Fifty for 150: Racist mob attacks Denver Chinese community in 1880 riot

On Halloween night in 1880, a white mob targeted Chinese residents in Denver after a drunken saloon fight, ransacked their homes and businesses, and killed a Chinese man. The killers were never punished and the city failed to compensate people for the tens of thousands of dollars in damage done during the anti-Chinese riot.

The bar fight between Chinese and white patrons spilled onto the street, and a violent mob soon formed in Denver’s Chinatown near the 1600 block of Wazee Street. The working-class area was known then as “Hop Alley,” a derogatory moniker that alluded to the opium use in the area, according to the Molly Brown House Museum.

At the time of the riot, around 300 Chinese residents lived in Denver. Many of them had moved to the city at the government’s encouragement to fill a labor shortage for railroads and mines. By the 1870s and 1880s, there was rampant, racist anti-Chinese rhetoric published in newspapers and spread by elected officials, and the matter of Chinese immigration was a key issue in the 1880 presidential election. The night before the riot, the Democratic Party in Denver held a parade in which many attendees held anti-Chinese posters.

Reports say the fight began at John Asmussen’s Saloon when white men followed Chinese patrons out the back door and attacked them. By midafternoon, there were a few thousand rioters, and they burned and raided most Chinese businesses by early evening.

“As the darkness increased—and it soon became very black—the fury of the crowd rose. At last the crowd opened vent. The crowd at Wazee Street rushed up to the houses of the Chinese and began to batter in the doors and windows. The throng in the street grew and grew,” said a Nov. 1, 1880, account in the Rocky Mountain Daily News. “‘The Chinese must go!’ This was shouted from a thousand voices at the same time. The shout rose into a roar and the roar into a blending of fury and determination which shook the earth. It was awful. Pandemonium seemed to reign supreme.”

The article describes men entering buildings and throwing clothing, dishes and other household items out of windows

Rioters wounded hundreds of people and killed a laundryman named Look Young. Residents reported over $53,000 in damage, about $1.7 million today. None of those claims were paid.

The city of Denver officially apologized to the Chinese community in 2022. In a letter, then-Mayor Michael Hancock wrote that while the city “cannot erase past injustices against Chinese immigrants and the Asian American and Pacific Island communities, the city owes them a long overdue apology.”

“The city police force failed to protect its Chinese residents from the violent mob that was intent on expelling them from the area. The city courts failed to punish the murderers of Look Young even though there were credible eyewitnesses to his beating and lynching. The city government failed to compensate Chinese residents for the damages to their property,” the apology letter says.

That same year, after lobbying from Colorado Asian Pacific United, the city removed an inaccurate historical marker about the riot following years of criticism from historians and community members. That plaque called the event the “Chinese Riot of 1880,” rather than an anti-Chinese attack, did not name Young, and praised white citizens for protecting Chinese victims.

CAPU has worked to install two murals within Denver’s historic Chinatown and three historical markers around downtown Denver.