Tacoma Remembrance of 1885 Injustice Against Chinese with Reconciliation

In 1885, one of the most outrageous acts of racism against Chinese occurred in Tacoma, Washington where Chinese were forcibly expelled from the town on very short notice.  An earlier post on this blog gives more details of this extreme action which was adopted in other western towns such as Eureka and Truckee, Nevada.

Civic leaders of Tacoma recognized the injustice of the 1885 mistreatment of Chinese and instead of ignoring this history acted to acknowledge this horrendous past and work toward some form of redress, with the creation of a Reconciliation Park, as described in an outstanding website created by students of digital media at the University of Puget Sound. 

The park is a 3.9-acre shoreline plot in Tacoma, within a half mile of the site of Little Canton, where many Chinese residents of Tacoma lived before they were expelled in 1885. The park, which officially opened in 2011, currently includes a waterfront trail, a bridge with a Chinese motif, and a pavilion donated by Tacoma’s sister city, Fuzhou, China.