The First Indochina War between France and North Vietnam ended with the 1954 Geneva Accords, a treaty that ended French colonialism and established Vietnam as an independent nation. Vietnam was divided into two states: a Northern communist state and a Southern non-communist state. These Accords also promised an election in 1956 that would reunite Vietnam. Instead, the North Vietnamese started warring with the South, resulting in civil war.

The U.S. government believed that communism was a threat to democracy and subsequently supported South Vietnamese forces; this included sending U.S. troops to fight against the North Vietnamese. On April 30, 1975, the communist government took over South Vietnam and united the country into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. This was known as the Fall of Saigon and marked the end of the Vietnam War.

South Vietnamese supporters and allies scrambled to evacuate themselves and their families out of the country. In 1975, nearly 130,000 Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong people resettled as refugees in the United States. The first wave of refugees often had ties to the U.S. military and were more educated and affluent compared to subsequent waves. The second and third wave refugees, known as “boat people,” were typically less educated than the first wave. This included shrimpers and fishermen from rural Vietnam, who were attracted to the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana because they could transfer the fishing skills they had learned from Vietnam. Fishing was a desirable job because it didn’t require the refugees to speak English.

Seadrift is a small town on the Texas Gulf Coast. It was a popular site for some of the resettled Vietnamese refugees. After arriving in Seadrift, the Vietnamese community banded together and lived in crowded trailers. They worked together, hauling large catches back to shore and even crabbing during inclement weather. To purchase the necessary materials to successfully fish, the Vietnamese developed a private loan system known as “hui.” They pooled their money, which was then distributed to a different family every month. This collective system helped each family survive.

Unbeknownst to the Vietnamese who moved into Seadrift, the mostly White fishermen who resided there were already struggling. The water was poisoned from pollution caused by dumping from nearby petrochemical plants and oil spills. Despite seeing deformed fish and shrimp before the refugees came, the White community blamed the resettled Vietnamese population. They accused the newly arrived Vietnamese of overfishing, of breaking unwritten rules that they had often broken themselves, and of generally destroying Seadrift’s way of life. Tensions escalated as White fishermen started confronting the Vietnamese fishermen, disrupting their fishing and threatening violence.

Despite the interventions of local and federal officials, the strains between the two communities culminated in an explosion of violence. On August 3, 1979, a White fisherman named Billy Joe Aplin, who had previously threatened and harassed the Vietnamese, yelled at Sáu Văn Nguyễn, a young Vietnamese crabber, and his brothers. Aplin struck Sáu and cut his chest with a knife. Sáu left one of his brothers in a boat and drove off with his other brother to retrieve his gun. Sáu then rushed back to the docks and engaged Aplin. Eventually, Sáu fatally shot Aplin and fled Seadrift.

That night, White townspeople firebombed three Vietnamese boats and an apartment rented by a multi-generational Vietnamese family. Other Vietnamese families received threatening phone calls. In the next two days, 120 of the 150 Vietnamese refugees fled Seadrift. Those who stayed rearranged their trailers into a compound so that they could guard each other more easily.

To further scare Vietnamese fishermen, some White fishermen in the area called in the Ku Klux Klan, a White supremacist hate group. This escalated a campaign of racial intimidation against the resettled Vietnamese.

In 1979, Sáu was tried for the murder of Aplin and then was acquitted by an all-White jury who ruled he was defending himself. The Ku Klux Klan inflamed the situation. Louis Beam, the Grand Dragon or leader of the Texas Klan, proclaimed, “Where ballots fail, bullets will prevail.” Over the next year, the Ku Klux Klan held rallies, burned crosses, burned a boat, and even hung an effigy of a Vietnamese fisherman. They patrolled the harbor with firearms and faces unmasked, knowing that the general public supported the intimidation of the Vietnamese fishermen. Beam also activated the Texas Emergency Reserve, an armed and trained militia in Texas, openly declaring his intentions to inflict violence on the Vietnamese community. Despite the Vietnamese community’s attempts to make peace with the White community, including concessions on fishing and trying to stop additional resettlement by Vietnamese to the area, the Ku Klux Klan pressed on.

In 1981, the Vietnamese Fishermen's Association, supported by the Southern Poverty Law Center, successfully ended Klan intimidation through a lawsuit in Vietnamese Fishermen's Association v. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (1981). The Ku Klux Klan and their allies were forbidden from intimidating the Vietnamese community. The Vietnamese prevailed; they could now fish without harassment or intimidation. A year later, that same judge dismantled the KKK’s paramilitary militia across the whole state.

Today, the Vietnamese fishermen are still fighting – but this time alongside White fishermen. Together, they are confronting corporations that have dumped harmful chemicals into the Gulf Coast. In 1993, hundreds of Vietnamese organized against pollution in the water. In 2019, one of their allies, Diane Wilson, the first woman shrimper in the area, won a $50 million settlement with Formosa Plastics. In collaboration with the Vietnamese and White fisherman, she is deciding how to redistribute the money to help the community. By working together instead of competing against each other, the fishermen are getting higher prices for their catches. Today, a coalition of Vietnamese Americans work internationally with communities in Vietnam and Taiwan and locally with other Gulf Coast communities to seek justice from Formosa Plastics.