A speech on events past and current, by Dr. Gregory Youtz, Vice President of the CRPF,
This statement was prepared and orated at the 2025 Walk for Reconciliation Against Racism by Dr. Gregory Youtz, on behalf of the CRPF. See below for the full transcript:
In 2025, we mark 140 years since the 1885 expulsion of approximately 1000 Chinese residents from the Tacoma, Pierce County area: the Tacoma Method. On that day, after a year-long campaign to intimidate them into leaving voluntarily, the last 200 Chinese remaining in Tacoma- men, women and children, were dragged from their houses and businesses, marched at gunpoint 8 miles through driving rain to the Lakebay Railroad Station in what is now Lakewood, and forced onto trains for Portland. None ever returned and no descendants of those pioneers have ever been found- perhaps because their trauma, their anger and their disgust at the City of Tacoma was too deep to ever consider reconnecting. The memory of what happened here was burned into the collective minds of Chinese everywhere, and Tacoma was shunned by generations of Chinese. Tacoma today has no Chinatown, and this absence still looms large as we compare ourselves to other sizable West Coast cities. The erasure is still felt and remains one of Tacoma’s darkest legacies- a wound still in need of healing.
Not just jobs and businesses were lost during the “Tacoma Method.” Real people were terrified, traumatized, made homeless and destitute. They were rounded up by armed men, often masked, who led them away from their homes, shops, jobs and dreams to a future of fear and uncertainty. They were told to “go back to where you came from,” that “there is no place for someone who looks like you in this new America.” It was in large part the international criticism heaped upon Tacoma that stopped other cities from completely eradicating their own Chinatowns across the American West. It is Tacoma’s name by which this violence has become known to history: The Tacoma Method.
And yet, as we stand here today, remembering what happened to our Chinese neighbors in 1885, we are a short walk from the Northwest Detention Center, one of the largest such facilities in the country, a place where, daily, armed, often masked men bring people who have been picked up at their homes, workplaces or on the streets, and where they are kept often without trial, legal counsel or opportunity to contest their status as “illegals.” They are picked up often because “they look like the kind of people who have no place in this New America.” They are swept up in a well-organized campaign of intimidation led by politicians and media figures at the highest levels of government- eerily similar to what happened in 1885.
Thus, remembering this history is not just looking back; it is also looking at ourselves in the mirror today, asking us not just what would we have done back in 1885, but what are we doing today? Remembering history- the Chinese Expulsion, the forced removal of Tribal people to “Reservations,” the imprisonment of people of Japanese heritage during WWII, the redlining of African American communities, the mixed reception of Southeast Asian immigrants and refugees- all of this is not just “in the past,” it is the lived experience of too many of our neighbors in Tacoma and Pierce County and Washington State and The United States of America today. Remembering history is a way we commit ourselves to act against racism and fear and hate and division, and FOR the lives and welfare of real individual people in our city, and for their communities, their cultures and their opportunities to pursue their dreams. Remembering history is the foundation for justice, healing, and a stronger, more inclusive Tacoma.
Through this Walk for Reconciliation Against Racism and through the Chinese Reconciliation Park, we take time to remember the past while also asking ourselves what can we do- what should we do, to support the individuals and families in our neighborhood, in our city, who are feeling the same pressures, the same fears, the same organized campaigns of intimidation that the Chinese pioneers of 1885 felt. How can we use our ballots, our money, our time and our passion to work FOR the flourishing of everyone in our city, everyone in all our beautiful difference?
This is the ongoing work of Reconciliation. And it takes time, and patience, and commitment and courage and a refusal to give up or just look away. We cannot change the past. But we can build the future. And we have an opportunity to do some of that building today as we remember and walk and celebrate the Tacoma we imagine as a place where everyone has a safe home, a vibrant community and a sense that “we belong here.”
So let us walk, on the unceded tribal lands of the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, past the places where Chinese and then Japanese people had their homes and businesses, along the tracks where generations of immigrants and refugees lived and worked and built our city, and finally to the Chinese Reconciliation Park where we can gather to remember the past and recommit ourselves to the work of reconciliation and peace.