‘Focused on healing’: Denver apologizes for anti-Chinese race riot

What causes a town to disappear without a trace?

In the case of a vanished Chinatown: hate.

On Saturday, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock apologized to descendants of early Chinese immigrants for the Colorado capital’s complicity in “nearly a century of violence and discrimination.” That included the dissolution of the city’s Chinatown, a decadeslong vanishing act after an anti-Chinese race riot.

Following similar contrition in at least four other cities in California, the apology comes amid raised awareness of pandemic-related aggression against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. It also affirms the work of local advocates seeking to correct the record on an overlooked history.

“Let’s reconcile and let’s move forward. ... Let’s tell our story, and let’s make sure that it’s preserved for future generations,” Linda Lung tells the Monitor. Honored this past weekend with a commemorative coin, she’s a descendant of Chinese business owners who settled in Colorado in the early 1900s, after fleeing anti-Chinese violence in other Western states.

“While the city cannot erase past injustices” against Chinese immigrants and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, said Mayor Hancock, “the city owes them a long-overdue apology.”

That’s 142 years overdue, for those counting back to the day a laundry worker was killed. 

“Hop Alley”

Early Chinese immigration can be traced along the tracks of the transcontinental railroad, which was built by thousands of Chinese workers in the 1860s. Many had originally arrived in California to cash in on the gold rush and send remittances home.

As former Colorado state historian William Wei notes, the westward expansion era tolerated Chinese more as menial laborers than as settlers. Long before COVID-19-era Sinophobia, Chinese in the American West were considered bearers of disease – both literal and societal – by white counterparts who were often immigrants themselves.

In the 1870s, one of over 200 Chinatowns in the American West flourished in Denver. Today, this downtown area on and around Wazee Street is lined with offices, sleek cafes, and parking meters; back then it offered rest and recreation for a working-class ethnic enclave, bustling with laundries, Chinese eateries, and herbal medicine shops.

The Oct. 31, 1880, anti-Chinese riot likely began as a saloon altercation between Chinese and white laborers. An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 locals swarmed Chinatown, damaging structures, assaulting residents, and killing one laundry worker, Look Young. An estimated $53,000 or more in damages to Chinese businesses and homes – roughly $1.5 million in today’s dollars – was never compensated.

“Nevertheless, most people remained to rebuild the community, because it was their home,” says Dr. Wei, professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder. However, discrimination and marginalization into menial jobs made it difficult to make a living. Some residents left for larger Chinatowns on the East and West coasts, where there was more work. 

Two years after the violence, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned the immigration of Chinese laborers. By World War II, the Chinatown population had dwindled; then the area underwent urban renewal. In 2020, Mayor Hancock declared Oct. 31 Denver’s Chinatown Commemoration Day.

There’s no trace of Chinatown now, besides a small plaque near the Coors Field baseball stadium that refers to the “Hop Alley/Chinese Riot of 1880” – “hop” being a slang reference to opium. Dr. Wei and others have contested the plaque as offensive and misleading, arguing the public should understand it as an anti-Chinese riot. He’s joined advocates involved in trying to develop alternative historical markers, The Colorado Sun has reported.

Beyond apology to action

Linda Jew is the great-granddaughter of Chinese pioneer Chin Lin Sou, a noted railroad foreman who later turned to mining. Ms. Jew recalls slurs hurled at her while growing up in the 1950s, and how she’d avoid playing in the front yard because other children would throw rocks at her.

“Every day we walked home from school, they would wait for us to harass us,” she says at her home in Parker, Colorado. During an interview, her petite white dog, Orion, checks up on her, his tags tinkling as he approaches. 

Even as an adult, the dental hygienist, a proud American and fourth-generation Coloradan, says she’s been unnerved by the question “What are you?” She hopes the Denver apology will raise awareness of anti-Chinese discrimination.

Colorado Asian Pacific United, a local advocacy coalition, pushed for the apology and helped draft the language with the office of the mayor, which will continue to partner with the group. (Dr. Wei, a founding member, serves on the CAPU board of directors, and Ms. Lung is on a family history committee.) CAPU counts four cities in California – Antioch, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Francisco – that have apologized for the treatment and massacre of early Chinese immigrants. 

The census estimates the Asian population of majority-white Denver at around 4%. Following five years of no recorded incidents, Denver Police Department data shows three bias-motivated cases categorized as anti-Asian in 2020, followed by five in 2021. Several cities across the United States have reported upticks in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic.

The Denver government has pledged that actions will follow words. At the livestreamed event held at the University of Colorado Denver, the mayor announced his administration’s support for the development of an Asian Pacific historic district, sponsorship of public murals, creation of a public education program on Asian Pacific Coloradans, and establishment of an Asian Pacific American community museum, which would be “the first of its kind in the Rocky Mountain region,” he said to applause. 

“There is a racial reckoning that is going on across the country, which is long overdue. And this is a part of that,” says Derek Okubo, executive director of the Agency for Human Rights & Community Partnerships within the mayor’s office.

“We are focused on healing,” says Mr. Okubo, whose own family survived Japanese American detention during World War II. “In order to heal as a community ... you have to acknowledge the past.”