September 1854 – Shasta County, California: Shasta County Lynching

In September 1854, in Millville (Shasta County), a white mob lynched a Chinese miner based on an allegation that he had “outraged” (assaulted) a young white girl. The Chinese man was hanged by a group of vigilantes without trial, making this one of the earliest confirmed lynchings of a Chinese immigrant in U.S. history. Several local newspapers reported that the molestation charge was dubious or outright false. Significantly, this lynching came just as California courts barred Chinese testimony against whites in the 1854 People v Hall ruling. People v.Hall effectively immunized white vigilantes from legal consequences. The Shasta County lynching served a racist agenda to terrorize and exclude Chinese immigrants. The brutality of this early lynching demonstrates how frontier communities sacrificed Chinese lives to the “justice” of the mob. This pattern of racial terror would persist into the 20th century.