About Tacoma’s Chinese Expulsion of 1885
On November 3, 1885, five hundred white
Tacomans rounded up hundreds of the city's remaining Chinese residents and
forcibly marched them through the pouring rain to a railroad station and
crammed them into boxcars bound for Portland.
After terrorizing local businessmen known to be supporters of the Chinese,
this mob burned Tacoma's Chinatown to the ground. The mob was so methodical in
its expulsion of Chinese residents, local newspapers reported, that its
approach was hailed as the "Tacoma Method."
Tacoma's Chinese Expulsion was the dark culmination of national and local
anti-Chinese sentiment, numerous outbursts of violence in the Puget Sound
region, and a culture within the city of Tacoma that reinforced xenophobia and
an enduring nativism. The terrorism in
Tacoma dehumanized an immigrant population and stimulated expulsions of Chinese
communities in over two hundred West Coast and Northwest towns and cities
between 1885 and 1887.
History Professor Dr. Dearinger concentrates
on the ways Tacoma 's Chinese Expulsion was depicted in the late 1880s and how
the city reckoned with its anti-Chinese history in the generations that
followed, leading to the creation of Chinese Reconciliation Park.
Dr. Ryan Dearinger is Professor of History
and Faculty Fellow in the Honors College at George Fox University, where he
teaches courses on the American West, labor and working-class history, and
immigration. His book The Filth of Progress: Immigrants, Americans, and the
Building of Canals and Railroads in the West won the 2017 "Best Book Award"
from Phi Alpha Theta, the National History Honor Society. His current book project explores the history
of Tacoma's 1885 Chinese Expulsion.