It’s 150 years since Chinese migrants were brought in to build the Transcontinental Railroad

[yuiyoshida]

The greatest engineering feat of the 19th century began in 1863, when the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads broke ground. Two years later, contractors began hiring large numbers of Chinese migrants, many from California, to help with the monumental construction project.

In July 1865, the Central Pacific imported the first major group of Chinese workers from China. They were sent to the Sierra Nevadas, where they worked around-the-clock to build 13 tunnels through the mountains. By 1867, 8,000 men were building tunnels and another 3,000 were laying track.

Working conditions were brutal and racism was rampant. In 1867, several thousand Chinese workers went on strike, demanding a pay raise from $35 to $40 a month and an eight-hour work day. The management starved the workers by cutting off food trains, and the strike ended unsuccessfully.

Unsurprisingly, white workers held almost all management positions and made more than their Chinese counterparts. When an Irish railroad worker killed a Chinese man in Texas, his case was dismissed because the judge could find no law that prohibited the killing of Chinese people. According to state law, only killing whites, African Americans and Mexicans was illegal.



http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/2015/05/26/150-years-chinese-migrants-were-brought-in-to-build-the-transcontinental-railroad/

[AsahinaKimi]

1. Thanks for posting...

I always knew building a railroad had been brutal, but some of that information, wow... the photos at SF gate are interesting.

[yuiyoshida]

3. scary stuff, sis...

omg, that Judge!

[AsahinaKimi]

5. yeah I saw that...

wow.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

2. And, then, they were rewarded with racist "exclusion" laws.

[yuiyoshida]

4. This is the kind of stuff

You never hear about in High School History class... why not? geeze!

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

6. History in high school is advertising and/or propaganda.

And, boring. I ended up a history major in college because of what I learned outside high-school history classes.

I'm now reading "1941" which is about what was going on in Japan prior to Pearl Harbor and what led up to it. There's a helluva lot more to history than the simple minded good guys/bad guys way of looking at it.

[hunter]

7. When I was a kid my older white San Francisco and other Cali. relatives were still utterly clueless.

My great aunt, a very sweet person who bore no ill will to anyone who hadn't actually assaulted her or stolen her money, used to speak fondly of her childhood family's Chinese laundryman and Irish housekeeper-cook. The "Chinaman" always brought her and my grandma exotic sweets when he came to drop off and pick up the laundry. He was such a good and trustworthy fellow he could collect the dirty laundry directly from anywhere in the house. That's how "progressive" these great grandparents were. If they even recognized the history of the San Francisco Chinese and Irish, they didn't like to think about it too much.

One of my grandfathers, even more Wild West than 19th century San Francisco, was a similar sort. He got upset that I was marrying in his words, "a Mexican Girl." Men in his family did not marry "Mexican Girls." Like he should talk... some of his own ancestors were unspeakably Irish and Catholic, and no matter that many of my wife's ancestors were already settled here in the Americas for thousands of years before his people arrived. He boycotted our wedding, but to his credit, he got over it.

[freshwest]

8. I've read that the bosses would kill entire crews when payday arrived. As bad as Qatar.

It wasn't called slavery, but by any other name, it would be. Anyone nostalgic for the 'good old days' needs an education.