Hanapepe massacre

The Hanapēpē Massacre (also called the Battle of Hanapēpē) occurred on September 9, 1924, when a dispute amongst Filipino strike organizers in Hanapēpē, Kaua'i, resulted in a violent exchange between local police officers and Filipinos. The conflict began when two Ilocano youth, allegedly breaking the Filipino-led labor strike, were detained and harassed by a group of Visayans at the Hanapepe strike camp. When the local police were called to settle the dispute, they arrived with a group of heavily armed special deputies. Upon arrival, the officers issued warrants of arrest for the two detained Illocanos, causing the collection of Filipino strikers to rally in opposition. Despite previously ridiculing the two Ilocanos, the remaining Filipinos armed themselves and demanded the boys be released. A violent exchange ensued wherein sixteen Filipino laborers and four police officers were left dead.

By the 1920s, the sugarcane plantation owners in Hawaiʻi had become disillusioned with both Japanese and Filipino workers. They spent the next few years trying to get the U.S. Congress to relax the Chinese Exclusion Act so that they could bring in new Chinese workers. Congress prevented the importation of Chinese labor.

Organized labor in the 1920s' U.S. mainland supported the Congress in this action, so that for a while it looked as though militant unionism on the sugarcane plantations was dead. To oppose organized labor, the Hawaiian Territorial Legislature passed the Criminal Syndicalism Law of 1919, Anarchistic Publications law of 1921, and the Anti-Picketing Law of 1923.

These laws, with penalties of up to 10 years in prison, increased the discontent of the workers. The Filipinos, who were rapidly becoming the dominant plantation labor force, had deep-seated grievances: as the latest immigrants they were treated most poorly. Although the planters had claimed there was a labor shortage and they were actively recruiting workers from the Philippines, they wanted only illiterate workers and turned back any arrivals who could read or write, as many as one in six.

In the fall of 1922, Filipino labor activist Pablo Manlapit and George Wright, the head of the American Federation of Labor, founded the High Wage Movement (HWM). Building from the networks Manlapit established through the Filipino Labor Union (FLU), Manlapit and Wright drafted a petition of demands that garnered over 6,000 signatures. Primarily, the HWM demanded an increase of the minimum wage to two dollars alongside the reduction of the workday to eight hours. When their petition was ignored by the Hawaiian Sugar Planter's Association (HSPA) in 1923, the HWM proceeded with an organized labor strike in 1924.

As they had previously, the plantation owners used armed forces, the National Guard, and strike breakers paid a higher wage than the strikers demanded. Again workers were turned out of their homes. Propaganda was distributed to whip up racism. Spying and infiltration of the strikers' ranks was acknowledged by Jack Butler, executive head of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association.^{[citation needed]}

Strike leaders were arrested in attempts to disrupt workers' solidarity, and people were bribed to testify against them. On September 9, 1924, outraged strikers kidnapped two strike breakers at Hanapēpē and prevented them from going to work. The police, armed with clubs and guns, came to union headquarters to rescue them. Between 100 and 200 Filipino strikers were armed with pistols, knives, and clubs.

The Associated Press flashed the story of what followed across the United States in the following words: