This Day in Labor History: September 4, 1907
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On September 4, 1907, about 500 white working men in Bellingham, Washington rioted against the arrival of Punjabi laborers in their border town. They wanted to round them up and drive them out of town, mostly succeeding in their goal. Part of the larger history of anti-Asian violence among west coast workers, the Bellingham riot was unusual in that it was targeted against people from India. But it fits very firmly in the history of grotesque violence toward people of color on the west coast that defined working class identity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
From the moment white workers arrived on the west coast, they wanted this to be a white man’s nation. That began with the California gold rush in the late 1840s and the violence that followed to cleanse the area of Chinese and Mexican workers. That didn’t entirely succeed, but both groups were placed into the lowest class of work possible. That did stop the white supremacy of west coast workers though. There was so much outrage about using Chinese workers to build the railroads and do other grunt work after the Civil War that the movement toward the Chinese Exclusion Act rose among working class whites in California. The Chinese Exclusion Act became the first major law in American history that came out of the labor movement. But it did not take long for animus toward Asian workers to be turned toward the Japanese too. There were smaller groups of Koreans and then Filipinos who could be targeted by white workers as well. This was not only in California either. There was plenty of anti-Asian violence in both Oregon and Washington that gets less attention and it was almost always driven by the working class, such as an anti-Chinese riot in Seattle in 1886.
There wasn’t a lot of migration from India to the United States, for the obvious reason that it made more sense for migrants from there to stay in the British commonwealth. That meant there was a good bit of migration to Canada. So it’s not that surprising that a few people would eventually decide to cross the border and give their lives a shot there. Mostly these were men from the Punjab, who were migrating south in order to work in timber camps or railroads.
Bellingham, Washington was a growing town just over the border from British Columbia. Like the rest of the Puget Sound, it was mostly a lumber town, with some fishing. And like the rest of the Northwest, it had a strong anti-Asian bias. So when a few hundred migrants started showing up in Bellingham to work in the timber mills, mostly staying in cheap bunkhouses, whites quickly organized to kick them out. It didn’t take much. With the Chinese “threat” mostly mitigated by 1907, whites there already had something called the Japanese-Korean Exclusion League that was dedicated to “to guard the gateway of Occidental Civilization [West Coast] against Oriental invasion.” Subtle.
On September 2, 1907, about 1,000 white union members marched through the streets of Bellingham to demand the exclusion of all Indians from Bellingham by noon on September 4. But nearly all the Indians still showed up to work on September 3, so it did not have the immediate effect desired. which was to scare them out of town. Thus, on September 4, whites moved to the next stage, which was violence. The newspapers had heated everyone up the day before. For example, the Bellingham Herald stated, ““The Hindu is not a good citizen. “It would require centuries to assimilate him, and this country need not take the trouble. Our racial burdens are already heavy enough to bear.”
That day, whites started rounding up South Asians and driving them out of town. That was about 125 people driven out and back toward Canada. But about 100 found safety in the city jail. Law enforcement, no doubt backed by the timber companies who hired these cheap workers, did step up to provide a safe place. Lots of people had their property destroyed. Evidently, no one was killed, though according to one report, six people, all from India, were hospitalized. Five whites were arrested, but none of them faced any charges. Even without outright murder, there is no way that a jury in that place and time would have convicted a white man on this.
Now, the riots did not get rid of all Asian workers in Bellingham. They did not completely flee, by and large, though undoubtedly, some did. A mass meeting of whites tried to build on this. They changed the name of their Japanese-Korean Exclusion League to become the Asiatic Exclusion League. Have to keep up with the latest in hate after all. Said a leader in the anti-Asian movement named A.E. Fowler, our
“program is that every Asiatic must be excluded and we’re not going to quit till we get the whole cheese… The proper thing to do is to stop the immigration of these undesirables right now, stop it right and stop it for all times… [U]ntold justice is being worked when the yellow coolies and immoral Japanese women are imported to prey upon American society.”
Nearly no whites in the United States really condemned this violence. It just added to the overall anti-immigrant feeling that led to the Immigration Act of 1924, wholeheartedly supported by the American Federation of Labor of course. But hey, it’s a good thing that we have gotten over our anti-immigration hysteria in this country and would never again round up and commit violence against immigrants seeking a better life through working jobs no one else wants. Nope, not a problem today……
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