A History of Hate
Bellingham’s Racial Past
STORY BY ANNIKA WOLTERS
Bellingham resident Satpal Sidhu used to think his household was one of the first Sikh families from India to make a home in Bellingham.
He thought so, until he noticed a small column in the Bellingham Herald mentioning the anniversary of a race riot.
“When I moved here in 1986, we were one of ten Sikh families in Bellingham. There were more than 200,000 Sikhs just across the border in Canada,” Sidhu said in a telephone interview. “It all seemed very hush hush. No one wanted to immigrate to Bellingham. We had no idea why.”
One hundred years ago, this community was not looking to be inclusive or diverse. Quite the opposite.
Sidhu’s family would have been escorted out — by the hands of an aggressive white mob.
Indian immigrants were snatched from their homes and jobs, dragged to the city jail and forced out of Bellingham at the start of September in 1907. For this group of people, the city limits had a different meaning.
“It was shocking to learn, but good to know the history,” Sidhu said. “There were more than 250 people living here in 1906 and 1907, and we didn’t even know.”
A warning was issued from white lumber mill workers for the more than 200 Indians to leave town before Labor Day, or else. The American holiday celebrating labor workers had come and gone, and the Sikhs were still in Bellingham, for the time being.
On Tuesday, Sept. 4, 1907, the sun had gone down and a crowd of angry white men and women marched to a bunkhouse on C Street, where 30 Sikhs lived. The sound of shattered the windows pierced the air, and two Sikh men were yanked from the house beaten in the street for display, according to the American Reveille newspaper, a main source of media in Bellingham at the time.
The Indians, mostly workers in the city’s lumber mills, were ignorantly referred to as “Hindus” by the two main Bellingham newspapers. But they were actually Sikhs (pronounced “seeks”).
Sikhism is a religion founded more than 500 years ago, in the Punjab state of India, and is a monotheistic way of life. Baptized Sikhs don a turban to protect their long, dark hair and wear metal bracelets on both wrists as a reminder to do good things, according to Sikhs.org.
The word “Sikh” in the Punjabi language translates to mean “disciple.”
Headlines in the 1907 Bellingham Herald issues described the Sikhs as “dusky Orientals” and “hordes of Hindu foreigners.”
“I am an American, but before that I am Sikh. I think it is easy to say that I am part of two cultures at once.”
Andrew Hedden, co-writer of a student documentary about the riots entitled “Present In All That We Do,” says he knew a broad a history of the city before making the film. One thing in particular caught him off guard.
“The anti-immigrant arguments you heard about Sikh workers in Bellingham, which come across as remarkably racist when we read them today, were similar to arguments made against Latino and other workers in 2007,” Hedden says in an email. “The language had changed to be more politically correct, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] raids took the place of race riots, but the same racist assumptions and misplaced anger about border security, jobs being “stolen” and immigrants being unable to ‘assimilate’ were still there.”
The city’s 1907 chief of police found and arrested two boys throwing rocks at a nearly naked Sikh man, shivering knee-deep in the tide flats beneath Holly Street. After the tumultuous crowd surrounded the chief, the boys were released.
The riot continued on to D Street, and spread like wildfire across Bellingham until the mob grew to about 500 whites, rounding up the some 200 Sikhs and herding them to the city hall’s jail like cattle. The Indians were held overnight in what is now the Whatcom Museum in front of Marine Park.
Today Navjot Singh, a volunteer at the Guru Nanak Gursikh Temple in Lynden, examines pictures of the Sikh men targeted by the hateful flock. He reads about the men being referred to as Hindus, and sees that Sikhs were severely misunderstood by citizens of Bellingham.
“They didn’t know anything about us. They didn’t know Sikhs were these people and Hindus were these people,” Singh says.
Singh notices the men’s turbans are not tied very neatly in the photographs, and infers that the men may have had bigger problems, or other hard work to do.
“You can see how the men had their turbans on, that they didn’t really try to look good. They just did it,” Singh says. “How I tied my turban today, you can see the layers and it is good and symmetrical. It feels like back then they didn’t care about how their turbans were, they just wanted to make sure it was there.”
As Singh flips through scans of yellowed pages from hundred-year-old Bellingham newspapers, Singh talks more about the hateful event that “happened to us.”
Though his family immigrated here in the 1980s, Singh says he feels a bond and tie to the people who were rejected by Bellingham in 1907.
“The reason I keep saying ‘us’ is because I would be comfortable saying it is a family thing. Whenever you see a fellow Indian, or Punjabi or a fellow Sikh, you treat them like family. You should always bow your head to whomever you see. The same religion I am a part of, you are a part of. There is just that connection,” Singh says. “I am an American, but before that I am Sikh. I think it is easy to say that I am part of two cultures at once. If Americans today go somewhere and were treated like this, I would still say ‘look what happened to us.’”
A headline from the Sept. 5, 1907 Herald reads, “Two Hundred Hindus Piled Into Room in City Hall.”
The Reveille printed the cause of the riot was the arrival of the South Asians in the job market, and accused the Sikhs of running the white man out of work in the lumber mills.
Sidhu says though the city has changed, some of the arguments against immigrants have stayed the same 100 years later.
“The most amazing thing we found was the same argument that we hear today. ‘They don’t know English, they take our jobs, these immigrants don’t take a day off or work over time’,” Sidhu says. “These are the same complaints we hear today and nothing has changed. They are going to take over our country’, and so on.”
On Sept. 5, 1907, the day after the riot, the Reveille wrote, “its immediate cause was feeling against the Hindus at Whatcom Falls Mill Company’s plant. Mill workers there stated that white men had been discharged and Hindus put in their place, and intense indignation among the white employees and their friends resulted.”
The following day, the media became more aggressive in its words, encouraging the exclusion of all Asian immigrants.
On Sept. 6, 1907, the Reveille asserted, “From every standpoint, it is most undesirable that these Asians should be permitted to remain in the United States. They are repulsive in appearance and disgusting in manners. They are said to be without shame, and while no charges of immorality are brought against them, their actions and customs are so different from ours that there can never be tolerance of them. They contribute nothing to the growth and the upbringing up the city as a result of their labors. They work for small wages and do not put their money into circulation.”
This was neither the first nor the last demonstration of racial hate in Bellingham.
The aftermath of the 1907 riot brought the almost rosy reminiscence of a past “Rally When the Yellow Foreigners Flee,” according to a headline in the Reveille on Sept. 7. The paper was remembering the exclusion of the Chinese workers in Bellingham in 1885, when yet another demographic was mandated to leave the city.
A pullout quote from the story recalled an agreement from the citizens of Bellingham be free from the yellow workers.
“We, the undersigned, do each solemnly pledge and promise upon our honor as citizens, that we will not, from this date henceforth, directly or indirectly, patronize Chinese laundries, or give employment to Chinese in any manner, and that we will use all reasonable means to discourage their presence among us. –Pledge signed by citizens in 1885.”
Leading into the 1920s, almost two decades after the race riots against the Chinese and Sikhs, Bellingham housed Washington’s strongest chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
The Klan became more visible in Bellingham after a cross was burned on Sehome Hill on July 4, 1923. By that year, the state’s Klan began to host public rallies and became an attraction to more than 70,000 in a day, according to the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project. On Sept. 26, 1925, “the largest crowd that has ever assembled in the Lynden District,” tallying up to 25,000 people, attended a KKK rally at the Northwest Washington Fair Grounds, where 160 people were initiated into the Klan, according to the Herald.
The following year, the Klan organized its own parade and marched by the hundreds in downtown Bellingham, ending with a Klan picnic at Cornwall Park, according to the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project.
Nearly a hundred years later, it almost seems as if nothing ever happened. Only subtle signs can be noticed, such as the stone plaques on historic Fairhaven’s grounds that commemorate the past’s oppression, reading, “No Chinese allowed beyond this point.”
Sidhu said he and the Sikh community hold no hard feelings after the 2007 Mayor Tim Douglas dubbed Sept. 4 as a Day of Healing and Reconciliation, in an effort to apologize for the violence against the Sikh community in years past.
In 2011, Mayor Dan Pike issued an apology to the Chinese community of Bellingham for its expulsion from the city.
“We want to bring out the positive relationships we enjoy in the community today,” Sidhu says. “It was a sad thing, but we must learn from it and make sure it does not happen to anyone or any community.”
The year 2014 marks a century’s anniversary of a violent riot against immigrants from India occurring in Vancouver, B.C. The South Asian immigrants were herded onto the vessel Komagata Maru and shipped back to India, where they were met with gunfire and violence. Some lost their lives when returning home.
Today, people may look at Bellingham as a progressive and welcoming place for people from every walk of life — a melting pot of Mason-jar-sipping, Birkenstock-wearing, blunt-smoking liberals.
The long-running history of racial hate in Bellingham remains the city’s worst-kept secret.