Ryan Coogler’s supernatural flick Sinners is generating buzz nationwide for its chilling plot and eerie atmosphere. But beyond the scares, the film weaves in some unexpected threads of American history.
Set in 1930s Mississippi Delta, near the region where Coogler’s own family lived before relocating to California, Sinners delves into the haunting legacy of the era, according to the award-winning director’s recent interview with The Guardian. While the supernatural elements take center stage, the story subtly explores the harsh realities of life during the Jim Crow South—touching on the aftershocks of slavery, the struggles of Reconstruction, the trauma of the First World War, and the crushing weight of rural poverty.
What makes Sinners especially compelling is its portrayal of how African Americans, Chinese Americans, and many communities of color were forced to navigate—and sometimes survive—systems built on exclusion and racism.
“I’ve been struggling to tell a story that does the great migration for a while,” Coogler told The Guardian during an interview published April 17. “It’s a personal obsession of mine, this period of time when Black people were considering leaving the south en masse.”
The Coolie Trade.
As NPR notes, Chinese migrants faced harsh conditions alongside Black Americans in the aftermath of slavery. In the mid-1800s, shortly after Emancipation, Chinese laborers were brought to the United States as part of the so-called “Coolie trade”—a system of indentured servitude that was often coercive and exploitative. While the trade period is more often associated with the Caribbean or South America today, this brutal form of labor was alive and well in the U.S., particularly in the South and West.
In the West, the Central Pacific Railroad Company signed Chinese workers to five-year contracts, assigning them to backbreaking jobs, from laying tracks for the transcontinental railroad to enduring extreme conditions in agriculture. Thousands were sent to the Mississippi Delta, where cotton planters recruited them to replace freed Black laborers during Reconstruction.
The Chinese Grocers of the Mississippi Delta.
According to Southern Foodways Alliance, Chinese laborers played a key role in the Delta’s rebuilding, but their journey didn’t end on the plantations. As Reconstruction waned in the mid 1870s, many Chinese workers sought more autonomy. Some returned to China, but many stayed, planting roots by opening small grocery stores in Black neighborhoods, often becoming quiet cornerstones of segregated Southern towns as Jim Crow Laws were enforced.
It’s this history that Coogler honors in Sinners through the characters of Grace and Bo Chow, played with quiet intensity by Singaporean actor Yao and actress Li Chun Li. As local grocers in the haunted Mississippi town, Grace and Bo become a trusted ally of Smoke and Stack, played by Michael B. Jordan, forging solidarity across racial lines in a community fractured by inequality.
That unity was solid as a rock down in the Delta. While researching the family history of her husband Baldwin Chiu in Pace, Miss., for a 2021 Los Angeles Times article, writer Larissa Lam spoke with several Black residents who had lived through the Jim Crow era within the small town. Many recalled a quiet but powerful sense of solidarity between Chinese grocers and Black communities during that time, bonds formed in the face of shared hardship and systemic exclusion.
“Many of the older Black residents, who lived through Jim Crow, told us that they preferred to shop at Chinese grocery stores because they were treated with respect,” Lam penned. “They could walk through the front door with dignity and not be relegated to a separate ‘colored’ entrance. Some told me that Chinese grocery stores, like the one Baldwin’s family ran, offered goods at a lower price and extended credit to sharecroppers who were paid only once or twice a year.”
Much like Black families during segregation in the 1900s, Chinese Americans in the Delta faced housing discrimination and educational exclusion. In cities like Cleveland, Miss., and Greenville, Miss., segregated schools were created specifically for Chinese children, further highlighting how deeply racial boundaries were enforced. As Scholar Ji-Hye Shin highlights in his essay In Between: The Mississippi Chinese and the American Racial Structure, the Chinese in the Delta were excluded from white society, forced to build their own communities as a result. They built their own institutions—churches, cemeteries, and schools— mirroring the same resilience as Black communities during this period, striving for acceptance that was rarely granted.
Source: NewsOne