Driven Out by Jean Pfaelzer

Author:Jean Pfaelzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588366405
Publisher: Random House Group
Published: 2007-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

6

THE CHINESE REWRITE THE LETTER OF THE LAW

On the morning of January 21, 1886, Deputy U.S. Marshal B. J. Alerman boarded a steamship in San Francisco and sailed three hundred miles up the coast to Eureka. Once there, he walked from the docks to city hall. In the office of the county clerk, Alerman filed a lawsuit, Wing Hing v. City of Eureka. He then went across the hall to serve papers on Mayor Tom Walsh, who had chaired the fateful meeting in Centennial Hall that launched the purge of Chinese people from Humboldt County. That day the Chinese took historic steps to win reparations.

Just a year before, on Monday afternoon, February 9, many of the Chinese men and women who had been driven out of Eureka over the weekend had quickly regathered at the Ong Cong Gon So offices in San Francisco’s Spofford Alley. They described the violent purge to the local Chinese community and the white press. Colonel Fred Bee, the Chinese consul, made it clear that the Chinese held the city of Eureka responsible: “There is a Sheriff and other officers of the law in Eureka, and they ought to have arrested all lawbreakers.” The Chinese from Eureka, he added, were peaceable merchants “whose business has been broken up by their expulsion. Somebody will have to pay for the injury done them.” They would only “wait quietly till the excitement dies down and then seek redress in the courts.”1

Bee announced that the Chinese would sue Eureka for their lost property and for being forced from their homes by mob violence. He reminded the angry audience that the Chinese government had readily paid American citizens over seven hundred thousand dollars “in full liquidation” when Christian missions were destroyed in the anti-American riots in Canton. “The Eureka case,” he warned, “will establish a precedent, and if America will not indemnify Chinese, China will not indemnify Americans.”2

Eleven months after the Eureka roundup, just before the statute of limitations ran out, the Chinese refugees, some now living in San Francisco’s Chinatown, others dispersed across the West, went on the offensive. On January 21, 1886, Wing Hing, a twenty-five-year-old merchant, filed Wing

Hing v. City of Eureka.3

Acting as “assignee” for fifty Chinese men and two Chinese women,

Wing Hing demanded reparations and monetary compensation for racial violence. They sued Eureka for “carelessness or negligence,” claiming the city was liable for a total of $75,245 for lost property “removed, carried away, and destroyed” by the rioters. These claims ranged from $60 to $7,000 per individual. The Chinese also sued for $37,670 in damages—for being the objects of a riot and mob action due to the city’s neglect of its legal duty. These individual claims ranged from $200 to $6,000.

The Chinese sued Eureka for debts that they could never collect, for the loss of their future earnings, and for the very experience of being driven out by a mob. They hoped to get back into their homes, back into their jobs and businesses, and recover their losses.

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