The expulsion of Tacoma's Chinese community
3 November 1885Tacoma's Chinese quarter, Little Jerusalem, Pierce County, WA
Tacoma's mayor and leading citizens marched the city's Chinese residents out of town at gunpoint and burned their homes. The organisers called it the Tacoma method, and other cities copied it.
On 3 November 1885 a committee of Tacoma's leading men - led by Mayor Jacob Weisbach, with the sheriff, the city attorney and local businessmen among them - went house to house through the Chinese quarter and ordered the city's roughly 200 Chinese residents to leave. A crowd of several hundred white residents drove them on foot through cold rain to the Lake View railway junction, loading their belongings onto wagons.
The people expelled waited overnight in the open at Lake View; at least two died in the following days. Their houses and shops in Tacoma were burned within the week, so there was nothing to come back to. The whole operation was carried out openly, by the city's own officials, and was celebrated locally as the "Tacoma method" - an expulsion presented as orderly civic action rather than a riot.
Federal grand jury indictments against the organisers collapsed; the mayor and his committee faced no consequences, and several were re-elected. Tacoma's expulsion came in the same months as the Rock Springs massacre and the drive against Chinese residents in Seattle, three years after the Chinese Exclusion Act made Chinese immigrants the first group barred from the United States by race.
Sources
- Tacoma expels the entire Chinese community on November 3, 1885HistoryLink.org, Washington State history encyclopediahistorylink.org
- Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese AmericansRandom House (2007)Jean Pfaelzer's study of the expulsions and massacres of Chinese communities across the American West.