Texans versus Vietnamese shrimpers in 1981
Look like the wrong men were sent to save South Vietnam
Gene Fisher was ready for the news crews pouring into Galveston Bay. “I went to my government…begged them to help the situation, do something about it, and they wouldn’t do it,” Fisher told a reporter. His tone was scolding, his arms stubbornly crossed. “So, I’m a white American. I went to the KKK. Those boats have to be taken out of the water. Destroyed.”
The situation escalated: a white shrimper named Jody Collins offered up his small ranch as a site for the first major Klan rally against the Vietnamese. Held on Valentine’s Day, 750 people hollered as the U.S.S. VIET CONG, an effigy of a Vietnamese boat, was torched, and Louis Beam, the Grand Dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan issued a 90-day deadline for the Vietnamese to leave or else face “blood, blood, blood.”
The situation escalated: a white shrimper named Jody Collins offered up his small ranch as a site for the first major Klan rally against the Vietnamese. Held on Valentine’s Day, 750 people hollered as the U.S.S. VIET CONG, an effigy of a Vietnamese boat, was torched, and Louis Beam, the Grand Dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan issued a 90-day deadline for the Vietnamese to leave or else face “blood, blood, blood.”