BELLINGHAM, WASHINGTON, September 3, 2007: Tuesday marks the 100-year anniversary of Bellingham’s “Hindu” riots, when a mob rounded up the city’s East Indian mill workers and ordered them out of town. Bellingham is a major town in Washington State, which sits on the US Pacific coast next to Canada’s province of British Columbia. On Sept. 4, 1907, roving gangs of thugs walked from mill to mill, from boarding house to boarding house, hauling out “Hindus,” roughing them up and ordering them to get out of town. “Hindu” was the common label in Canada and the U.S. for all East Indians, though most early 20th century immigrants from India were Sikhs from the Punjab region. The next day, city officials decried the use of force and hooliganism on the immigrants, fretting that Bellingham would get a reputation for lawlessness. But most people — judging by the words of city officials, business leaders and newspaper editors — were pleased with the result.
“While any good citizen must be unalterably opposed to the means employed,” editorialized “The Reveille” soon after the riot, “the result of the crusade against the Hindus cannot but cause a general and intense satisfaction.” Within a couple of days, most of the city’s estimated 250 Indian immigrants had boarded trains for points north and south. By the end of the week, an even larger body of thugs in Vancouver, B.C., emboldened by an anti-Asian rally there and, perhaps, Bellingham’s evictions, trashed the city’s Chinatown district. By the end of the year similar riots erupted along the Pacific Coast. Within a decade, the U.S. would pass restrictions barring most Asians from immigrating at all. It would be nearly the end of the 20th century before significant numbers of East Indians would call Whatcom County (of which Bellingham is part) home again. By 1907, hostility against Asian immigrants had long been brewing in the Pacific Northwest. Many of Bellingham’s residents could remember when the town’s Chinese immigrants had been thrown out in 1885. Asian immigrants provided cheap labor for the physically demanding fishing and timber jobs that fueled the booming economy. But white workers also feared the immigrants posed competition for jobs.
“It was a city going through an immense amount of social and physical change, and all these new people coming in, scrambling for jobs,” said Erika Lee, an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota. “American migrants coming from the East Coast felt a sense of privilege coming to the West. This was part of their pioneer journey. They were coming to make it,” Lee said. They were horrified at the idea of these jobs going to “unassimilable, really foreign, exotic people,” as East Indians were described in the racial hierarchy of the era.
Chinese immigration to the U.S. had been cut off in 1902, but immigrants from Japan, India and the Philippines were arriving to take their places in the region’s resource-based industries. South Asian migration was particularly sudden that year, Lee said, with about 600 East Indians arriving in the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 1907.
To read about today’s Sikh arrivals, click here. When Satpal Sidhu moved to Bellingham from Canada with his family in the mid-’80s, he thought the dozen or so East Indian families already here were among the first to settle in Whatcom County. He was surprised to learn there were about 200 East Indian lumber mill workers in Bellingham around the turn of the century — until they were run out of town in a 1907 race riot. “Our people have been here 100 years,” said Sidhu, now a leader at the county’s main Sikh temple. “Most of our community has gathered here in the last 10 years.” Just over the border, in Canada, where some East Indian families have lived since the early 1900s, some older residents “have this kind of memory — don’t go to America, just stay in Canada,” he said. “That’s why a lot of people never bothered to come across.” Today, the county’s Sikh community includes about 600 to 700 families, Sidhu said. About 20 to 25 percent work on family-owned farms. Many others own small businesses like motels and gas stations, and many work in the education and health care sectors, he said. The Sikh temple will hold an open house Sept. 13 to mark the anniversary of the riot. They picked the date because it was on Sept. 13, 2001, that some kids or young men in a pickup truck hurled eggs and rocks and shot paintballs at the Pole Road temple’s sign, apparently in some kind of misguided response to the terrorist attacks. One of the neighbors caught them and the vandals sped away. When word got out, 150 to 200 people from outside the Sikh community came to the temple for a gathering as a sign of solidarity, Sidhu said, a gesture that made quite an impact on the congregation. “There are a lot of well-wishers, a lot of good people around in the community,” Sidhu said. “We want to recognize that, to welcome other people, to come visit us and learn more about us.”