureka Chinatown Project honored two local Chinese American pioneers whose legacies were too little known.
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Read the complete article at the link.
We can’t build for a better future on the positive foundations of America without honestly acknowledging, discussing, and addressing the racism and injustices of the past. The GOP “history deniers” are hamstringing our nation!
You can trace today’s rise in anti-Asian-American hate crimes, anti-Asian racial slurs from a former President, and snarky “anti-woke proclamations” from DeSantis directly to the ugliest truths about America’s past.
And, just because the latter can speak in complete sentences doesn’t mean that he isn’t just as dangerous to democracy and unsuited to public office as Donald Trump! White Nationalist theocracy and lies are bad for our country no matter who utters them.
DeSantis’s self-proclaimed “Red Florida Paradise” also relies on the hard work of migrants, many of them undocumented, and some other charitable out of state benefactors to literally remain above water: Joe Biden, Democrats, and lots of “Blue State taxpayers:”
