by A.C. Thompson

August 4, 2017

 

Demonized as immigrants. Mistaken for Muslims. For more than a century, Sikhs in the U.S. have faced suspicion and violence.

THE 1907 EPISODE in a seaside timber town in Washington came to be known as the Bellingham Riots. Really, though, there were no riots. There was a pogrom.

At the time, the U.S. was suffering through deep economic distress, a panic-filled recession that had begun the year before. Angry anti-immigrant sentiment was ascendant. And hundreds of Sikh men who had traveled from India to Bellingham to toil in the lumber mills paid the price.

Some 500 white men, many of them members of the local Asiatic Exclusion League, descended on the Sikhs and other South Asians, routing them from the bunkhouses where they roomed and chasing them into the streets. Within hours, the entire Sikh population of Bellingham had fled, frantically piling onto trains and boats in search of some sort of refuge. Many had been physically battered.

 

Full article:

www.propublica.org/article/sikhs-in-america-hate-crime-victims-and-bias?utm_source=pardot&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailynewsletter