Racial reckoning: California city apologizes for burning down its Chinatown

First U.S. city to formally apologize for its past treatment of Chinese residents

Antioch's downtown once was the site for a Chinatown.

A California city formally apologized for its racist treatment of early Chinese residents during a period known as "The Driving Out," that included a district once known as Chinatown.

Acknowledging the wrongs Antioch’s early residents inflicted against Chinese Americans, Mayor Lamar Thorpe on May 19 issued an apology and introduced a series of proposals to make amends. “We’re in the middle of a national awakening that has been spun out of anti-Asian American and Pacific Islander hate,” Thorpe said in downtown Waldie Plaza, where the California city's Chinatown once stood.

“I think we will be the first city, not only in the Bay Area, in California, but throughout the United States, to officially apologize for the misdeeds and mistreatment of the Chinese,” Thorpe said at a news conference, according to East Bay Times. “And so this is, this is no small thing that we’re doing here today. This is a big deal.”

After the 1849 Gold Rush attracted fortune hunters from around the world, many miners stopped in Antioch, located in the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta enroute to the Sierra Nevada foothills where gold was discovered.

Chinese entrepreneurs set up shop along the waterfront, feeding and supplying the 49ers heading upriver to the goldfields. The Chinese who made Antioch their home  lived in hotels, homes and houseboats along the river. 

After the initial rush to find gold died down, many Chinese remained in the area to work on the railroads and built the river levees that created one of the richest agricultural regions in the country. 

SCREEN CAPTURE / KTVU

Antioch Mayor Lamar Thorpe, right, presents the apology resolution to Andrew Li,
president of the Contra Costa Community College Board.

The boundaries of Antioch's Chinatown were created by white leaders and landowners who didn't want the Chinese as neighbors.

The years following the Gold Rush, no immigrant group was as loathed as the Chinese. That hatred became endemic to California, planted and stocked by politicians, city leaders and the media. Their xenophobic talking points will sound familiar today: outrage over “low skill” laborers taking jobs from white people, complaints that Chinese people failed to integrate into American society (while simultaneously barring them from schools, social gathering places and even public streets) and accusations of “an invasion.”

This period, 1850-1870, in Antioch and in most of the country became known as “The Driving Out,” with the forced removals of Chinese immigrants from cities throughout the West Coast and Honolulu. 

During this time, Antioch became a so-called sundown town in which Chinese residents were barred from walking city streets after sunset.

To avoid the restrictive local laws, the Chinese residents built a series of sturdy, brick-lined tunnels connecting the businesses and residences so that business could continue after nightfall.

"The citizens of Antioch have been endeavoring to rid themselves of the Chinese for some time,” the Sacramento Bee wrote in the spring of 1876.

The final straw came on April 29, 1876, when a local doctor announced that the source of venereal disease contracted by several white men were the Chinese women downtown.

An angry mob formed going door-to-door in Chinatown telling Chinese residents to leave the town by 3 p.m. or suffer the consequences. No exceptions, the mob declared. Children, old, men, women, healthy and  the infirmed had just hours to pack up and depart via the ferries that plied the waters, connecting San Francisco to Sacramento and Stockton.

By the 1870s, California had moved from local ordinances, like Antioch’s street ban, to creating entire anti-Chinese political parties. San Franciscan Denis Kearney, (Ironically, one of San Francisco's main streets is named after him) himself an immigrant from Ireland, formed the Workingmen’s Party of California. Its stated goal was to eradicate Chinese workers and its infamous slogan was: “The Chinese must go!” 

The state constitution ratified in 1879 had only one article that addressed a racial or ethnic group. Entitled “CHINESE,” it banned corporations from hiring “Chinese or Mongolian” people and specified "no Chinese shall be employed on any State, county, municipal, or other public work, except in punishment for crime." Three years later, the infamous federal Chinese Exclusion Act banned immigrants coming from China.

The Sunday after Antioch's Chinese residents were driven out of town, a rumor began to spread that the Chinese had returned.

By 8 p.m. that day, the area known as Chinatown was set on fire. The firemen did little to stop the blaze, using their equipment only to protect the nearby white-owned businesses and residences.

"[T]he story of Chinese immigrants and the dehumanizing atrocities committed against them should not be purged from or minimized in the telling of Antioch’s history," the city said in its resolution.

The city also said it "must acknowledge that the legacy of early Chinese immigrants and xenophobia are part of our collective consciousness that helps contribute to the current anti-Asian-American and Pacific Islander hate."

A plaque recognizing Antioch's past treatment of its Chinese residents is missing.

Antioch Mayor Thorpe said he would create a historical district designating the location and history of Antioch's old Chinatown. “These histories help inform who we are today and avoid mistakes of the past,” said Thorpe.

A bronze plaque recognizing Antioch's history with its Chinese residents from the Joaquin Murrieta Chapter of E Clampus Vitus, a fraternal organization, has been lost to time.

Now a city of over 100,000, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up about 10% of Antioch's population, attracted to the new homes being built, warm climate and accessibility to the urban core of the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Some may say that what happened in the past has no effect on who we are today,” said Joy Motts of the Rivertown Preservation Society. “We believe this to be incorrect. And that, to the contrary, to not acknowledge the wrongs or intolerances of yesterday can only make it more plausible that they happen again.”

“Chinese and Asian residents who were so instrumental in building our community and communities of the Bay Area in the state of California.” Dwayne Eubanks, president of the Antioch Historical Society, who spoke in favor of the resolution. “History matters,” he said.