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The Chinese massacre of 1871 was a racially motivated riot on October 24, 1871, when a mob of over 500 Anglos and Latinos entered Los Angeles' Chinatown to attack, rob and brutally murder Chinese residents of the city. The riots took place on Calle de los Negros (Street of the Negroes), also referred to as "Nigger Alley", which later became part of Los Angeles Street.
The riot and massacre was triggered by the killing of Robert Thompson, a local rancher. He was caught in the cross-fire during a gun battle between two Chinese factions. This fight was part of a longstanding feud over the abduction of a Chinese woman named Yut Ho.[1]
Practically every Chinese-occupied building on the block was ransacked and almost every resident was attacked or robbed. The county coroner confirmed 18 Chinese deaths at the hands of the mob, although some estimates ranged as high as 23.
Calle de los Negros was situated immediately northeast of Los Angeles’s principal business district, running 500 feet (150 m) from the intersection of Arcadia Street to the plaza. The unpaved street took its name from the dark-complexioned Californios (pre-annexation, Spanish-speaking mixed-race Californians) who had originally lived there. Once home to the town’s most prominent families, the neighborhood had deteriorated into a slum by the time Los Angeles’s first Chinatown was established there in the 1860s.
Los Angeles merchant and memoirist Harris Newmark recalled that Calle de los Negros was “as tough a neighborhood, in fact, as could be found anywhere.”[2] Los Angeles historian Morrow Mayo described it as “a dreadful thoroughfare, forty feet wide, running one whole block, filled entirely with saloons, gambling-houses, dance-halls, and cribs. It was crowded night and day with people of many races, male and female, all rushing and crowding along from one joint to another, from bar to bar, from table to table. There was a band in every joint, with harps, guitars, and other stringed instruments predominating.”[3]
Calle de los Negros was incorporated into Los Angeles Street in 1877. The adobe apartment block where the Chinese massacre occurred was torn down in the late 1880s. Today the location is part of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument.
The underlying causes are sometimes said to be economic. A growing movement of anti-Chinese discrimination in California climaxed in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. These root economic causes were the unstable economy after the American Civil War, which led to high unemployment in California and other Western American states. However, some scholars point out that the anti-Chinese movement had not yet taken in root further south in Los Angeles at the time of the massacre. They maintain that the killings were the product of racism and lawlessness.
Only ten rioters were ever brought to trial. Eight were convicted, but their convictions were overturned on a legal technicality.
The event was well-reported on the East Coast as newspapers there labeled Los Angeles a "blood stained Eden" [2] after the riots. Los Angeles, at the time, was considered a backwater.
Alejandro Morales recounts the massacre in his The Brick People (1988).
   | PBS History of the West - PBS - THE WEST - Events from 1870 to 1880 |
| | Library of Congress - The Chinese in California 1850-1925 - The Chinese in California, 1850-1925: Related Resources |
| | Heritage Parkscape - The City Project |
| | First Person Narrative of Massacre - American Memory from the Library of Congress |
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