Antioch, California’s Chinatown Was Burned to the Ground, 145 Years Ago

How racist’s white residents destroyed Chinatown, murdered and hanged Chinese men

Racism is nothing new in America. Sadly, to say this country was built on this mentality and went about all the United States doing the same to communities of color.

Faced with much hatred, the Chinese feared for their safety so they built a tunnel of escape in the basement of Reign Salon in Antioch, of which remnants can be seen in the above photo, the brick wall is a grim reminder of yesterdays’ atrocities. This tunnel was built under the city because of a mandated curfew that forbidden Chinese outside after sundown.

In addition to this restriction of their lives, the white residents burned Chinatown to the ground. There are little to no traces of the old Chinatown, just a few tunnel entrances, wood pilings that were the foundations of houses along the San Joaquin River.

Today, while many people, tourists, and locals walk the many streets in Antioch, they are clueless about the land they stand and walk on is where Chinatown once stood.

Unbeknownst to many today, Antioch, Los Angeles, and Santa Ana are three of the many cities that lynched Chinese people or burned down their neighborhoods in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Also, the white residents on an occasion hung Nineteen Chinese men at a wagon shop in front of a crowd.

With racism on the visible upswing and with the murdering of George Floyd amidst the global outcry for justice, along with the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes, Antioch has had a reckoning with their past and issued a formal apology to the Chinese population.

Antioch’s mayor is Black, Lamar Thorpe, who was raised by a Mexican American family in East Los Angeles and has a personal issue with racial injustice as he was schooled by the former Mayor Don Freitas about what had happened to the Chinese inhabitants in a now downtown public square.

George Floyd’s murder hit home emotionally with the current mayor and this was followed by another atrocity in the city of Antioch, where the police killed a 30-year old man suffering from a mental illness which propelled the mayor to issue a slate of policing reforms that were passed by the council. As the hate crimes increased against Asian Americans, Mayor Thorpe decided it was time to address Antioch’s history of violence and discrimination against Chinese immigrants.

The Chinese like the African Americans were instrumental in building this country. They help build the railroads as they migrated to California during the Gold Rush. Many landed in Antioch and built their small Chinatown that consisted of storefronts providing noodles, herbal potions, and laundry services.

Then came an 1851 law that prohibited Chinese people from walking the streets after sundown, so they dug tunnels for travel during the night. Years later, in 1876, the tensions between the white residents and Chinese immigrants came to a boil, along with a newspaper account that some young white men had contracted diseases from Chinese prostitutes and were ordered to leave town and some departed on boats. The whites set fire to Chinatown. After the fire destroyed the remaining homes, the newspaper celebrated this atrocity with words in the newspaper stating that Antioch was now free of a degraded class of people and that the whites had lit the torch for the heathens way out of the wilderness.

Today there are a few remnants of these tunnels in basements and other downtown businesses, and a cafe of the hard lives Chinese immigrants endured.

Old Chinatown remnants were razed to make way for Union Station in the 1930s, the only landmark that remains is the Garnier building on Los Angeles Street that houses the Chinese American Museum. Also, notable, a Chinese group purchased a vacant rail yard and turned it into a modern-day Chinatown in 1938. Thereafter, there was a migration of Taiwanese and Hong Kong settlers in the San Gabriel Valley who created a suburban Chinatown.

After Antioch city apologized for the dehumanization and injustices the Chinese endured, has plans for restoration and recognition of a part of American History, the Chinese perspective, to promote much-needed racial healing and reconciliation confronting the ghosts of the past. According to the mayor, self-guided tours will be permitted of the old Chinatown. Donations from the founders of a grass-roots Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs Association who is an immigrant from Taiwan and worked as a civil engineer before purchased 26 Bay Area McDonald’s locations. This new recognition and reckoning will include creating a Chinatown Historic District with murals and museum exhibits commemorating Antioch’s Asian history. Antioch is a racially diverse city of 110,000 inclusive of 33% Latino, 28% white, 22% Black, and 12% Asian.

In conclusion, this apology and commitment to change has and will bring about much-needed healing in the Asian community and especially in the face of all the anti-Asian hate crimes of today. Antioch has set the example for other cities to follow who have buried similar atrocities against communities of color. The time is now, tomorrow is already too late.

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