At the time of the massacre, I heard a shot just as I was about to leave my office, and learned that it had been fired from that part of Chinatown facing Los Angeles Street; and I soon ascertained that it had ended Thompson’s life. Anticipating no further trouble, however, I went home to dinner. When I returned to town, news of the riot had spread, and with my neighbors, Cameron E. Thom and John G. Downey, I hurried to the scene.

— Harris Newmark, 1871 · Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853–1913 (1916) · via Project Gutenberg

Why it's here: On October 24, 1871, after a shootout between rival Chinese factions killed a rancher, Robert Thompson, a mob of about 500 attacked the Chinese quarter. Nineteen Chinese men were killed, fifteen of them hanged: more than a tenth of the city’s Chinese population. Some historians call it the largest mass lynching in American history; eight men were convicted of manslaughter. Newmark called it “one of the most disgraceful of all disturbances” he saw in Los Angeles. His account uses the racist language of his time, so we quote only what he witnessed himself.