The Mayor Who Refused to Expel
When an outsider asked to ban Chinese residents from Tacoma, Mayor Jacob Mann stood his ground against the era's tide of exclusion.
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.
Mayor Mann, of Tacoma, received the following telegram from Portland Monday: 'Hen Wang Tai,' asks: 'Will you give me a permit to take a couple of Chinese to Tacoma?' Mr. Mann says he replied that as Mayor of Tacoma he had no right to forbid anybody’s coming to or going from the city, and added: 'Persons behaving themselves are never molested in Tacoma. You had better apply to the hotel.' Nothing more was heard of 'Hen Wang Tai.'
“I replied that as Mayor of Tacoma he had no right to forbid anybody’s coming to or going from the city.”
In 1887, just two years after the violent expulsion of Tacoma’s Chinese community, Mayor Jacob Mann’s refusal to participate in further exclusionary gatekeeping marked a rare, quiet act of resistance against the prevailing tide of anti-Chinese terror that defined the era's Pacific Northwest politics.
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