Mayor points out ‘troubled history’
Council condemns crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders
ANTIOCH >> Acknowledging the wrongs Antioch’s early residents inflicted against Chinese Americans, Mayor Lamar Thorpe on Wednesday apologized for that and introduced a series of proposals to make amends.
“We’re in the middle of a national awakening that has been spun out of anti-Asian American and Pacific Islander hate,” Thorpe said in downtown Waldie Plaza, where Antioch’s Chinatown once stood. “Every day, it seems like all of us are witnesses to some of the most jarring headlines on social media and local and national television news outlets and the newspapers.”
As example, Thorpe pointed to the recent violent attack and robbery of two older Asian women at County Square Market, the city’s only Asian grocery. Police are investigating that incident to determine whether it was a hate crime, he said.
“I’m glad I learned a lot about Antioch’s troubled history when I first moved here from folks like former Mayor Don Freitas,” Thorpe said. “These histories help inform who we are today and avoid mistakes of the past.”
The City Council on Tuesday adopted a proclamation Thorpe introduced condemning the current violence and hate against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. He signed the proclamation and presented it the next day to Conra Costa County’s only Asian American elected official, Andy Li,
president of the Contra Costa Community College District.
In accepting the resolution, Li thanked the Antioch community and noted that partly because “of the pandemic and hate speech from the former president, there has been a surge of crimes” against Asians.
Li also cited Chinese American contributions to the region, such as building the railroad and San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta levees in the 1860s and 1870s.
“It was a great contribution to the community, and they were treated badly,” he said, referring to the 1863 Chinese Exclusion Act that prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers after they had helped build the communities.
To remember the past, the mayor said he wants to the city to designate a Chinatown historic district with historical markers and fund a permanent exhibit at the Antioch Historical Museum, as well as a community mural. He also will ask the city to officially apologize for the terrorizing of Chinese immigrants in its early years, Thorpe said.
Very little was recorded about the city’s historic Chinese community, whose population was estimated to number in the hundreds in the late 1800s. A section of Antioch — one of the state’s oldest communities — was called Chinatown and included Chinese American homes and businesses on both sides of Second Street and on First Street from G to I streets.
Chinese immigrants helped build the levees and railroads and worked in the coal mines and on farms for low wages, disliked by nonAsians who thought they were taking away their jobs.
In the city’s early days, people of Chinese descent were banned from walking Antioch’s streets after sunset, so they built underground tunnels to move around and socialize. In 1876, a White mob forced the Chinese Americans from Antioch and later burned down its Chinatown, according to early newspaper accounts. Some eventually would return to do business and work in the canneries.
“Under this building right here, there are tunnels where we marginalized our Chinese brothers and sisters,” Thorpe said. “During the 19th century, anti-Chinese sentiment resulted in conflict and extremely restrictive regulations and norms concerning where Asian Americans could live and in which occupations they could work, which is often enforced by violence.”
Dwayne Eubanks, president of the Antioch Historical Society, said he would work toward efforts to remember the city’s early Chinese American residents.
“History matters,” he said. “We at the Historical Society are excited because this day is the dawning of a new era for people.”
As Antioch approaches its sesquicentennial year, the city and Historical Society are planning to create a permanent program celebrating China’s history “with exhibits that allow us to examine our past, appreciate the patience, endurance and grace of the Chinese and Asian American Pacific Islander people,” Eubanks said.
Joy Motts of the Rivertown Preservation Society also applauded the efforts to remember “Chinese and Asian residents who were so instrumental in building our community and communities of the Bay Area in the state of California.”
“Some may say that what happened in the past has no effect on who we are today,” she said. “We believe this to be incorrect. And that, to the contrary, to not acknowledge the wrongs or intolerances of yesterday can only make it more plausible that they happen again.”
“We’re not born hateful; hate is passed down through generations,” Councilwoman Tamisha Torres Walker added. “And because Antioch has chosen to rise from the ashes of a horrible past into a more inclusive future, we stand here before you all today, united against racial hate,” she said. “We say that opportunity lives here, and opportunity can only live here when we, as residents, fight just as hard for belonging as we have to get beyond our past and to move forward in a future where we are not defined by our past, but we acknowledge our past.”