The War Between the Texas KKK and Vietnamese Fishers, 1979

Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s were relocated to places across the United States, in an effort to assimilate the people. The people, however, knew they were safer and stronger together, and gathered into the many cities with large Vietnamese American populations today.

One of the places where people relocated was Galveston, Texas, where they got into the shrimp business. Vietnam being a coastal country with a tradition of eating fish and shrimp, the Vietnamese people were skilled at the business. They were also desperate refugees, struggling.

The shrimp business, like many businesses based around limited natural resources, cannot be operated as a competitive marketplace. Unregulated competition would lead to extinction of the shrimp. The shrimping needs to be regulated, by controlling how much shrimp is caught; the way the system was set up, white good ol boys dominated the business.

The entry of Vietnamese people changed the shrimping business. (Washington Post)

What Happened

From Timeline: Tensions came to a head in 1979, when a fistfight broke out between white and Vietnamese fishermen, and a white crabber was shot and killed. Hours later, Vietnamese boats were set aflame and a crab plant that employed a number of Vietnamese workers became a bombing target. The two Vietnamese men accused of the shooting were acquitted on self-defense grounds a few months later. The crabber’s father said, “As long as there’s one gook left in a fishing town on this Gulf Coast, there’s going to be trouble. There’s going to be war.” He was right about the war part.

Laura Smith – Timeline

The Texas KKK saw what was happening, and got triggered. Many were Vietnam vets hyped up on anti-Vietnamese and anti-Communist war training, and when they saw Vietnamese people, they saw Communists (Leon Daniel, UPI)… even though the Vietnamese refugees were anti-Communists who sided with America.

KKK leader Louis Bean was already a terrorist, with a couple bombing, and an attempted attack on Deng Xiaoping under his belt. He took the Klan to Galveston to organize whites.

In February of 1981, Beam led a Klan rally in the Galveston Bay area, playing on a now-familiar cocktail of resentments: a diminished sense of manhood, the anger of a neglected working class, and the immigrant threat to the job security of “real Americans.”

…Two days after Beam started offering trainings on “the right way to burn a shrimp boat,” two Vietnamese shrimp boats went up in flames. The arsonists were never caught.

Laura Smith – Timeline

The Klan continued to organize and terrorize people, burned crosses on Vietnamese peoples lawns, and more (just read the Timeline link). Vietnamese people armed up, and got ready to fight.

The Vietnamese fishermen, with the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed a lawsuit against the KKK.

See: VIETNAMESE, ETC. v. Knights of KKK, 518 F. Supp. 993 (S.D. Tex. 1981)

The court ordered an end to the harassment, and disbanded the KKK. See The KKK and the Vietnamese Fishermen by Andrew Chin for details about the decision.

How Things Are Now

Decades After Clashing With The Klan, A Thriving Vietnamese Community In Texas (John Burnett, NPR)

2019 film Seadrift about the war. (Rose Calahan, Texas Observer) (Charlie Lanyon, SCMP)

Daughter of the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan says her father murdered 30+ Vietnamese (DC Urban Moms Forum)

10 Places with the Most KKK in Texas

The Fight Over Teaching History

Ku Klux Klan by the Texas State Historical Society

2021, Texas SB3 Fight over “Critical Race Theory”. Conservative comment by Tyler O’Neil, PJ Media. Mainstream centrist story Texas Senate passes bill that removes requirement to teach Ku Klux Klan as ‘morally wrong’ by Minyvonne Burke, AP.

What is SB3 about? I think Texas is racist and doesn’t want to teach real history.

A search for “Vietnamese Fisherman” on the Texas State Historical Society turns up this single article, “Vietnamese“. It reads like a Model Minority story, and has no reference to the KKK or the war. The site has the history of the KKK on it, and linked above.

Is it any wonder why SB3, the law to remove teaching requirements that would help minorities, passed overwhelmingly?