Rocklin teen wants town to recognize dark past with Chinese laborers. Here’s his push
A Rocklin high school graduate is calling on the district board to demand change after learning his high school is named for a wealthy white landowner who historians say exploited Chinese laborers.
Diego Liebman graduated from Whitney High School on Thursday. The school is named for Joel Parker Whitney, a white landowner who was once one of Placer County’s richest men. It’s a legacy Leibman, 17, said he’d never given a second thought.
But after learning that Whitney’s fortune was built on the backs of Chinese laborers that were likely underpaid and overworked, Leibman decided to call on the school district to reconcile with this history.
He’s proposed to mandate Asian American history – specifically, history about their contributions to California and the discrimination they faced – as part of the district-wide curriculum, and to name one of the school buildings after a Chinese American. He plans to push for these changes during the Rocklin Unified School District board meeting on Aug. 5.
“It’s really about not necessarily erasing history, but broadening its scope to include all of the perspectives that were involved,” Leibman said. “It might be difficult, but it’s just about broadening the historical narrative around it … The community at large has no information about this.”
The city of Rocklin has a dark past when it comes to Chinese relations – one that, along with the exploitation of Chinese laborers by white landowners, repeats throughout state history, according to several historians.
But it’s a complicated past, historians emphasized, one that’s not as simple as calling Chinese laborers victims. Though they often were tasked with hard physical labor for lower wages and poorer conditions, historians noted that stories of Chinese resistance exist alongside stories of hardship.
This complexity is all the more reason why Rocklin has to wrestle with the truth of its own past and the legacy of the man it’s named its landmarks for, Leibman said. He opened a Change.org petition last week which had more than 500 signatures as of Thursday night.
“(Adding Asian American history to RUSD’s curriculum) is a concrete thing that will affect generations of students” Leibman said. “It’s really, really easy in an affluent community that’s primarily white … to think these problems don’t extend to where you are, but they clearly do.”
Reckoning with Rocklin’s history
Whitney was a white landowner who joined San Francisco’s Gold Rush from Boston in 1852. After building a fortune through selling game birds, the canary trade and mining, he purchased 18,000 acres of sheep-farming land. There, he planted fruit orchards and built the Whitney Ranch, becoming one of the wealthiest people in Placer County.
Whitney used Chinese laborers for this kind of work, historians said. According to University of California, Davis historian Cecilia Tsu, fruit cultivation – and the backbreaking work of digging ditches and building roads for orchards and farms – was the kind of labor Chinese immigrants did statewide at the time. And according to a National Park Service field record, Whitney hired about 1,000 Chinese laborers on his ranch.
Yet no official census records show their existence. According to Rocklin Historical Society member Gary Day, it’s likely because Whitney hired them after they were violently forced out of Rocklin.
On Sept. 15, 1877, several Chinese men were accused of killing a white woman at a ranch house in Secret Ravine, according to historian Jean Pfaelzer’s book, “Driven Out.” Although the evidence against them was “thin,” Pfaelzer wrote, the men were arrested.
There are different accounts of the murder’s details, Day said, but what happened next was undisputed by historians.
Angry Rocklin residents gathered outside the jail, threatening to lynch the Chinese men before dawn. The next day, all 400 of Rocklin’s Chinese residents were notified they had until 6 p.m. to leave town.
By 4 that afternoon, all Chinese residents had filed out on foot. By 6 p.m., white residents “flattened” all the houses and buildings in the Chinese quarter, Day said. A stray spark from chopping down the houses started a fire and within minutes, Rocklin’s Chinatown burned down.
Later, Rocklin police concluded that they had no definitive evidence against the Chinese men who were accused.
In a letter Whitney wrote to his business manager in the mid-1880s, Day said, Whitney described sneaking Chinese laborers through the animal loading gate to avoid retribution from the town.
“That’s one evidence that there were Chinese people here and he was exploiting them,” Day said. “That’s the only hard evidence I have of the specific way he treated Chinese people.”
Although no official records exist about how he treated his Chinese workers, historians agreed Whitney likely worked them harder and for less pay than white workers. And Whitney’s book, “Reminisces of a Sportsman,” exposes his views on Chinese people, with offensive language and description:
“Last of all comes the Chinaman of the lake, the sucker, who works patiently at lower wages than the dominant race, who with his porcine snout makes havoc with the bed, and fairly roots it apart for the last lingering morsel which remains,” Whitney wrote.
California’s complicated anti-Chinese history
Rocklin’s expulsion of Chinese immigrants was just one of nearly 200 throughout California, historians said, as growing anti-Chinese sentiment in the 1870s boiled over into Chinese people being lynched or driven out from towns statewide.
“It’s hard to wrap your mind around the importance of Chinese people to the economy, the settlements of the West, and then you have them being blamed,” Tsu said. “It speaks to a central contradiction in American history. There is this desire and demand for immigrant labor on one hand, and yet, on the other hand, this desire to maintain some kind of racial purity.”
Anti-Chinese racism was commonplace, Day said, and that’s part of why more education about this period is so important, especially in Rocklin.
“This area where we live here was right at the center of what was going on,” Day said. “This is one of the parts of Northern California history that very few people know about.”
Tsu noted that while Chinese laborers were marginalized and exploited, some laborers leveraged landowners’ dependency on their work to get better contracts, Tsu said.
“That part of the story needs to be told,” Tsu said. “They’re not just these powerless victims of the system.”
Tsu said solely focusing on exploitation like Whitney’s can obscure Chinese people’s own agency. That does not excuse Whitney’s racism and labor practices, Tsu said, but shows history is extremely nuanced.
That kind of understanding requires context through education. But education about this history is precisely what Leibman and many California historians believe is lacking.
A drive to elevate and educate
Leibman first learned about the town’s expulsion of Chinese immigrants and Whitney’s use of Chinese laborers during the annual Sacramento Archives Crawl last October. The lesson sparked his own research, turning to Whitney’s biographies and personal letters, as well as Rocklin historians and experts like Franklin Odo, founder of the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Center, and Ted Gong, executive director of the 1882 Foundation.
But it wasn’t until after RUSD released several statements condemning discrimination and systemic racism following the police killing of George Floyd that Leibman decided to go directly to the school board and request teaching students about this.
“It’s really about educating people,” Leibman said. “It’s about elevating Chinese American and Pacific Islander American voices and contributions to our country and our community.”
The first step, Leibman said, is to put his proposal up for a vote on the RUSD board’s meeting agenda. Leibman requested the school board add his proposal to next week’s agenda, but was told to make a public comment instead. He’ll call in with some of his classmates, along with Odo and Pfaelzer.
Given that Rocklin is still finalizing their fall reopening plan, Leibman said he understands why the district might not want to make any promises. But if not now, Leibman questioned, then when?
“There’s a lot of stuff they’re dealing with right now,” Leibman said. “But ... there’s never going to be a convenient time to address something that’s really inconvenient.”
In a statement, RUSD spokeswoman Diana Capra said the school board was “grateful” that Leibman brought these issues to their attention. No details were provided as to how long or costly the process of naming a building and creating new lessons would be, but Capra said that the district implemented a new history and social science curriculum last year that represents more diverse American histories.
“As our nation grapples with these important issues surrounding equity, we recognize that schools and school districts are reflections of our communities and must also focus on these issues,” the statement read. “This (new) curriculum more accurately portrays the cultural and racial diversity of our society and includes Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and members of other ethnic and cultural groups.”
To what level of detail this new curriculum goes into, however, was unclear.
Chinese state contributions are ‘very invisible’
“It’s amazing how little we know about history that’s in our own backyards,” Tsu said.
Despite how recent this history is, Pfaelzer said, Chinese contributions to California are still “very invisible.” Not teaching the whole truth of the past is a disservice to Californians today, historians said. It’s knowledge that’s essential for more than just multiculturalism.
“Do we want a history that’s just about myth and celebrating American identity, or do we want to know the truth?” Tsu said. “Who really built this country? ... We need to include this history because this is our history.”
RUSD may have yet to agree to put Leibman’s proposal on their board meeting agenda, he said, but he’s still going to keep pushing for the school and district to meet his changes.
What Leibman said he really wants to see, more than naming a building for a Chinese American, is Asian American history becoming a standard part of his school district’s curriculum. Whitney’s name is all over Rocklin, he said, from parks to retirement centers. Even Whitney High’s biggest football game – against Rocklin High – is called the Quarry Bowl, after a quarry built by nameless Chinese people.
He doesn’t want his community to stay in the dark about where their town came from any longer.
“It’s just not part of our narrative, which is the problem,” Leibman said. “If nobody learns about this history, that affects how they understand the present, the pride they take in their community.”