The 1871 Anti-Chinese massacre in Los Angeles, and Anti-Asian American antipathies during the COVID-19 pandemic

Aim: This paper examines the 1871 massacre against the Chinese people in Los Angeles, leading us to reconsider that massacre and relate it to the numerous hate crimes committed against Asian Americans today. Methods: The methods used were historical research and analysis of the social, cultural, and political contexts of the Asian Massacre in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Results: Overall, the 1871 Anti-Chinese Massacre was a devastating event that resulted in multiple deaths. It provides a useful lens for comparing current acts of racism against Asians since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Conclusions: The United States has a long history of racist ideologies that have pushed social and political agendas to maintain power. From the grand jury ’ s failure to punish the murderers involved in the 1871 Chinese Massacre to political leaders posting racist tweets on social media in 2020, it is important to remember that hatred will always seek a public platform from which to spread. Nurses and in key positions to keep this from happening.

For months, officials at the highest levels of the United States government referred to the global Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID- 19), as the "China virus," and "Kung Flu." 1 This baseless claim evokes an earlier attack in 1871 against the Chinese people in Los Angeles, leading us to reconsider that massacre and relate it to the numerous hate crimes committed against Asian Americans today. A reexamination of the Anti-Chinese massacre of 1871 seems especially relevant at the time of this writing, the spring of 2021, because it is a critical point during the COVID-19 pandemic that has spread around the world. Once again, the Asian American and Pacific Islander community is being blamed. The March 2021 Atlanta murder of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, is a recent example. Indeed, the United States is no stranger to racism or placing blame on others for disasters, as evidenced by the fact that the 1918 Influenza epidemic is still commonly called the "Spanish Influenza." As such, it is no surprise that the spread of the coronavirus also spread hatred towards Chinese Americans and Asian Americans in general. Hate crimes including verbal harassment, shunning, physical assault, and civil rights violations all increased in 2020 to a degree that an organization called Stop Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Hate was created to track and respond to these crimes. 2 Significantly, on May 20, 2021, United States President Joseph R. Biden signed the Anti-Asian Hate Law. 3 also described the perpetrators: an "Irish shoemaker known as 'Crazy Johnson, who stood guard;' and men of Mexican descent led by Jesus Martinez, who, with others, cut a hole in the roof of the building where Chinese inhabitants were hiding and shot them. 4 In 1883, another newspaper reporter from the Los Angeles Daily Times, in "A Reminiscence," described anonymous mounds buried behind the area where the massacre occurred. The riot had been forgotten by then. Yet he quoted an older resident who recalled the mob attack that had occurred twelve years earlier: "The difficulty arose from a quarrel between two Chinamen," fired on or hanged by "motley Mexican, American and European population[s]" who "for a long time had cherished the worst feelings towards the encroaching Mongolians" [italics original]. 5 In the aftermath, nineteen people of Chinese descent living in Los Angeles were either lynched or shot. According to Victor Jew, this killing should be called the "Anti-Chinese Massacre," which is the term used in this article. 6 Then in 1894, C. P. Dorland wrote again about the massacre, this time in the Historical Society of Southern California. He began by stating, "The trouble originated among the Chinese themselves." He described the grisly scene that followed: About 9 o'clock a party battered in the eastern end of the building, and with hooting and yelling and firing of pistols, the rioters rushed in and found huddled in corners or hidden behind boxes, eight terror-stricken Chinamen, who, in vain, pleaded piteously for their lives. They were violently dragged out and turned over to the infuriated mob. 7 Dorland referred to it as "a recital of one of the most bloody and barbarous tragedies in the annals of this state." 8 In 1870, Los Angeles had a total population of just under 6,000, one hundred and seventy-two of whom were Chinese. This information is even more disturbing when compared to the fact that the mob who attacked the Chinese numbered somewhere around 500 people, more than twice the population of their target. 9 Jew notes that accounts of remembering the massacre as one "caused by Chinese wrongdoing were themselves woven with anxieties about the Chinese," which had begun in the 1860s and escalated in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. 10 The road to the Anti-Chinese massacre in 1871 began when the United States and China concluded the Burlingame-Seward Treaty in 1868, which aimed to ease immigration restrictions. While the United States wanted access to profitable trading in China's ports, leaders promised the Chinese the right to free travel in the United States, thereby encouraging Chinese immigration and giving China a most-favored nation status. 11 The success of the treaty was short-lived, however, as anti-Chinese sentiment soon erupted.
According to reports written in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, the Anti-Chinese massacre was instigated by an argument between two Chinese companies that were trying to obtain possession of a highly valued young woman who was thought to belong to one of them and stolen by the other. On October 23, 1871, one company member was shot while walking down the Calle de los Negros in the Coronel Adobe part of town, and although he was not killed, the shooting led to both company leaders calling for a major conflict. On the evening of October 24, at 5:30 p.m., a police officer by the name of Jesus Bilderrain heard gunfire coming from the Calle, went to investigate, and ended up calling in backup. 12 The vigilantism that resulted, as people took the law into their own hands, was typical of the violence in the region, based on values of personal self-redress and individualism that had emerged in the Western frontier since before the Civil War. In particular, white fears of job competition had spurred a virulent anti-Chinese movement. The 1871 Los Angeles Anti-Chinese Massacre was one of many over the years. 13 During the ensuing altercation on the Calle de los Negros, multiple police officers and others responded, and a white civilian named Robert Thompson was wounded. He was taken to the nearest place for first aid, Dr. Theodore Wollweber's drug store on Main Street, where he died an hour later. The death of Thompson spurred a mob to attack the Chinese in force, who at that point had barricaded themselves in a large building. Two Chinese men were captured and killed as they tried to escape the attackers, and seventeen more were killed or hanged once the mob broke into the building where the Chinese had tried to hide. One casualty was a Chinese doctor, Chee Long Tong, who was hanged. The angry crowd also looted several thousand dollars. Dorland describes Sheriff Burns joining the crowd and calling for "all good and law-abiding citizens to follow him to Chinatown," where they found the horrific effects of the lynchings and killings. Other sources relate how Judge Robert Widney walked through the streets trying to restore order. 14 In the end, a grand jury judged the cases brought about by the massacre and condemned the inefficiency of the police and the actions of all those involved in murdering innocent civilians. Paul M. De Falla notes that the names of "the perpetrators who seemed to encourage the mob [were]not published by the newspapers+ .In fact, this list seems to have completely disappeared, and is not known to exist today." 15 In 1872, in Judge Robert Widney's court, nine of the accused received convictions of manslaughter and sentences of two to six years of jail time each. Yet the state supreme court reversed the order on a technicality, and Widney released them in 1873. While the massacre was brutal, the retreat of law also occurred in the face of racial violence. As such, there has been no real justice brought about for the victims of the 1871 Anti-Chinese Massacre. 16

Context and Analysis
In contextualizing the massacre, we build on the analysis of Jew and De Falla, who re-examine accounts that were written in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s when preoccupations with anti-Chinese rhetoric was increasing, and the city of Los Angeles was rewriting the history of the embarrassing massacre. Scripts in these later years referred to the lynchers as the habitual ruffians of the city (the Irish, Mexicans, and other Europeans), members of the dangerous classes. Indeed, an 1880 source criticized the "American 'hoodlum' and Mexican 'greaser,' Irish 'tramp' and French 'communist,' all of whom "joined to murder and dispatch the foe." 17 Pitted against these instigators were the white courageous heroes who were seen as trying to stem the violence, including Sheriff Burns and Judge Widney. 18 Yet the vigilante teams that erupted that night were, in fact, multiethnic groups that included not only those from the margins but also the respected members of the city. De Falla notes that the perpetrators were "of all nationalities," and in 1871, five hundred of them came together to commit the massacre. The vigilantes included those both within and not-quite-within respectable society, prompting Jew to argue: "white Angelenos" were not "static identities;" rather, identity effects "that could be latched onto by those occupying various shades of ethnic relation to 'white.'" 19 Those deputized in 1871 were Anglos and Hispanics, and the subsequent indictments revealed Anglo and Hispanic names. Significantly, after the killing of Thompson, the main motive became the idea that "white men" needed to be defended against the impertinent Chinese, especially after Chinese civilians began firing their guns in self-defense. Yet, as Jew asserts, when the massacre was memorialized in the following years, those safeguarding their "whiteness" blamed "the ambiguously white or strangely recruited Hispanic Angelenos," a narrative that worked to restore a "new urban order" in Los Angeles. The embarrassing memory of what happened in 1871 had to be suppressed, with blame placed on the Chinese and the city's habitual criminals. 20 Jew also analyzes narratives that blamed the Chinese. In the 1880s and 1890s, these remembrances "took shape at the same time that the United States Congress was building the statutory and administrative regime of Chinese Exclusion, the legal structure of immigration restriction that lasted from 1882 to 1943." As well, by 1880, the Burlingame Treaty had been renegotiated to suspend Chinese immigration. It was also during this time that urban violence and anti-Chinese labor unrest were increasing, and the perpetrators of the massacre viewed the Chinese immigrants as encroaching on the territory they had already claimed. Thus, "tracing the ultimate fault of the 1871 massacre to the Chinese residents of Los Angeles worked the convenient retroactive effect of blaming the Chinese." 21

The COVID-19 Pandemic and Anti-Asian American Hate Crimes
Overall, the 1871 Anti-Chinese Massacre was a devastating event that resulted in multiple deaths. It provides a useful lens for comparing acts of racism to today. By 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was claiming that the coronavirus was discovered in Wuhan, China. 22 As that information became public, tensions rose between angry, mostly white, Americans and Asian Americans, whether they were Chinese or another East Asian or Pacific Islander ethnicity. This conflict was not the only one to occur during the COVID-19 pandemic. People were fighting back against quarantining measures and mandates about wearing masks in public, saying that such overarching mandates passed by government officials violated their civil rights. On the other hand, many other Americans were protesting violence by police against Black people and calling for equal civil rights as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, especially after the murder of a Black man named George Floyd. Amidst calls to action by people across the cultural and political spectrum, one group that came to be blamed was that of Asian Americans.
Hatred and violence towards people from East Asian and Pacific Islander countries increased significantly in early 2020. As a response, the Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council, the Chinese for Affirmative Action, and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University created "Stop AAPI Hate" on March 19, 2020. The organization's website states that the AAPI center "tracks and responds to incidents of hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning, and child bullying against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States." They also acknowledge in their mission statement that to end hatred towards Asian Americans requires destroying systemic racism towards all communities of color in the United States. 23 "Stop AAPI Hate" has produced a national record of all the incidents that have been reported to them since March 19, 2020. As of March 31, 2021, the number of incident reports filed regarding discrimination numbered 6,603. Overall, "verbal harassment (65.2%) and shunning (18.1%)" accounted for the majority of the incidents reported with "physical assault (12.6%)" being the third-largest category. Some trends indicate that most incidents have occurred in public areas and businesses, with more than half filed by females. 24 Horrific hate crimes committed against Asian Americans increased when vaccinations started to become available and social distancing restrictions began to lift. One of the first major hate crimes to be widely publicized occurred in March 2021, when a white man murdered eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent. He attacked three different massage parlors in Atlanta, Georgia. In a New York Times article entitled, "8 Dead in Atlanta Spa Shootings, With Fears of Anti-Asian Bias," the author discussed that the perpetrator may have had racial and gender-based motivation for his killings The gunman claimed his motivations were primarily to rid himself of "temptation" by attacking women that he associated with his own "sexual addiction," and he said the race of the women was not relevant to why he killed them. 25 Nevertheless, the attack shook the Asian American community, and many felt that it was a direct attack on people of Asian descent because of bias created by the virus.
Aside from the news coverage of tragic events such as the Atlanta shooting, social media sites such as Twitter have played an important role in promoting both support and hatred towards Asian American populations. The @StopAAPIHate Twitter account has posted informational content about discrimination towards Asian Americans, and it has provided resources to help people constructively lift Asian American voices through virtual conferences and vigils. 26 Additionally, the hashtag #StopAsianHate has been used to promote awareness of crimes perpetrated against people of Asian descent in the United States and to uplift those who have helped to prevent racist hate crimes against Asians. 27 On the other hand, Twitter users repeatedly used the platform to abuse Asian people and to spread misinformation and hatred. Even Former President Donald Trump, known for using Twitter as a place to spread his own opinions, enforced anti-Asian sentiments by using the phrase "Chinese Virus" in his tweets and other public announcements. An article published by the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), entitled "Trump's 'Chinese Virus' Tweet Linked to Rise of Anti-Asian Hashtags on Twitter" discussed how attaching a specific group of people or a location to a disease is dangerous. A UCSF study found the use of racist hashtags in relation to COVID-19 had increased substantially after March 16, 2020, when then-President Trump tweeted, "The United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like Airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus." 28 On January 8, 2021, Twitter officials permanently blocked Trump's account because it violated Twitter's Glorification of Violence Policy. 29 This important action removes the accounts and social media posts that promote hatred and violence towards people of any minority group.
Bigotry and violence towards Asian Americans have been perpetrated on a large scale throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The actions by organizations such as "Stop AAPI Hate" and Twitter, Inc. have given hope to those who have been affected by anti-Asian discrimination. However, there are still many incidents of violence towards Asian Americans that show that the fights to protect people's lives and their rights are still desperately needed.

Legacy of the 1871 Anti-Chinese Massacre and 2021 Hate Crimes Against Asian Americans
With a difference of 150 years between the 1871 Anti-Chinese Massacre and the rash of hate crimes against Asian Americans in 2021, we see a disturbing number of similarities that show the United States has been slow to change its ways of ignoring the pains of people of color. The 1871 massacre was a tragedy in which many innocent people were murdered; yet how it was remembered and who is to blame remain problematic. Media coverage of hate crimes in 2021 differs somewhat in that it is much easier for citizens to spread information and misinformation at their own will through social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. This increased access to information has a positive effect in that it allows people to explore more facets of a single situation with all the different biases that come with each view. However, it also has a negative effect by encouraging some people to deceive and manipulate others who do not wish to analyze situations from multiple angles.
In times of disaster, an emergent effect is often observed as people close to or affected by the disaster come together to help alleviate the suffering of others. 30 After the Anti-Chinese massacre of 1871, however, emergent actions led to a riotous murder spree. The shame of the killings resulted in a rewriting of its memory and who was to blame. Still, with many public traces of the massacre gone, De Falla points out that the Los Angeles Daily News printed out the names of the known murdered Chinese men. Indeed, they were not nameless, and they need to be remembered: 1. Doctor Chee Long Tong, known as "Gene" Tong by non-Chinese Angelenos, shot and hanged.  31 With today's social media, there is a potential for both beneficial and harmful emergent effects as public memory is created and recreated. Considering the anti-Asian hate crimes from 2020-2021, a negative memory is being produced by those who have mocked and threatened Asian Americans, especially after pointed attacks such as the spa parlor shootings. Even so, it is important to note that social media has also played a significant role in bringing together affected communities, particularly during a time of social isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, even though hatred and bias still exist towards people of color, the improvement in communication and information sharing between 1871 and 2021 has made an impact on how crimes and bigotry are remembered and dealt with.

Conclusion
The United States has a long history of racist ideologies that have pushed social and political agendas to maintain power. From the grand jury's failure to punish the murderers involved in the 1871 Chinese Massacre to the former President of the United States himself posting racist tweets on social media in 2020, it is important to remember that hatred will always seek a public platform from which to spread. It does not matter whether the triggering event for taking a deeper look at systemic bias is a single violent altercation that lasted only hours or thousands of abuses of varying severity over the course of a year; any time is an appropriate time to be aware of one's place in history. By looking at the past, we see a violent event of one of the first incidents of Anti-Chinese bigotry that the public worked hard to either re-write or forget. As it is mirrored in modern time and space, societies can begin to appreciate the lessons that history must tell. All the hatred and cruel actions towards Asian Americans, or any other marginalized group, must be put together in a tangible format that can be researched, understood, and stopped. That is why it is necessary to acknowledge history and to learn from it; otherwise, humanity will be doomed to repeat its mistakes. If societies, including nurses, cannot protect all their people, there will come a disaster greater than a massacre or a pandemic that will rip humanity apart, and only then will humans be forced to put aside their differences to survive or perish without a single sympathy among them.