On the evening of Sunday 11 October 1903, Boston police and federal immigration officers sealed off the city's Chinatown, then centred on Harrison Avenue between Beach and Kneeland Streets, and arrested every Chinese man who could not at once produce the registration certificate required under the Chinese exclusion laws. At 7.30 about twenty federal officers and a squad of thirty policemen met at the corner of Chauncy and Bedford Streets, closed the streets leading out of the quarter, and from 8 o'clock searched lodging houses and restaurants from cellar to garret for nearly two hours. The raid was timed for a day when the district was crowded with visitors attending the funeral of Wong Yak Chong, a Hip Sing Tong member murdered a few nights earlier. In all 234 men were taken to the Federal Building and held overnight in small rooms where they could not lie down. Police patrol wagons and electric cars were pressed into service, and one overloaded barge, a large road vehicle borrowed from the steamship wharves, overturned on Harrison Avenue, injuring three policemen and breaking a prisoner's ribs. Friends and relatives, among them the white wife of a Melrose laundryman, brought papers to free men during the night and the next day, and only 45 of those arrested were afterwards deported. Immigration officials said the raid was meant to rid the quarter of highbinders. A few days later Bostonians held an indignation meeting at Faneuil Hall to protest against it.
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