Foul Play: A Historical True Crime Podcast
Shane L. Waters, Wendy Cee, Gemma Hoskins
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Hawaii and Louisiana: The Plantation's Shadow, 1887-1889
This episode is part of Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary -- 50 states, 25 double-feature episodes exploring the cases that shaped American history from every corner of the country. Hawaii, 1889. A Japanese shopkeeper is lynched from a telephone pole on the main street of Honoka'a for speaking English on behalf of plantation workers. Louisiana, 1887. Ten thousand sugar cane workers strike for cash wages instead of scrip -- and armed paramilitaries sweep through residential streets at dawn, killing between 35 and 300 people. Two plantation economies. Two communities who challenged the system. The same answer. The Victims Katsu Goto was twenty-seven years old when he was killed on October 29, 1889. Born in Japan in 1862, he changed his family name from Kobayakawa to Goto to qualify for the Hawaii immigration program. He arrived in Honolulu Harbor on February 8, 1885, aboard the SS City of Tokio -- one of 944 immigrants in the first wave of government-contract Japanese workers under the kanyaku imin program. After three years cutting cane at nine dollars a month on the Hamakua Coast, Goto opened a general store in Honoka'a, the second-largest town on the Big Island. He spoke English. He used that skill to help Japanese workers file complaints against plantation abuses. That made him a target. In Thibodaux, Louisiana, the victims of the November 23, 1887 massacre were overwhelmingly Black -- formerly enslaved people and their children who had struck for fair wages during the sugar harvest. Eight names survived the historical record: Willis Wilson, Felix Pierre, Archy Jones, Frank Patterson, Grant Conrad, Marcellin Weldon, Riley Anderson, and Mahala Washington. They represent a fraction of those killed. The full death toll has never been established. The Crimes On the night of October 28, 1889, Katsu Goto rode on horseback to Robert Overend's plantation to meet with Japanese workers who had been fined for a cane field fire they may not have set. He left the meeting around ten o'clock. Six men were waiting on the road: Joseph R. Mills, Thomas Steele, William C. Blabon, William D. Watson, John Richmond, and a man identified only as Lala. Goto was found the next morning hanging from a telephone pole on Honoka'a's main street. The coroner determined he died of asphyxiation -- he was alive when the rope went around his neck. In Louisiana, the 1887 sugar strike began on October 29 when approximately 10,000 workers laid down their cane knives at the start of harvest season. The Knights of Labor had demanded $1.25 per day in cash wages, elimination of the scrip system, and biweekly payment. Governor Samuel Douglas McEnery -- himself a planter -- deployed eleven companies of state militia to evict striking families from plantation housing. Parish District Judge Taylor Beattie, a former Confederate and sugar planter, declared martial law over the Black population of Thibodaux, assembled a committee of three hundred armed white men, and required Black residents to carry passes. On the morning of November 23, 1887, armed paramilitaries moved through Black neighborhoods for more than two hours, killing men, women, and children in their homes, yards, and streets. The Investigation In Hawaii, all six perpetrators in the Katsu Goto lynching were identified within weeks. Lala and Richmond cooperated with authorities in exchange for dropped charges. The 1890 trial convicted four men of manslaughter -- not murder. Mills and Steele received nine years; Blabon and Watson received four years each. But justice eroded: Steele escaped to Australia, Blabon escaped to California, and Mills was pardoned in 1894 by the same planter-aligned provisional government that had overthrown Queen Lili'uokalani the year before. Only Watson, who played the smallest role, served his full sentence. In Thibodaux, no one was arrested for the killings. No one was tried. No one was convicted. The bodies were collected and dumped in unmarked graves at a site that later became the city dump. Andrew Price, a sugar planter who participated in the attacks, was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1889 -- two years after the massacre. Historical Context Both cases occurred within plantation economies that ran on the same equation: keep labor costs low, keep workers dependent, and make it dangerous to organize. In Hawaii, the Bayonet Constitution of 1887 had already stripped voting rights from Asian residents. In Louisiana, the scrip system effectively trapped formerly enslaved workers on the same land they had worked before emancipation. Black farm labor organizing in the American South did not resume in earnest until the 1930s -- more than forty years after the Thibodaux massacre. Today, a memorial to Katsu Goto stands near the Honoka'a Library on Mamane Street, erected in 1994 -- 105 years after his death. A documentary, Honoka'a Hero: The Story of Katsu Goto, remains in production. In Thibodaux, the City Council officially condemned the violence in 2017, and a state historical marker was approved for 1123 Bourbon Street. Ground-penetrating radar surveys of the former dump site have found anomalies consistent with burials. As of 2025, excavation and formal identification have not been completed. The bodies are still in the ground. Our Sponsors: * Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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