Irwin A. Tang
Asian Texans: Our
Histories and Our Lives
About 6200 words
June 2003
Chapter 1: The
Chinese Experiment
Texas.
They knew next to nothing
about the state. But here they were, in
the dead of winter, stepping off a train in Galveston, Texas. The calendar read January 10, 1870.
They numbered about 250, and almost all of them were men aged 25-30. Most were born in the Guangdong province of southern China. A few were young boys, and a few were men over forty. Only one woman hobbled off the train, her feet having been bound in the tradition of many Chinese women of that time. (Houston Telegraph, 1/13/1870, Peabody 57-65)
These Chinese American men had recently helped complete the first transcontinental railroad of the United States, the Central Pacific Railroad (Harper’s Weekly, 1/22/1870, Peabody). They were among the best railroad builders in the world. They could lay ten miles of track in one day and completed the transcontinental railroad seven years ahead of schedule. For three years, they built track through the solid granite of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. They built track through snow piled stories high. They climbed out of avalanches, leaving the dead beneath the snow. They fought off Irish workers. Some even struck for better pay and improved working conditions, and Central Pacific rail executive Charles Crocker cut off their food supply and threatened to replace them. They still won a two-dollar a day raise. All in all, about 1200 of the 11,000 Chinese workers on the Central Pacific were killed by the elements, by sickness, and by dynamite blasts. These 250 Chinese American men arriving in Texas tonight were among the hardened survivors, some of the toughest men America had ever known (Ward and Duncan 230-233; see Steiner).
They
needed work. In May 1869, they hammered
down the final mile of the first transcontinental railroad, uniting the nation
by rail and allowing for the speedy settlement of the wild West. Despite and because of their heroics, these
11,000 Chinese American railroad workers lost their jobs over the following
months. Thousands of them returned to
San Francisco where they had originally landed on American soil (Peabody
57-65).
In November 1869, labor contractor
Chew-Ah-Heung of San Francisco negotiated for a group of these Chinese American
laborers a contract with John G. Walker, an agent of the Houston and Texas
Central (H&TC) Railroad. The
Houston and Texas Central was Texas’s second railroad and one of its most
important commercial lines. Construction
had begun in 1853 at Houston’s Buffalo Bayou on the Gulf coast. By January 1870, the railroad ran north
through the cotton plantations of the Brazos River Valley, helping to create in
its wake the railroad towns of Millican, Bryan, and Hearne. The H&TC railroad allowed for the
efficient and affordable shipment of raw cotton to processing houses and to
port (McCarver and McCarver). The
Chinese Americans were to work in rural northeast Texas, extending the railhead
further north through cotton country, from Bremond to Corsicana (Rhoads 3).
The
labor contract Chew negotiated with Walker committed the Chinese American rail
builders to three years of work on the H&TC at twenty dollars of silver
coin per month, which consisted of 26 working days. Chew himself would serve as the group’s leader and interpreter
for $100 gold per month. (10 XI 1869 –
Record Book #55, pp. 20-22, Southern Pacific Co. Headquarters, Houston). Although the Chinese American men could
procure similar wages in California, these men wished to start a new life in
Texas, a state to which few Asians or Asian Americans had ever journeyed.
The
250 or so Chinese American workers left San Francisco on December 19, 1869 by
rail, heading southeast. At some point,
seven “faint-hearted” workers decided to stay behind. The Chinese Americans knew not what awaited them in Texas. The South had four years ago lost the U.S.
Civil War and now wanted to experiment with replacing slave labor with Chinese
labor. Would the Chinese be treated as
slaves? Or would the South be an oasis
from the anti-Chinese riots of the West?
Many Chinese American men were prepared to find out, as the seven
deserters were replaced by eighteen more men. (St. Louis Republican, 12/29/1870, reprinted in Houston Telegraph
1/6/1870 as “The Coming Chinaman”).
The
train stopped in Council Bluffs, Iowa where the Chinese Americans crossed the
frozen Missouri River by walking on wooden planks laid across the cracked ice
(Harper’s Weekly 1/22/1870). They arrived at St. Louis on December 30
(GTWN 1/7/1870), via the North Missouri rail line. From there, they took the steamship Mississippi down the
Mississippi River. They stopped in
Memphis, Tennessee for a day and then steamed down to New Orleans (Peabody
57-65).
Upon
their arrival in Galveston, a journalist described these new Texans to his
readers, many of whom had never encountered people of Chinese or Asian descent:
Considering the length of time those who passed
through yesterday had been cooped up on the deck of a vessel, they were much
cleaner and neater in their clothing and persons than could have been
expected. Though small in stature they
were robustly formed, and from the ease with which they handled heavy packages
of plunder they are both strong and active.
(Houston Telegraph, 1/13/1870)
According to the St. Louis Republican, the Chinese each
carried with ease a pole on the ends of which hung bundles of belongings
weighing about 150 or 200 pounds. They
were described as having “dark, almond eyes and olive colored countenance, a
whitish hue, tinged with orange and vermilion.” (Houston Telegraph, 1/6/1870)
The Galveston reporter continued:
The general dress was a blue cotton blouse and pantaloons of the same material but of more ample dimensions than a fashionable gent would like to be incased [sic] in. Their shoes were made after the fashion of a canoe, turning up sharply at the toes, and their hats resembled inverted washbowls. A number of them, however wore boots and loose overcoats, and all appeared to be comfortably clad.
[ . . . ]
If they saw anything new or unexpected in Galveston
they did not manifest it by word or sign, neither did they appear conscious of
being the centre of attraction for crowds of strange people.
After their arrival at the depot preparations were
made for cooking breakfast. Fires were
lighted, kettles were brought out, pans and bowls were placed in the hands of
each, and every thing was conducted systematically and decorously. The principal ingredient of the cuisine was
rice, though we noticed that some of them placed small pieces of pork that had
been browned to a crisp, over the tops of their pans of rice. The chop-sticks were the only instruments
used in carrying their food to their mouths [ . . . ] After breakfast was over we noticed that most of them took a good
big drink of the hot water in which the rice had been boiled. Carefully putting aside the wood which
remained after the cooking was done, they washed their bowls and chopsticks,
packed away their pots, &c., lighted their pipes and enjoyed a smoke with
as much philosophical composure as the most devoted lover of the weed among the
ouside [sic] barbarians could have done.
Several of them spoke English indifferently well but did not evince any
disposition to be communicative.
There was but one woman in the lot; she was small in
size and by no means attractive in personal appearance, having undergone the
usual process for rendering the feet disproportionally small; her walk was
anything but graceful [ . . . ]
(Houston Telegraph, 1/13/1870)
The writer then described
the typical Qing Dynasty hair cut of the Chinese men: their hair shaved from
forehead to crown, the rest of the black hair allowed to grow long and tied
into a queue, which most often “was nicely braided, coiled around the head and
hidden under the hat.” The article
concluded with this:
About one o’clock yesterday afternoon the train left
for Calvert with these, the first Mongolians ever brought to the State. The success of this experiment will be
watched with anxiety by a very large proportion of the people of the State [. .
. ] (Houston Telegraph, 1/13/1870)
The migration of these 250
Chinese Americans to Texas may have doubled the Chinese American population of
the American South. According to the
U.S. Census, only 217 Chinese lived in the entire South in 1870, with
twenty-five of them residing in Texas, ninety-eight in Arkansas, seventy-one in
Louisiana, and sixteen in Mississippi.
The rail workers heralded the migration of an additional two or three
thousand Chinese to the American South over the next few years (Peabody 71).
At
the dawn of 1870, the Chinese American populations of states east of the far
western states were minimal. These 250
Chinese American workers were pioneer immigrants, representing the first large
group of Chinese American workers to migrate eastward. Thousands followed their lead in the
subsequent months and years, establishing many of the first Chinese American
communities throughout the East, South, and Midwest.
The Chinese
Experiment in the American South
Although
the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863, it was not
made public in Texas until Union General Gordon Granger read it in Galveston on
June 19, 1865 (a day now known as Juneteenth).
Gradually, the 250,000 African American slaves of Texas were freed from
bondage by their proprietors. Although
there was now an abundance of freed black laborers available to work on Texas
farms, some of these men and women preferred to live in cities, in part for the
urban social environment and in part for their own safety. (Barr, 40-41). Throughout Texas, and particularly in the Brazos River Valley,
many whites attempted to keep African Americans in a state of semi-slavery
through racist state laws and violence (see Crouch). While some whites sought socio-economic domination, others simply
sought alternatives to black labor.
Just
weeks after the announcement of slave emancipation in Texas, white plantation
owners began debating the possibility of Chinese American labor as a viable
alternative to free black labor. Lucy
M. Cohen describes some of the white planters’ highly racialized thinking in Chinese in the Post-Civil War South:
The only group of Chinese
workers to enter the ante-bellum South consisted of twenty Chinese workers
hired in 1854 to refine iron at an iron factory in Eddyville, Kentucky (Cohen
17-19), so for the most part, Southerners were unfamiliar with the
Chinese. Some Southern planters hoped
that they could “import” Asian coolies to pick cotton and plow fields, rather
than contract with free Asian laborers.
The term “coolie” refers to Chinese and East Indian workers who were
treated in most ways as slaves, but whose servitude, in theory, and according
to their contracts, lasted only eight years.
Most of the 300,000 Chinese coolies between 1847 and 1874 were kidnapped
or tricked into bondage, and at the end of their eight years, their “employer”
had the option of renewing their contracts.
The vast majority of coolies worked in Latin American and Caribbean
plantations and guano pits owned by white capitalists. Those coolies fortunate enough to survive
the deadly ship ride from Asia to the Americas were often worked to death.
In
the months after the Civil War, Southerners and Cuban planters suggested that
Chinese and Asian Indian coolie laborers from the Caribbean islands be
contracted to work in the South. In the
two years following the Civil War, Louisana plantations “imported” over one
hundred Chinese coolies to work on sugar and cotton plantations, but in August
1867, the “trade” in coolies was halted temporarily by order of the federal
government, which had outlawed coolie labor five years earlier. (Cohen, 54-58)
Nevertheless,
the Chinese “experiment” continued.
Despite protests that the Chinese were “heathens” and that introducing
the Chinese might once again upset race relations in the South, commercial
conventions in 1869 resolved that Chinese be brought to work in the South
(Cohen 72). A convention organized to
discuss the possibilities of Chinese labor met on July 13, 1869 in Memphis,
Tennessee. The Southern capitalists and
planters voted to form a joint stock company that would bring to the United
States “as many Chinese immigrant laborers as possible, in the shortest
time.” (Cohen 67) The possibility that the Chinese might be
treated as slaves still motivated the white planters and capitalists. One attendee, J.W. Clapp, stated that the
South preferred labor managed “as of old,” meaning as slaves. An importer of Chinese laborers and coolies
named Cornelius Koopmanschaap, who was considered the “star” of the Memphis
Convention, stated that in the South, “nothing but coerced labor will bring
about prosperity.” (Harper’s Weekly, 8/14/1869)
Some
Southerners opposed the Chinese “experiment.”
Tennessee in December 1869 prohibited the joint stock company from
bringing any Chinese laborers into the state (Cohen 72). The
Dallas Herald stated in unambiguously racist terms, “We want neither nigger
nor Mongolians – we want white men . . . men created in their Maker’s image . .
.” After the Memphis convention, the
paper wrote that it was the first in Texas “to oppose the mad scheme of
introducing the Chinese into the country to take the place of negro labor in
the South and to supplant white labor in the North.” The Chinese will “lower the standard of labor, demoralize society
and vote the Radical [Republican] ticket.” (Feb 12, 1869, p. 2 and July, 30,
1869, p. 2)
Some
of the Chinese workers brought to the South in the 1870’s were coolies brought
directly from China. In June 1870, 169
Chinese men brought directly from Hong Kong arrived at New Orleans to work on
cotton plantations throughout the South.
Twenty had died on the 107-day trip across the Pacific Ocean. These workers were to do farm work for
thirteen dollars a month, working 312 days each year, even “if it takes
eighteen or more months to do it.” (see
Cohen, “George Gift” article 169) In
what was the worst case of abuse of coolie labor in the American South, over
200 Chinese died while working on Arkansas plantations in the 1870’s. They were victims of “the climate and hard
treatment.” (Peabody 74) In contrast to the slave-like coolies taken
from China, the Chinese American railroad workers of the South were free
laborers doing far less work under much better conditions for much more
money. Nevertheless, some Southerners
saw the Chinese American H&TC rail workers as underpriced replacement
workers. On their train trip from San
Francisco to Galveston, they were met by African American protestors at St.
Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans. A
Memphis reporter wrote that African Americans standing before the steamship
were “open in their threats to demolish any of the usurpers who might step upon
shore.” (Houston Telegraph 1/4/1870)
The St. Louis Democrat,
utilizing racial stereotypes, explained the animosity by writing that
protesting African Americans “regard them [the Chinese Americans] as
interlopers who work for half pay, keep all they earn, despise fat bacon, and
never indulge in whiskey and poker.”
(Etta Peabody, 58-59)
The
African Americans were no doubt aware that white capitalists had contracted
with the Chinese Americans in part to diminish the economic power of African
American laborers. Ironically, Central
Pacific railroad mogul Charles Crocker had threatened during the aforementioned
railroad labor strike to replace the Chinese American workers with newly
emancipated African Americans (Ward and Duncan 232). In the early 1870’s, east coast capitalists also contracted with
Chinese and Chinese Americans to work at factories in the Northeast. Most of these workers were hired by plant
managers to subdue white labor organizing.
When white workers returned to work, Chinese American workers were most
often left without jobs (see Rhoads, “White Labor” vs. “Coolie Labor”). It is unclear whether the Chinese American
workers of the H&TC knew they were pawns in a war between capital and
labor. No matter, these Chinese American
men needed the work; this they shared with both white and black Texans.
Upon
arrival in Calvert, Texas, the Chinese American rail workers headed directly to
the end of the rail line around Bremond and began constructing towards Thornton
(Rhoads 3); the rail line would eventually reach Corsicana and then
Dallas. The Chinese lived in huts and
tents in a large work camp. They ate
rice, pork, dried fish, vegetables, and they drank hot tea, even during the
Texas summer. They spoke mostly
Chinese, although Chew-Ah-Heung was fluent in English. At least one Chinese foreman was in charge
of each one hundred men, and one interpreter represented the group to
English-speakers.
A
writer for the Calvert Enterprise
observed that “they all speak at once, and reminded us of a covey of
blackbirds.” He noted that the
“principal word” of the Chinese language must be “la,” since he heard it at the
end of every sentence. The writer was
certainly referring to the Chinese word pronounced “luh,” which denotes past
action. The Texans observed that the
Chinese workers were thrifty with their silver because, after all, they were in
Texas to make money, not spend it.
(Galveston Tri-Weekly News 1/19/1870)
Some of the Chinese men were “sojourners,” planning on working hard and
saving up a good deal of money in the United States before returning to China.
A
week earlier, the Galveston Tri-Weekly
News had editorialized that the Chinese would bring the newly enfranchised
blacks back under the control of planters and capitalists. “When the Negro once finds out it is work or
starve he will not hesitate long between the two. Welcome then, John Chinaman.”
(GWTN 1/10/1870) The Calvert Enterprise stated, “We hope they
[the Chinese American workers] will rouse the negroes to work . . . Outside of
this we see no particular need of them.” (GWTN 1/19/1870) In March, the Centreville Experiment reported that some black freedmen watched
the Chinese Americans, “habited in the lightest kind of cotton,” laying track
during a Texas norther (GTWN 3/9/1870).
Texas’s
first Chinese New Year celebration occurred on January 30, 1870 (Chinese New
Year’s Eve) in Bremond, Texas. “In full
Chinese costume, including large umbrellas, they promenaded the streets, ‘to
the delight of the juveniles without distinction of race or color.’” The Chinese Americans drank whiskey and
returned to their work camps by noon.
(GTWN 2/18/1870, p. 2)
The
Chinese railroad workers sometimes rode the H&TC train down to Houston and
picked up supplies. The Houston Telegraph observed a young man
dressed “in his best clothes.”
Yo Wykee, the name of our illustrious Mongolian
visitor, who is apparently a young man of about 28 years and characteristically
Chinese in feature and dress, has just come down to Houston for the purpose of
making commissariat purchases for his countrymen at work up the line. (Houston
Chronicle, 1/11/1942)
Yo Wykee was followed by a
crowd of onlookers who may have never seen a Chinese before. Wrote the Telegraph, “Under the
circumstances, his manner was rather instructive to us barbarians, and speaks
volumes for the finish given in one branch of Celestial education anyway –
politeness.” Another paper marveled
that “the poorest day laborer that arrives here from that country can write and
cipher.” (Houston Chronicle 1/11/1942)
It was reported that one Chinese man bought in
Houston a ten gallon hat, a Bowie knife, two holsters, and two guns. Evidently, the Chinese had been told that
the Arapaho Indians had awaited the arrival of the Chinese “with anticipation
of intense enjoyment in lifting their scalps.”
(Houston Chronicle 1942)
By
all early accounts, the Chinese Texans of the H&TC railroad were great
workers. The railroad company claimed
that Chinese labor was the “only labor” they could rely on. (Cohen 87)
Galveston’s Daily Civilian
reported that “in contrast with the state of affairs among the Chinese stands
the fact that a number of Swedes who came to labor on the same work have
already given up their contract, and left for Minnesota, declaring that they
cannot endure the hot sun, and must seek a colder climate.” (Cohen 87)
The Galveston Tri-Weekly News
reported too that “the planters round about regard them [the Chinese workers]
with approving eyes,” and were interested in trying the Chinese Americans out
on farm work (GWTN 2/4/1870, p. 3).
By
July 1870, this glowing opinion of Chinese workers reversed. The Calvert
Enterprise reported that “The Chinese at work on the Central Railroad are
said to be very lazy and trifling, requiring constant watching.” (GTWN 7/3/1870) Had the Chinese suddenly quit working hard? It is more likely that the railroad company
wanted to rid itself of Chinese workers to appease its white workers and the
white communities that would utilize their rail lines. The Enterprise
continued its rant later in July, “We are determinedly opposed to the Chinese
coming here; we protest against it, as a laboring man . . . We would rather see
every railroad in Texas abandoned, than that one man from the Celestial Empire
should be imported in their construction.”
(GTWN 7/25/1870) As early as
February 1870 the Waco Register had noted “the jealousy of the Irishman towards
the pig-tailed Chinese.” (Dallas Herald 2/3/1870, p. 3)
By
August, the Calvert Enterprise
reported that “the Chinese laborers on the Central road are said to be
worthless, and the company would like to get rid of them.” (Dallas Herald 8/20/1870) The H&TC rail company evidently stopped
paying the Chinese their wages. By
September 1870, according to the Bryan
Appeal, the Chinese “have all quit work, and have entered suit against
their employers for wages and for a failure of compliance with contract.” (Rhoads 6; GTWN 9/2/1870, p.2)
The
Chinese American workers’ suit against the H&TC railroad was one of the
first among a series of petitions and protests for fair labor relations by
Chinese workers throughout the South.
In the summer of 1870, Chinese field workers on a Louisiana plantation
known as the Millaudon estate kidnapped a Chinese labor contractor to protest
working conditions. This led to the
imprisonment of sixteen Chinese “ringleaders.”
The other Chinese attempted to break these leaders out of jail and
refused to work until conditions had improved.
In December, a white overseer on the plantation pushed a Chinese worker,
who retaliated. The overseer shot the
Chinese, and by some accounts, killed him.
The Chinese workers rebelled by taking up clubs and knives and demanding
that the overseer be handed over to them.
In 1871, Chinese workers at W. L. Shaffer’s Cedar Grove plantation in
Louisiana protested the whipping of a Chinese servant. Three Chinese workers were shot, killing one
of them. (Cohen 111)
Throughout 1870 and 1871, hundreds
of the 960 Chinese rail workers on the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad left
their jobs in Alabama for higher wages in Louisiana. The three hundred who stayed on were left in a lurch by the
railroad when it went bankrupt in June 1871, owing six months’ of wages. In protest, the Chinese, black, and white
workers took over the trains and refused to let them run. (Cohen 94)
Many
Chinese workers of the South left plantations and rails to work for higher
wages and better conditions at other plantations and factories. Some workers saved their money and opened
laundry houses and restaurants. Other
workers protested abuses and breaches of contract. Seen in this light, the H&TC rail workers’ lawsuit for lost
wages may have spearheaded a series of Chinese American actions for fair
treatment throughout the South. The
Chinese labor protests of the American South coincided with worldwide Chinese
coolie desertions, escapes, protests, mutinies, and rebellions of that time. Chinese coolies and workers throughout the
Americas were known to have a strong sense of justice.
Southern
capital had attempted to cast Chinese Americans as a “model minority” to
discipline African Americans, but the Chinese Americans shirked this role in
their struggle to improve their work conditions and to gain economic
independence. By the mid-1870’s,
Southern capital stopped contracting with Chinese and Chinese American
laborers. With the end of Reconstruction,
the South also abondoned on its plantations the system of contract labor system
in favor of the system of sharecropping.
Upon
losing or quitting their rail jobs, the Chinese Americans of the H&TC were
thrown into limbo. They were no longer
obligated to their labor contractor, Chew-Ah-Heung. But no longer were they employed, either. They were for the first time far from the
Pacific Ocean, the body of water that connected them to China, far away from
any Chinatown, and even farther away from their families in China.
Chew-Ah-Heung
traveled to New Orleans in November 1870 and advertised in the newspaper that
he had “under his control Two Hundred and Forty (240) CHINESE LABORERS (now in
Calvert, Texas) in need of employment, and whose services he offers to the
community at large.” (Cohen 89)
While
some of the H&TC workers within a few years migrated to other parts of the
nation or returned to China, some of the Chinese Americans worked as field
hands or sharecroppers on Brazos River Valley cotton farms around Calvert and
Hearne. One sharecropping contract of
1872 stipulated that Sin Yong and John See farm thirty acres of James Scott
Hanna’s land near Calvert. The cotton
and corn grown on the land would be split evenly between the two Chinese and
Hanna (Hanna Papers). In 1874, the
Hanna plantation imported fifty-nine more Chinese farm laborers either directly
from China or from Cuba, upon expiration of their coolie labor contracts there
(Rhoads 3). Still more Chinese may have
been brought to Calvert in the 1880’s
(Burnitt interview).
One
Alabama man, in recalling the harvesting of the 1874 Calvert area cotton crop,
wrote that “the country was full of negroes and Chinamen.” (O’Keefe 10) The African Americans and Chinese Americans were together in the
fields picking cotton, as almost all of them at this time were farmers,
sharecroppers, farm hands, and servants (1880 Census). What did the Chinese do besides work? An 1875 invoice charges James Scott Hanna
$9.75 for a pound of opium, which he likely purchased for his workers (Hanna
documents). The Chinese also involved
themselves with their new American democracy.
According to one local historian, 150 Chinese Americans, along with a
large number of African Americans, registered to vote in Hearne in 1874
(McCarver and McCarver 57).
The
1880 U.S. census shows 136 Chinese Texans, 72 of them living in Robertson
County, around Calvert and Hearne (Rhoads 7).
While some of the Chinese American men had wives and family in China,
others married Texas women. Among those
who married local women, some married white women, and most married African
American women. Of the latter, there
was a man named Bar Low, who expanded his name to Bar Low Williams. The name change did not represent a complete
assimilation, however; when discussing the after-life with a Baptist preacher,
Mr. Low Williams declared, “I don’t think I want to go to your heaven, so high,
high, up there in the cold, cold sky.
Your hell sounds better, warm and not so far away.” (Tolbert 6/20/81)
Lie
Chapp, a leader among the Chinese, married an African American woman, and they
gave birth to two sons, Lawyer and Bud (see Burnitt). Chinese American Tom Yepp, Sr. arrived at Calvert as a farm
worker for the Hanna estate (Yepp interview), and later in life ran a café and
a laundry (Burnitt). He and his wife
Moriah had five children (Burnitt). Lie
Chapp and Tom Yepp married sisters, making their children cousins (Rhoads’
notes).
Lawyer
Chapp became the overseer on the John Hill Drennan farm, where African
Americans and Chinese African Americans had for years lived, worked and
sharecropped. Lawyer Chapp was known as
“honest and able.” After his only child
(a daughter) died during childbirth, he became “broken of health,” moved into
the town of Calvert, and passed away (see Burnitt). Lawyer’s brother Bud apparently had children; by the 1970’s three
of Lie Chapp’s great grandchildren – Alonzo, Jimmy, and Sammy Lee – still
resided in Calvert (Johnnie Yepp interview).
By 1981, three of Sammie Lee Chopp’s children were engineers, one
working for the Space Shuttle program.
(Tolbert 1981)
Johnny
Yepp, Tom Yepp’s son and Bud Chapp’s cousin, was 78 years old when Texas
newspaper columnist Frank X. Tolbert wrote, “Certainly there is no more
respected citizen in 1972 Calvert than Johnnie Yepp.” By the time of his death, Yepp had managed the cotton gin in
Calvert for 42 years. He and his wife
Jessie had seven daughters and one son.
Johnny knew little of his father, who died when Johnny was young, but he
did tell Tolbert something about the younger generations: “My children have quite a varied racial
background. My wife had a black mother
and white father. We have some mighty
handsome children.” By the 1980’s, most
of the descendants of the Chinese Americans of Robertson County had left the
Brazos Valley, many of them to pursue successful careers (Tolbert 1981).
Just
months after some African Americans had protested the 1870 arrival of the
Chinese to the South, Chinese Texans began to live, work, and raise families
with African Americans. Segregation and
the taboo of miscegenation had thrown Chinese Texans and black Texans into
overlapping racial classes. The
intermarriage of Chinese men with black women demonstrated that the Chinese
Americans of Robertson County had integrated harmoniously with the black
community. The marriage of Chinese men
with white women demonstrated that even in the nineteenth century, Chinese
Texans successfully challenged the segregation of races. Although the census count of Robertson
County Chinese dwindled down to 5 by the year 1910, this number is deceptive,
as the children of most Chinese American men were counted as black or white,
according to the races of their mothers.
The descendants of Bar Low Williams, Tom Yepp, Lie Chapp and many others,
provide the true count.
During
the 1870’s and 1880’s, Chinese Texan communities sprung up in cities and towns
throughout the state. Although the
Chinese Texans of Robertson County were farm workers and sharecroppers, they
would prove the exceptions over the following years. Railroad work and small business opportunities brought Chinese
Texans to various small towns from West Texas to East Texas, including towns
such as Toyah, Denison, Sanderson, Waco, Tyler, and Beaumont. By 1882, all of Texas’s major cities,
including San Antonio, Houston, El Paso, Austin, Dallas, and Galveston, were
home to burgeoning Chinese Texan communities.
Galveston was the state’s major seaport of immigration and trade, and
Chinese American immigrants formed perhaps the first major urban Texan
Chinatown in the city’s downtown.
From
the 1870’s to the early 1900’s, most of the Chinese Americans of Galveston were
involved with the laundry business; at the height of Chinese laundering, the
1893-94 Galveston directory listed thirty-two Chinese American laundries and
three non-Chinese laundries. While
white businessmen ran steam laundries, which required special equipment, the
Chinese laundries were run completely by hand.
Other
Chinese Galvestonians worked in Chinese-owned restaurants and groceries, and
some worked as house servants. In the
first decades of the twentieth century, some worked as cooks in Galveston’s
extravagant gang-run casinos. Perhaps
the most famous casino was located on the pier and originally had the Chinese
name of Sui Jen (meaning unknown) before it became The Balinese Room. The only Asians there, however, were Chinese
American men working in the kitchen.
One old cook fished the Gulf waters out of a trap door in the
kitchen. Once, upon catching a fish too
big to fit through the trap door, he had to be restrained from taking a hatchet
to the floor (Waldman 7, 8, 54-55).
Some
white Southern capitalists of the 1870’s undoubtedly reveled in the conflicts
and competition between the state’s Chinese and black workers. Nevertheless, laborers and labor organizers
sometimes played into the hands of those who would pit race against race by
scapegoating the culturally different Chinese.
The Galveston strike of July 1877 provides an example of such.
On
July 30, 1877, most of the African American workers of Galveston struck for a
wage increase from $1.50 to $2.00 per day.
(Galveston Daily News, 7/31/1877, p. 2). A man named Martin Burns (race unknown) led the strike, and in a
speech to workers the next evening railed against Native Americans (whom he
labeled “scalp takers”) and Chinese Americans.
According to Burns, the nation had been “built up by the Irishman, the
negro and the mule.” According to the Galveston Daily News, “If the Chinamen
and other foreigners were to be brought here to reap the results of the labor
of those who had developed the country, [Burns] thought that it should be
knocked to pieces, so that the Chinese and others could build it over again.”
(GDN, 8/1/1877, p. 2)
In the first recorded labor strike by
Texas women, black women laundry workers of Galveston joined the general strike
on the morning of July 31 (see Winegarten).
Twenty-five African Americans, including a few men, asked white women
employees of a white-owned steam laundry to join the strike for higher
wages. After keeping laundry workers
out of J.N. Harding’s steam laundry and nailing the entrance shut, they headed
toward the Chinese American laundries.
These “California laundries,” as the Daily
News called them (apparently implying that the Chinese Americans who opened
them came from California), were located in a contiguous line “beginning at
Slam Sing’s, on Twentieth street, between Market and Postoffice, and ending at
Wau Loong’s, corner of Bath avenue and Postoffice street.” The Galveston Chinatown, then, was only a
few blocks south of the great port.
(8/1/1877, GDN, page 2)
According
to the Galveston Daily News, “At
these laundries all the women talked at once, telling Sam Lee, Slam Sling, Wau
Loong and the rest that ‘they must close up and leave this city within fifteen
days, or they would be driven away.’”
These Chinese American men were neither the strikers’ employers nor
their co-workers, but were seen as competition in the laundry business. The men agreed to leave, saying, as quoted
by the Daily News, “yees, yees,”
“Allee rightee,” and “Me go, yees.”
They closed their shops for the day, but there is no evidence that they
closed their shops for good. The strike
ended the next day, with the requested increase in wages, and the city went
back to work, no one apparently forced to leave. The expulsion of a city’s Chinese population was not uncommon in
the western United States, but rare in the South. Threats of expulsion were usually made by whites, not blacks, who
were the victims of just such an expulsion in Texas on at least one
occasion. (see Comanche County entry,
Handbook of Texas Online)
One
event that brought Galvestonians together were the Chinese American funerals of
the nineteenth century, during which a roasted pig was placed at the grave of
the deceased, as a sign of respect.
After the mourners left the cemetery, non-Chinese feasted on the pigs, a
common phenomenon throughout the nation.
One such funeral occurred in 1898, for Sam Lee, a Galveston laundry
owner who was most gruesomely murdered by Chinese American “hatchetman” working
for a tong, or secret society (see Chapter Two).
Two
years later, on September 8, 1900, Galveston suffered one of the deadliest
natural disasters ever to strike North America. The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 killed 6000 of Galveston’s 37,000
residents and so thoroughly destroyed the city that it “called into question
the location of the city itself.”
(Wooster and Calvert 245) Although it is unknown how many
Chinese Galvestonians died in the hurricane, one journalist did record that the
Chinese American men of the city acted heroically during Galveston’s darkest
days. According to the Galveston Daily News (October 4), the
Chinese Americans “called on the authorities and asked to be put to work
without pay, at anything that could relieve the sufferings” of others.
The work assigned them was not of the sort for which “heroes” are detailed. They were told that the desolate men would need a change of clothing, and that the wounded in the improvised hospitals would require clean linen, bed clothing and bandages, and it was suggested to them that they do the washing for the afflicted survivors. They acquiesced gladly, and in a few hours a club of them was formed, which, as long as was necessary, did the unheroic work of keeping the garments of the sufferers clean. It was never necessary to tell them they were needed. They volunteered for any service that would bring relief – and in the performance of every duty, no matter how arduous, they were apt, efficient and earnest.
The news story concluded
that “the conduct of the Galveston Chinese during the late horror will give
much comfort to those who are ever looking forward to an establishment of the
‘universal brotherhood of man.’”
END OF CHAPTER ONE
Works Cited and Partial Bibliography
Note: Many of these sources
were obtained from the research archives and notes of Dr. Edward J.M. Rhoads,
former professor of History at UT Austin.
His article, “Chinese in Texas” (see below), along with Cohen’s Chinese in the Post-Civil
War South (see below) lay the foundation
for this chapter.
Amerasia Journal, special issue, “Asians in
the Americas: Transculturations and Power,” volume 28, number 2. On coolie trade, protests and
uprisings. See especially page 60,
footnote 49 on death rate, page 76 on coolies in Cuba, page 91 on coolie
uprisings in Peru, page 5 on death rate on ships; pages 70 and 93 on number of
coolies.
Barr,
Alwyn, The Black Texans: A history of
African Americans in Texas, 1528-1995, second edition (Norman, Oklahoma:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1996).
Burnitt,
Pauline. Interview, as summarized in
the file “Chinese Farmers of 1870’s,” Robertson County, Texas Historical
Commission (obtained from the notes of Dr. Ed Rhoads).
Cohen,
Lucy M., Chinese in the Post-Civil War
South: A People Without A History (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1984).
Cohen,
Lucy M., “George W. Gift, Chinese Labor Agent in the Post-Civil War South,” Chinese America, History and Perspectives,
1995, pp. 157-178. San Francisco,
CA : Chinese Historical Society of America.
Crouch,
Barry A., The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black
Texans (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1992).
Dallas Herald, 2/3/1870, p. 3. Reprint from the Waco Register.
Dallas Herald, 2/12/1869, p. 2.
Dallas Herald, 7/30/1869, p. 2.
Dallas Herald, 8/20/1870, p. 1. Reprint from the Calvert Enterprise, no date.
Galveston Daily News, “Another Raid,” 8/1/1877,
p. 2, col. 6.
Galveston Daily News, “The Chinese in
Galveston,” 10/4/1900, p. 4.
Galveston Daily News, “Jim Gouy’s Funeral,”
1/20/1908.
Galveston Daily News, “A Chinaman Assassinated,”
2/15/1898.
Galveston Daily News, “A Chinaman’s Funeral,”
6/30/1892, p. 8.
Galveston Daily News, “Chinese Funeral
Services,” 2/16/1898.
Galveston Daily News, “Chinese Registration,”
10/26/1892, p. 5, col. 1.
Galveston Daily News, “The Strike,” 7/31/1877,
page 2, col. 2.
Galveston Daily News, “The Strike at An End,”
8/1/1877, p. 4, col. 2.
Galveston Daily News, “The Strikers in Council,”
8/1/1877, p. 2 col. 2.
Galveston Tri-Weekly News, 1/10/1870, p. 4.
Galveston Tri-Weekly News, 1/19/1870, p. 3. Reprint of story from Calvert Enterprise of January 13, 1870.
Galveston Tri-Weekly News, 2/4/1870, p.3.
Galveston Tri-Weekly News, 2/18/1870, p. 2. Reprint of Waco Register story.
Galveston Tri-Weekly News, 3/9/1870, p. 3. Reprinting story from Centreville Experiment.
Galveston Tri-Weekly News, 7/3/1870, p. 3. Reprint of Calvert Enterprise editorial.
Galveston Tri-Weekly News, 7/25/1870, p.1. Reprint.
Galveston Tri-Weekly News, 9/2/1870, p.2. Reprinting Bryan Appeal article.
Harper’s Weekly, “Coolies,” 8/14/1869, pp.
514-515.
Harper’s Weekly, “Coolies for Texas,”
1/22/1870, p. 53.
Harper’s Weekly, “Domestic Intelligence,”
7/31/1869, p. 483. On Chinese labor
convention.
Handbook of Texas, Handbook of Texas Online,
various entries. Go to
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/.
Houston Chronicle, “Picturesque Chinese Unit,
Landing in 1870, Won Liking of Texans,” 1/11/1942, reviews old Houston
Telegraph articles on early Chinese.
Houston Telegraph, 1/11/1870, pp. 1 and
5. On arrival of Chinese to Galveston.
Houston Telegraph, “Our Celestials,”
1/13/1870, p. 4, col. 5; reprint of a Galveston Daily News article.
Houston Telegraph, “The Coming China Man,”
1/6/1870, p.2, col 4; reprints St. Louis Republican article of 12/29/1870.
Houston Telegraph, no title, under “Texas
Items,” 1/7/1870, p.2 col . 4, dateline Memphis, January 4, 1870.
McCarver,
Norman L. and Norman L. McCarver, Jr., Hearne
on the Brazos (San Antonio, Texas: Century Press of Texas, 1958).
Nunn,
W.C., Texas Under the Carpetbaggers
(Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1997)
O’Keefe,
Rufe, A Cowboy Life (San Antonio: The
Naylor Company, 1936).
Peabody,
Etta B., “Efforts of the South to Import Chinese Coolies, 1865-1870,” (M.A.
Thesis, Baylor University, 1967)
Rhoads,
Edward J.M., “The Chinese in Texas,” The
Southwestern Historical Quarterly 81 (July 1977).
Rhoads,
Edward J.M., ““White Labor” vs. “Coolie Labor”: The “Chinese Question” in
Pennsylvania in the 1870s,” Journal of
American Ethnic History, Winter 2002, pp. 3- 32.
Hanna
Papers, available at Daughters of the Revolution Library, San Antonio,
Texas. Includes sharecropping contract
and receipt from the office of Moody & Jenison, Cotton Factors &
Commission Merchants, Galveston, 4/1/1875.
Southern
Pacific Railroad Archives, Houston, Texas, Record Book #55.
Steiner,
Stan, Fusang: The Chinese Who Built
America: The Chinese Railroad Men (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).
Tolbert,
Frank X., Tolbert’s Texas column, “The Black Chinese of Calvert Town,” Dallas Morning News, 6/25/1972.
Tolbert,
Frank X., Tolbert’s Texas column, Dallas
Morning News, 6/20/1981.
Waldman,
Alan, “Isle of Illicit Pleasure, Part III: The Casinos,” In Between #53, August 1979, pp. 7-57. On Galveston Casinos and brothels, and Chinese cooks.
Ward,
Geoffrey C. and Dayton Duncan, The West: The Complete Text of the Illustrated Companion Volume to
the Acclaimed PBS Television Series (New
York: Back Bay, 1999)
Williams,
David A., Bricks Without Straw: A
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Winegarten,
Ruthe, Black Texan Women: 150 Years of
Trial and Triumph (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995)
Wooster,
Ralph A. with Robert A. Calvert, Texas
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Texas: Texas State Historical Association, 1986)
Yepp,
Johnnie. Notes of interview by Edward
J.M. Rhoads, in person on 2/22/1974 and then by phone on 3/2/1974.
Yun,
Lisa and Ricardo Rene Laremont, “Chinese Coolies and African Slaves in Cuba,
1847-1874,” Journal of Asian American
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