The 1878 San Francisco riots was a series of racially-motivated violent attacks against San Francisco's Chinese immigrant community that occurred in 1878, carried out by members of the anti-Chinese Teddy Boys gang and predominantly Irish Workingmen movement.
In the aftermath of the Panic of 1873, a "Long Depression" beset the United States' once-booming postwar economy, causing nominal wages to decline by one-quarter and thousands of American businesses to fail. Many California industrialists turned to hiring Chinese contract laborers as a cheaper alternative to paying reasonable wages for Irish workers, who had, before the mass Chinese immigration and Black emancipation of the postwar years, been the main source of cheap labor in the West and Northeast. This caused widespread anti-Chinese sentiment among San Francisco's predominantly-Irish working class, which responded by forming the anti-Chinese Workingmen movement, with Civil War veteran and labor unionist Dylan Leary at its head. Throughout 1878, the Workingmen bombed factories that employed Chinese labor and assaulted Chinese workers on their way to their workplaces. The endemic unemployment of Irish immigrants, as well as rising violence in Chinatown due to the start of the "Tong Wars", led to rising racial tensions, partly stoked by Deputy Mayor Walter Buckley, who had the goal of providing political capital to US Senator Robert Crestwood, who supported a Chinese Exclusion Act and who promised Buckley a future in Washington in Buckley helped build the anti-Chinese platform on which he would run for President in 1880.
Racial tensions exploded after Mayor Samuel Blake was accidentally killed by his wife Penelope's Chinese manservant Jacob Fok, who had come to his mistress' aid upon seeing the mayor drunkenly attack her. News of a Chinese man murdering the Mayor spread rapidly, as Mayor Blake had recently attempted to win the support of the Irish working-class by promising to review the city's labor laws and confine employment to white American workers. The San Francisco Police Department scoured Chinatown for Fok, who approached the black marketeer Wang Chao and offered him a great sum of money to help him escape. Chao agreed to help him escape to China in a coffin, but declined his money; however, Long Zii Tong boss Mai Ling pressured him to betray the plan to the police to spare Chinatown the wrath of the Workingmen. Fok was pulled from the coffin by the police and placed in a wagon, but Irish laborers led by Patrick Tully, suspicious of the eight-man guard placed around the wagon, halted the vehicle and demanded that the police hand over the Mayor's murderer. When Sergeant Bill O'Hara and his men refused, Tully and his thugs rushed the wagon, savagely beating the police and dragging Fok out of the wagon. Fok was horrifically beaten before being lynched from a lamppost in front of the Banshee pub; Leary, who had been asleep until the riot began, was shocked to see his girlfriend Sophie Mercer's sister's manservant being hanged, but he was unable to do anything to stop the mob from killing him.
Adrenaline rushing, Tully decided to redirect the angry mob to Chinatown, saying that they would do the police's jobs for them. The Irish mob marched into Chinatown, leaving behind Fok's body. The Workingmen hit fast and hard, knocking over and beating every man, woman, and child in sight and destroying shops and property. The warring Hop Wei Tong and Long Zii Tong were forced to join forces to stop the Irish mob from destroying their homes, and SFPD officer Richard Lee intervened by shooting the mob's leader, Tully, dead. The Tongs used sharp weapons to kill several Workingmen, gradually driving them out of the neighborhood. Some of the rioters attacked Ah Toy's brothel before Wang Chao shot one man dead and Ah Toy's bodyguard killed several other. Young Jun slashed his way through a mob attacking the laundromat, and Father Jun saved his life from one of his attackers.
With the Irish driven out of Chinatown, a brief peace held before the Tongs decided that they would ultimately go back to dicing each other, and Ah Toy would go back to selling sex. The SFPD came in to drive off any remaining rioters, and injured Irishmen were brought back to the Banshee for treatment.
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