Calls for Segregation in North Yakima
Local property owners threaten to turn their own buildings into 'China tenements' unless Chinese residents are restricted to a specific district.
Much complaint is heard regarding the Chinamen encroaching on block 12. Messrs. Redfield, Schichtl and Scborn are among the complainants and threaten to turn their property into China tenements and abandon the block to the Celestials if they are not barred out entirely. The city fathers should allot the heathen a district and keep them there.
“The city fathers should allot the heathen a district and keep them there.”
This reflects the anti-Chinese exclusion movement that swept Washington during the 1880s and 1890s. The 'solutions' proposed here—segregation and forced displacement—were common tools used by white property owners to exert social and economic control over immigrant communities in early Yakima.
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