On September 4, 1907, South Asians workers are attacked and forced to leave Bellingham.
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Several hundred South Asian immigrants, most of them Punjabi, had come to Bellingham to work in the large lumber mills. They were portrayed in newspapers as a “dusky peril” — a teeming and dirty threat to jobs and white civilization.
Agitation against these South Asian workers came from the 800-member Japanese-Korean Exclusion League in town. It demanded that no South Asians be employed in Bellingham after Labor Day (September 2, 1907), when 1000 union members paraded through town.
The South Asian workers continued to work and tensions rose.
On September 4th, rioters broke into the mills and pulled South Asians from their work, entered the bunkhouses where they lived, destroyed and stole their property, and drove them to the city limits or to the jail. The police housed those who made it to the jail, ostensibly for their protection, on the condition that they leave town shortly afterward.
Within days all the South Asians had left the city.
Decades later the Sikh community in the region continued to feel unwelcome in Bellingham.
Some of the men rounded up by rioters and brought to the city hall
South Asians and others outside city hall the morning after the riot.
Bellingham Herald article on the riot and its aftermath.
See also:
Gerald N. Hallberg, “Bellingham, Washington’s Anti-Hindu Riot,” Journal of the West Vol. 12 (January 1973), pp. 163-175.
Englesberg, P. (2013). The 1907 Bellingham Riot and Anti-Asian Hostilities in the Pacific Northwest.
Documentary: Present in All that We Do
“The Foreign Invasion of the Northwest”
“Gifts of Famine: Invasion of Sikhs from the Punjab”
Letter from Adolphus W. Mangum
White workingmen attack Bellingham’s East Indian millworkers