At least 18 people were massacred. Nobody was held accountable because of a technicality called racism.
October 24, 1871: One of the largest mass lynchings in United States history, the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871, broke out.
Calle de los Negros, known as Negro Alley, was a short, unpaved lane just off the Plaza, lined with saloons, gambling parlors and brothels. It was named for the dark-skinned Spaniards who once owned property there, not for African Americans. More than half of the city’s Chinese residents lived in the adobes along it.
Los Angeles had been turning on them for two years. In 1869, two local newspapers, the Los Angeles News and the Los Angeles Star, began running editorials that attacked Chinese immigration and described the Chinese as inferior and immoral. Racially motivated attacks rose along with them.
On October 24, a feud between two rival Chinese benevolent associations, reportedly over a young woman, broke out into a shootout in the alley. Police officer Jesús Bilderrain was wounded. Robert Thompson, a civilian who had come to help, was killed. The shooters took cover in the Coronel Building.
Five Hours of Violence
Word spread that Chinese men had killed Thompson, a popular former saloon owner. Racist rumors went further, claiming Chinese immigrants were “killing whites wholesale.” The crowd grew.
The mob forced the Chinese out of the Coronel Building and dragged captured men to makeshift gallows at a corral and a wagon shop. Homes and businesses were looted, and dozens of people were assaulted. The violence lasted about five hours.
At least 18 Chinese immigrants were killed. They included a 15-year-old boy and Dr. Gene Tong (also recorded as Chee Long Tong), a respected physician. Only one of the victims is thought to have been involved in the original gunfight.
By the next morning, 17 bodies lay in the jail yard. An eighteenth victim, the first man hanged, had already been buried.
The Trials
A grand jury handed down indictments, many of them against unidentified men listed under placeholder names. The killings had taken place in front of hundreds of people, yet police officers and other non-Chinese witnesses repeatedly failed to identify members of the mob.
Only ten men stood trial. In the first trial, several prospective jurors admitted past involvement in vigilante lynchings. Selecting a jury for the second, larger trial took more than three weeks and 255 prospective jurors.
Eight men were convicted of manslaughter, not murder, and the Los Angeles Star praised the verdict as a deterrent to the city’s lawless. Their sentences ran from two to six years in San Quentin State Prison, and six of them were sent there in April 1872 while their lawyers appealed. In June 1873, after the appeal succeeded, the district attorney did not object to their release.
The Technicality
The case went to the California Supreme Court. In 1873, the justices found the indictment fatally defective. It accused the men of encouraging others to murder Dr. Tong, but never alleged that he had actually been murdered. Judge Robert Widney, who presided over the trial, had ruled the wording sufficient. The Supreme Court disagreed.
Nobody was retried. The district attorney, Cameron Thom, did not fight for a new trial. Historian Paul Spitzzeri writes that the decision went unexplained, but likely reflected a belief that convictions could not be won again. Even the Los Angeles Star admitted the men had escaped full punishment “by a quibble.”
The law itself didn’t help. California barred Black, mixed-race and Native American witnesses from testifying against white people, and in 1854 the state Supreme Court ruled in People v. Hall that the rule covered the Chinese too. A judge noted in February 1872, during one of the massacre-era trials, that an 1863 statute still barred Chinese witnesses from testifying against a white person.
Everything Around the Technicality
There were also other factors that worked against the victims. Los Angeles in 1871 had just six police officers for nearly 6,000 residents. According to the Los Angeles Public Library, its homicide rate was higher than New York’s or Chicago’s, and lynchings were a regular part of city life.
When the Los Angeles News and the Los Angeles Star began running editorials that condemned Chinese immigration and described the Chinese as inferior and immoral, racially motivated attacks rose along with them.
After the 1871 massacre, anti-Chinese feeling kept on growing. The newspapers resumed their attacks, and in 1876 a local Anti-Coolie club counted many prominent citizens among its members. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese laborers from immigrating for ten years.
Remembering
For many years, the massacre received little public notice in the city where it happened. Michael Woo, who in 1985 became the first Asian American elected to the Los Angeles City Council, has said he never heard about it growing up in Los Angeles.
A bronze plaque set into the sidewalk across from the Chinese American Museum has marked the site since 2001. In 2021, on the 150th anniversary, Mayor Eric Garcetti apologized on behalf of the city and announced plans for a larger memorial: a grove of 18 granite sculptures, one for each known victim, on the same block. The project has said it aims to unveil the first site in 2026.
The museum has commemorated October 24 since 2010, with a candlelight vigil.
At the vigil, the names of the known victims are read aloud.