Hawaii: Colonialism and Capital Punishment
Known Executions in Hawaii, 1826–1947 (continued) No. 79 80
Name
Year
Ethnicity
No.
Perry Pearson
1945 1945
unknown black
81 82
Name
Year
Ethnicity
Thomas Mickles
1945 1947
black black
*The combination of Koseki (1978), Espy and Smykla (1987), and Theroux (1991) gives a grand total of 82 recorded executions for Hawaii for the period of 1826 to 1947.
Race and Class in Hawaii The decline of the Native Hawaiian population throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and, almost simultaneously, the increasing demand for labor in the burgeoning sugar industry brought large numbers of nonwhites and non–Native Hawaiians to the islands. Francis Conroy (1953) outlined the circumstances: The reciprocity treaty negotiated between the United States and Hawaii in 1876 removed the U.S. tariff on Hawaiian sugar and opened to Hawaiian planters the prospect of immense expansion with an assured market. The problem of labor supply was magnified accordingly.3
With the introduction of contract immigrant labor, not only were new racial and ethnic groups being introduced to the islands, but new classes of labor were created in the developing economic base. Sugarcane workers and their families brought their native cultures and assumed the position of ready-made minority groups. Over time, Japanese immigrants became the majority of the islands’ population. Historical records indicate that white plantation owners viewed contract workers from China, Korea, Japan, and the Philippines as necessary and well-disciplined supplements to the dwindling native labor force, while Hawaiians adjudged other Pacific Rim peoples as acceptable racial supplements to their indigenous gene pool.4 Explaining the overrepresentation of lower-class Asians on the scaffold in Hawaii requires separating the intertwining strands of race prejudice and class antagonism. In addition, nowhere else did the U.S. military, particularly the navy, have such a profound bearing on economic conditions and race relations. Following the coup that toppled the Native Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, the mainstream media were .....................
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