When I saw this story about historical archeologists digging in Wyoming to study a massacre of Chinese residents that happened in 1885, I thought that the Rock Springs massacre was just one of a few massacres of Chinese, such as this one in Oregon, that happened at a time of anti-Chinese sentiment around the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act. It turns out that this was not just a rare example, but one of many in a part of American history of called The Driving Out. I have never heard that term before, and I didn’t realize how many and how systematic these attacks were.
In this NPR interview, Professor Jean Pfaelzer described how she first got interested in the The Driving Out. When she taught at Humboldt State University in northwestern California, she noticed that she had no Asian American students. She asked locals about that, and one of them said that Chinese Americans won’t send their children there as they were driven out one hundred years ago. She was inspired to document this history in a book called Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. The Rock Springs incident was not isolated – Pfaelzer’s count of incidents of Chinese being driven out of towns reached 250 within a year of starting her research.
One might think that the Chinese Americans were helpless and did nothing to fight back against this treatment. They resisted in many ways, physically and legally. One part of resistence resulted in the establishment of birthright citizenship, currently a topic of controversy, through The United States vs Wong Kim Ark. That case along makes the history of the Driving Out especially relevant today.
At least 28 Chinese were killed in Rock Springs, but no one was indicted for these murders. The article about Rock Springs was written by Michael Luo, who derived it from his book Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.
