Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans

[Sequoia]

by Jean Pfaelzer



The brutal and systematic “ethnic cleansing” of Chinese Americans in California and the Pacific Northwest in the second half of the nineteenth century is a shocking–and virtually unexplored–chapter of American history. Driven Out unearths this forgotten episode in our nation’s past. Drawing on years of groundbreaking research, Jean Pfaelzer reveals how, beginning in 1848, lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians purged dozens of communities of thousands of Chinese residents–and how the victims bravely fought back.
In town after town, as races and classes were pitted against one another in the raw and anarchistic West, Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and field workers, prostitutes and merchants’ wives, were gathered up at gunpoint and marched out of town, sometimes thrown into railroad cars along the very tracks they had built.

Here, in vivid detail, are unforgettable incidents such as the torching of the Chinatown in Antioch, California, after Chinese prostitutes were accused of giving seven young men syphilis, and a series of lynchings in Los Angeles bizarrely provoked by a Chinese wedding. From the port of Seattle to the mining towns in California’s Siskiyou Mountains to “Nigger Alley” in Los Angeles, the first Chinese Americans were hanged, purged, and banished. Chinatowns across the West were burned to the ground.

But the Chinese fought back: They filed the first lawsuits for reparations in the United States, sued for the restoration of their property, prosecuted white vigilantes, demanded the right to own land, and, years before Brown v. Board of Education, won access to public education for their children. Chinese Americans organized strikes and vegetable boycotts in order to starve out towns that tried to expel them. They ordered arms from China and, with Winchester rifles and Colt revolvers, defended themselves. In 1893, more than 100,000 Chinese Americans refused the government’s order to wear photo identity cards to prove their legal status–the largest mass civil disobedience in United States history to that point.

amazon.com

This is some book, wow!! I had to put it down for a while it's so overwhelming. I found towns that I live in who were a great part of this but Eureka was about the worst in California. The Gold Rush was not good for this country, not one bit! Creepy racists from the east came to California and brought their hate with them. And those "poor persecuted Irish" who came to CA where about the worst instigators of them all.

[ewoden]

1. And their revenge is Harbor Freight and WallMart

[Warpy]

2. The Irish were poor and persecuted

and had the shit kicked out of them back east. Every successive wave of immigrants get the shit kicked out of them. Look at how people feel about Mexicans.

However, the Chinese also faced racial bigotry. The war against them was much worse and aided by a government that allowed male workers but didn't allow them to bring their wives. They wanted to use them up and send them back.

[Sequoia]

3. But they don't feel the racial hatred that Jews, Blacks, Mexicans, Islams, and Asains still face.

Hell no, they've joined the Minute Men and are sitting by the Border on deck chairs swilling Budweiser.

[Warpy]

4. There are still vestiges of it

that are expressed as anti Catholic hate more than the old anti Irish hate.

But yes, some have fully adopted the prejudices of their former tormentors.