Firecrackers and Guard Duty for the New Year
As the Chinese community celebrates, the City Council forces them to pay for their own police watchmen.
The Chinese began the celebration of their New Year yesterday, with the burning of innumerable firecrackers. The Council, at their meeting Friday night, permitted the burning of crackers for eight days, on condition that the Chinese pay to Chief Woolery sufficient money to pay four special watchmen to keep an eye on the city during the festivities. This was agreed to, and the Chinese are paying $12 per day for guards to watch them while their fun is going on. The scene of most of the fun is around the corner of Third and Washington streets, in the vicinity of Wa Chong's buildings, where large crowds of heathen are continually to be seen, and where bunch after bunch of firecrackers are thrown to the tender mercies of the young hoodlums.
“The Chinese are paying $12 per day for guards to watch them while their fun is going on.”
This article highlights the climate of conditional tolerance and targeted policing faced by Seattle’s early Chinese residents in the mid-1880s. While firecracker ordinances are now routine, the requirement for a specific community to fund their own surveillance underscores the institutionalized exclusionary politics that eventually boiled over in the city's anti-Chinese riots later that decade.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.