After Saigon fell in 1975, Vietnamese refugees came to Texas, and the Handbook of Texas says letters to Texas congressmen ran more than ten to one against admitting them. The "boat people" who followed in the late 1970s took up blue-collar work, and fishing grew in importance. By 1981 Texas had about 40,000 Vietnamese, and Houston had more than any American city outside California. In Seabrook and Kemah, on Galveston Bay, Jim Craig of the Old Harbor Seafood House told a federal court he had 43 Vietnamese-owned boats at his docks, known as "Saigon Harbor."
The rally in Santa Fe
Tension had been building. The Southern Poverty Law Center says a white fisherman was shot dead at nearby Seadrift and two Vietnamese men were charged and acquitted. A Houston arson investigator testified that three boats at Kemah and Seabrook were deliberately burned, one in January 1981 and two in March, and that no one was caught. American shrimpers also had a grievance of their own: a dramatic rise in bay licenses made a living harder, and the legislature passed a limited-entry law that May.
On January 24, 1981, Eugene Fisher, who spoke for a group of American fishermen, was introduced to Louis Beam, Grand Dragon of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. At a rally on February 14 in Santa Fe, Beam arrived with about thirteen men in military dress, demonstrated how to burn a boat, gave the government ninety days to act, and offered to train fishermen at Klan camps.
March 15
On March 15, Joseph Collins's shrimp boat went out into the bay carrying robed and armed Klansmen, a small cannon and a figure hanging in effigy. It stopped for several minutes at the dock of Colonel Nam Van Nguyen. His sister-in-law, Phuong Pham, was inside with an infant niece. She saw the white robes, picked up the child and ran to a relative's house, and she testified that she was afterward too afraid to sleep there. A Seabrook woman who let a Vietnamese fisherman use her dock received a Klan card reading "friendly visit" and threatening phone calls.
The ruling
The Vietnamese Fishermen's Association and individual fishermen sued on April 16, 1981, with the Southern Poverty Law Center's Morris Dees as counsel. Judge Gabrielle McDonald heard the case on May 11 through 14. The Seabrook police chief told her that some American fishermen believed there were just too many Vietnamese in Kemah and Seabrook. Most defendants testified that their warnings of violence no longer applied, and her opinion, issued July 15, quoted the Fifth Circuit that repentance timed to a lawsuit is insufficient assurance. She found the fishermen likely to win under federal civil rights law, the Sherman Antitrust Act and Texas tort law, and she issued a preliminary injunction. Dees later recalled attending a blessing of the fishermen's boats with U.S. marshals standing guard. The Southern Poverty Law Center says a later order shut down Beam's paramilitary camps.
Kemah and the Seabrook marker for the Ritson Morris and Elmwood Plantation sit on the same shore, and Space Center Houston is a few miles up Clear Lake.