Los Angeles, the City of Angels has a storied history. While today it is the
second largest city in the United States with a population of nearly 4 million,
in 1870 its population was just five thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight. And according
to the United States Census Bureau of those 179 were Chinese. Chinese immigration to the
United States began in earnest during the California Gold Rush but the clash between
people who had a different appearance and a different culture always resulted in racial
tension. And one terrible night in 1871 those racial tensions boiled over into what was at
the time called Black Tuesday, or the Night of Horrors, but what today is usually called,
the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre. And the victims of that massacre deserved to be remembered.
Early Chinese immigration to the United States began with maritime trade, but the first great
wave began in the middle of the nineteenth century as Chinese immigrants came to work
in the California Gold Fields or building the Transcontinental Railroad. Many were seeking
a better life with higher wages to either send back to the extended families they left behind
in China, or to take back with them when they returned home. Some were seeking to escape
the violence of the bloody Taiping Rebellion. In 1848, the US census showed a total of 325 Chinese
Americans, in 1880, that number was 300,000. By the 1860s there was a significant Chinese minority
living in the frontier city called Los Angeles, and many Chinese families lived on a street called
Calle de los Negros. Calle de los Negros, in Los Angeles's former Chinatown district,
was originally named for the Spanish men who frequented the street. The colloquial English
version of the street name, which can be viewed on some of the city's older maps,
is a racial slur. In 1871 it was lined with shops, saloons, brothels and even a doctor's
office. Though the street itself was only 500 feet long, it had a large reputation for violence.
A Los Angeles Times article talking about the history of the street published in 1898
said that the Calle de los Negros had been “the wickedest street on earth.”
But it wasn't always such a dark destination and had seen better days. The street was once home
to wealthy California families, the remains of the Spanish landowners in California. Los
Angeles itself was a rough-and-tumble western city. For example, the first publicly funded
building constructed in the city of Los Angeles was a jail. It also smelled. The ditches around
the city served as multi-purpose latrines, laundry areas, and wallows for hogs. The Los Angeles News
wrote about the conditions in the city in October 1869, “Dead dogs and cats, with rotten fruit,
slops and decaying vegetables lie promiscuously about, and pass undisturbed through the successive
stages of decomposition. Making a picture of supreme nastiness.” The dirt roads that lined
the city could turn into swamps after rainstorms in which travelers could sink into mud up to 2
feet deep. And Los Angeles could be a dangerous and violent place. In the 1850s the city had a
homicide rate of 12.4 per thousand people, still the record for the highest per capita homicide
rate in US history. There was an average of a murder a day and the killings largely took
place around the gambling dens and saloons of the Calle de los Negros, often driven by long-standing
grudges or gambling disputes. It didn't help matters that the Los Angeles Police Department was
incredibly small. When it was first established as a paid, rather than a volunteer force in 1869,
the department consisted of only six men, for a violent city of roughly 6,000 people.
Perhaps because of the small number of police officers, California generally
had a history of vigilante justice. Committees would form to take matters into their own hands,
and those committees could often turn into mobs. As they did the night of October 24th 1871.
That night police officer Jesus Bilderrain heard shots coming from the Calle de los Negros. He
and his partner, Esteban Sanchez jumped on their horses and rode to the dispute. They
discovered five or six Chinese men firing at one another in the street. Bilderrain tried to break
up the fight but then the duelists turned their pistols on him and he was shot in the shoulder.
Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles were often members of social groups called the Huiguan,
commonly called companies in the newspapers at the time, although that translation is
not exactly correct. Huiguan were social groups formed to help Chinese immigrants in their new
lives in America. Members would sign up for the Huiguan based on the location they immigrated
from in China. These groups would help with everything from finding their members jobs,
to offering loans and helping care for the sick. If the person died,
the Huiguan would help transport the member's body back to his or her family in China.
The violence started in the Calle de los Negros that evening because of a fight between two
Chinese men who were members of different Huiguan who developed a feud. The feud had become so
heated that one merchant said that the local Chinese residence, numbering only around 200,
had purchased between forty and fifty pistols from his store in the weeks before the shootout. The
noise had alerted other citizens of Los Angeles to the fight and they gathered around the Calle de
los Negros to see if they could lend assistance. Robert Thompson, a former saloon owner,
was among the crowd. Someone yelled, “The Chinamen have shot Bilderrain!” Thompson drew his gun and
approached one of the shops where some of the shots were coming from. As he fired into the
open doorway a shot came from those within and struck him above the heart. Eyewitnesses later
said that Thompson choked out, “I'm killed.” He eventually bled to death hours later,
but the shooting of Thompson and Bilderrain changed the mood of the watching crowd. A mob of
an estimated 500 people of different nationalities attacked the Chinese living in the city.
The general public opinion was driven by resentment and distrust of Chinese
immigrants. While often portrayed as a working class complaint over jobs,
the hatred towards the Chinese was a thinly veiled racism against the people who were hated largely
because their ways and culture were different. Newspapers supported the racist attitudes and Los
Angelenos blamed the Calle de los Negros for crime in their city. It did not take much to
incite a mob against the residents there. Between the sheriff, city marshal and police officers,
there were only nine lawmen available that night to control the crowd. They deputized
some of the citizens and ordered everyone to keep the Chinese from leaving the Calle de los Negros,
particularly the Coronel apartments, named after their owner of former Los Alamos mayor
and California State Treasurer Antonia F. Coronel. You wouldn't call the Coronel apartments a nice
place to live. Chinese immigrants who lived on the Calle de los Negros in the Coronel
adobe apartments lived there because it was all they could afford. The men who
had started the gunfight in the street fled the scene and the inflamed mob descended on
the innocent Chinese families, some of whom were sitting down to dinner in the Coronel.
When the mob couldn't get to the people in the Adobe building they climbed up down the roof
and dug holes to where they could shoot down at their helpless victims. One man,
a man named Ah Wing panicked and tried to run away. The mob
ran him down and lynched him from the gate of a lumberyard.
Meanwhile back in the Calle de los Negros the mob had grown impatient, there was talk of setting
fire to burn the Cornell to the ground, but that idea was set aside. Only two weeks before that
night the city of Chicago had experienced a devastating fire that had burned out of
control and destroyed a large part of the city, Los Angeles did not want to suffer the same fate.
Using a large stone, the mob eventually broke down the doors and went through the building apartment
by apartment, dragging the Chinese people out into the street. The violence and brutality was
terrible. One of the victims was Dr. Chee Tong, who was a popular Chinese physician. Dr. Tong
swore to the crowd he had nothing to do with the earlier gunfight, and promised to give his
life savings to the mob if they let him go. They shot him through the mouth and then hanged him.
Eyewitnesses to the violence claimed men were pouring into the Calle de los Negros from the
suburbs of Los Angeles bearing rifles, shotguns, and pistols. In some quarters the mood was almost
a celebration, with one man dancing as he pulled the rope. Another report had a young
boy clamoring for more victims while helping the older man pull the innocent ones to their death.
Three of the victims, two men and a Chinese boy of only 15 years old, who were returning from their
jobs to their homes in the Calle de los Negros when they were caught by the mob. They didn't
even know a shooting had taken place when they were lynched from an awning outside of a wagon
shop. While the killings were going on looters ransacked the homes and shops of the Calle de los
Negros. There was a rumor that one of the shops contained a chest full of gold. That was untrue,
but looters ripped through possessions in a fury trying to discover it. When the evening was over
nearly 10 percent of Los Angeles's Chinese population was shot to death or lynched.
Experts argue that the more than 18 people who were killed in the 1871 riots and lynchings were
killed largely because they didn't have a voice being marginalized members of society. Chillingly,
members of the mob seemed to think that the violence against the Chinese was fun. To be fair,
not everybody in Los Angeles participated in the riots. Some tried to shame the mob into stopping,
and others hid Chinese people in their homes to keep them safe. One man named
William H. Gray hid several people in his home, and he said for years
thereafter he would receive anonymous gifts and thanks for what he had done.
Despite the killing, no charges of murder were brought. Nine men were eventually
tried and found guilty of manslaughter for their roles in the lynchings and murders,
and sentenced in between two and six years,
but their sentences were eventually overturned by the California Supreme Court on a technicality.
When news of the Night of Horrors was published in newspapers in places like New York and Chicago,
it was the first time that many of the citizens of those cities had ever
heard of the tiny city of Los Angeles. Editorials skewered the city saying,
“There was nothing angelic about it.” City leaders were so embarrassed by the publicity
that they took steps to implement effective law and order, and among those steps in 1877 was to
rename the infamous Calle de los Negros, calling it instead, Los Angeles Street.
The massacre in Los Angeles took place more than ten years before the Chinese Exclusion
Act of 1882, a federal law that prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers. This law was
one of the first restrictive immigration into the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act
highlighted racial tensions at the time, and would not be repealed until the 1960s.
The exact number of people killed by the mob that night is still unknown. After an
initial burial in the United States the bodies of the victims were returned to their families
in China. The cemetery where they were initially buried doesn't exist anymore,
many of their names are lost to history. And the tensions that can turn a crowd into a mob
still exist today. The city of Los Angeles has a long history of racial violence. 34 people
were killed in race riots in Los Angeles in 1965, and another 62 were killed in race riots in 1992.
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