thinking out loud

zuky:

This innocent-looking house is believed to be the only Chinese home to survive the Rock Springs Massacre in 1885. At that time, more than 300 Chinese miners were living in 80 houses in Rock Springs, Wyoming, when a white mob went on a rampage, murdering and mutilating an unknown number of Chinese people (at least dozens, probably hundreds), torching 79 homes, throwing corpses into the fires and burning some people who could not escape alive.

This photo comes from a new online project called No Place For Your Kind (via Angry Asian Man), which aims to photograph and document contemporary locations where anti-Chinese violence took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Chinese in America. According to the site:

From 1870 to 1910 a violent anti-Chinese movement in this country instigated forced removals of entire Chinese communities, major riots against Chinese residents and even horrific massacres of Chinese immigrants. Some of these actions, such the riot in Rock Springs, Wyoming, were among the most violent events in American history, yet few people are aware of this part of our American culture.

Photographer Tim Greyhavens has spent more than five years researching and documenting the exact locations of many of these events, tracing the history of the past to the landscapes of today. Unlike many historical sites, there has been little recognition of the specific places where these events took place. For most sites there are no plaques or markers, no guidebook references – nothing at all to indicate what happened. Greyhavens has recorded these seemingly commonplace scenes and combined them with written descriptions of what took place there. The photographs and the text together are integral parts of the documentation for this project.