ABSTRACT
Police cooperation with the forces of “vigilante justice” has a long legacy in the United States. White lynch mobs who terrorized Black communities in the South following the Civil War became a fixture of a Jim Crow legal system. On February 8, 1924, three physicians, a few local reporters, and an Army representative watched through the window of a makeshift gas chamber while Gee Jon's head bobbed gently up and down after guards released “a spray of liquid hydrocyanic gas into the stone death chamber.” Gee's actions placed him in the gas chamber, but police brutality toward Chinese immigrants in the West during the nineteenth century explains why he and other Chinese often found their place in this criminal landscape. Anti-Chinese racism and White supremacy reigned in the West long before Gee Jon's execution and inaction was the brutal police response to the pleas for help from vulnerable Asian communities.
