The Minister Who Faced Down the Mob
How a local pastor stood against the 1886 anti-Chinese riots and became a target of the city's fury.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The nomination of Rev. Louis Albert Banks for governor by the Prohibitionists of Massachusetts recalls to the people of Seattle the Chinese riots of 1885-86, in suppressing which this same preacher performed a prominent part. Mr. Banks was at that time pastor of the Battery Street Methodist Episcopal Church. On the famous Sunday, February 7, after preaching in his church, he was one of the first to join the Home Guards to protect the Chinese community. At the corner of Commercial and Main streets, the mob attacked the line. When the guards fired into the crowd, wounding six men, the mob set up a howl for the blood of Mr. Banks, E. M. Carr, and Judge Thomas Burke, making threats that they would be publicly hanged before nightfall. Despite several attempts by agitators to waylay and kill him, Banks survived his Seattle years before moving to Boston. He remains a figure remembered for both his religious fervor and his active defense of those targeted by the anti-Chinese movement.
“They seemed to be the marked men by the mob and threats were openly made that they would be publicly hanged before nightfall.”
Louis Albert Banks was a polarizing figure who bridged the gap between Gilded Age moral crusades and political reform. Today, his defense of Seattle's Chinese population against violent nativism is a stark reminder of the city's volatile history regarding exclusion and the physical geography of those early, dark conflicts near the waterfront.
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