October 24, 1871: As it frequently did in the 19th Century, especially in California, the specter of anti-Asian bigotry rears its head. After hearing (it remains unknown if it was true) that Chinese men had killed a rancher and shot a policeman, a mob of around 500 people walked into Chinatown in Los Angeles, attacking, robbing and killing Chinese immigrants. They were shot, and, regardless of whether they were already dead, hanged. The number varies, between 17 and 20.
Although Northeastern cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Boston have "Chinatowns," the West Coast of North America, due to also being on the Pacific Ocean, has always had more people of Asian descent. Los Angeles developed a Chinatown, a Little Tokyo, a Koreatown, a Historic Filipinotown, and a Little Saigon. San Francisco has, outside of New York, America's best-known Chinatown. And in Canada, Vancouver is said to be the most Asian city in the Western Hemisphere.
Chinese immigrants were hired by rich men in the American West, especially railroad barons, as cheap labor, which led to other cheap things becoming known as "Chinese." As late as 1958, the mesh screen that tried to prevent easy home runs from going over the too-close left-field fence at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where the Los Angeles Dodgers played before Dodger Stadium was built, was nicknamed "The Chinese Wall," and the balls hit over it "Chinese home runs."
And, of course, being Asian, and thus "yellow," Chinese immigrants were not "white," and faced racial discrimination. They were thought of as dumb, lazy, and ineffective -- despite being used as cheap labor. Someone who didn't have much of a chance of getting something done was said to "not have a Chinaman's chance."
In spite of this, the National Hockey League, the Canadian Football League, and the England national football (soccer) team each had a Chinese player before they had a black player.
As a result of the discrimination, like other ethnic groups, the Chinese developed their own protection groups, which became gangs involved in organized crime. In their case, they were called "tongs." As with most cities, there was not one dominant gang, but multiple gangs.
And in 1871 in Los Angeles, rumor got around that a white policeman and a white rancher had been killed as a result of an inter-tong fight. As would be the case in the race riots of the 1960s, the rumor spread that it was done on purpose, and representatives of the group whose native son was killed retaliated.
The sad part is, of the 500 people who attacked the residents of Chinatown, not all of them were white: For once, the whites and the Hispanics teamed up. To make matters worse, the street in Chinatown where most of the attacks took place was named Calle de los Negros -- "Negro Alley." Chinese men, including boys, were hanged. It has been called the largest mass lynching in American history.
Eight men were convicted of manslaughter, but these convictions were overturned on appeal, due to what Wikipedia calls "technicalities," but does not elaborate. And, like many other racist incidents in American history, this one got buried, before being uncovered by activists over a century later. Many other such racial attacks got covered up for decades, most notably the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921.
Roy Bean, the famed Texas judge who called himself "the only law west of the Pecos," was alleged to have said, "I see in this book that it's against the law to kill a man, but it doesn't say it's against the law to kill a Chinaman."
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October 24, 1871 was a Tuesday. There were no scores on this historic day: Baseball season was over, college football and ice hockey barely existed, and basketball wouldn't be invented for another 20 years.
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