On this day, February 7, in 1886

More than 400 Chinese people were forcefully driven from their homes in Seattle Washington by a rioting mob of white citizens who wanted them gone. The governor of Washington State quickly ordered that they not be forced to leave, but many Chinese people gathered that next morning at the docks and voluntarily left Seattle on the next boat to San Francisco. Four years before this, the United States government had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, and since that date, violence and abuse against people of Chinese decent began to heavily increase. Unfortunately, violence is often the outcome when government legislation seems to legitimize the 'inferior' status of a certain group.