September Fourth, Nineteen Hundred and Seven

On the evening of September fourth, nineteen hundred and seven, a mob of between four hundred and five hundred white men moved through the streets of Bellingham toward the neighborhoods where South Asian immigrant workers lived. The men were predominantly members of the Asiatic Exclusion League, an organization that had spread across the Pacific Coast with the explicit goal of driving Asian workers from the region's mills and canneries. The South Asian workers they targeted were mostly Sikhs from the Punjab region of India, though American newspapers of the day routinely labeled them as Hindus, a conflation that spoke more to the ignorance of the reporters than to anything about the men being attacked.

The mob threw the workers into the streets, beat them, and took their valuables. The city authorities, rather than dispersing the mob, gathered the beaten South Asian men and held approximately one hundred of them overnight in the city jail, described as being for their "protective custody." By the following morning, one hundred and twenty-five South Asian workers had been driven out of Bellingham and were making their way toward British Columbia.

According to one report, disputed by local leaders and newspapers, six men were hospitalized. No one was killed. Five men from the mob were arrested.

None were prosecuted. The workers who were expelled were not compensated or invited to return. The Bellingham riots, as they came to be called, were not an isolated event.

Similar mob violence had driven Chinese workers out of towns across the Pacific Northwest in the eighteen eighties. Two months after the Bellingham attack, workers who had fled north to Everett, Washington received similar treatment there. The same patterns played out in Vancouver, British Columbia, that same September.

In two thousand and seven, on the one-hundredth anniversary of the riots, Whatcom County and the city of Bellingham issued a joint proclamation calling September fourth a Day of Healing and Reconciliation. In two thousand and eighteen, a granite monument called the Arch of Healing and Reconciliation was dedicated in downtown Bellingham in memory of three groups of Asian immigrants expelled from the region: the Chinese in eighteen eighty-five, the South Asian Sikhs and Hindus in nineteen hundred and seven, and the Japanese in nineteen forty-two.