This is Fresh Air.

I'm Dave Davies and today for Terry Gross.

If you'd been standing at the right point a Cider Harbor on the Texas Gulf Coast in 1981,

you might have seen a shrimp trowler cruising by sporting a Confederate flag.

It's deck swarming with men, some in army fatigues and many wearing Ku Klux Klan robes

with a mannequin hanging in effigy from the vessels outriggers.

The display was intended to intimidate Vietnamese fishermen and residents of the coastal town,

who just a few years before had supported the American side in the Vietnam War.

Our guest writer Kirk Wallace Johnson has a new book about an intense conflict on the Texas

coast between white fishermen and the Vietnamese newcomers.

The locals blamed the Vietnamese for declining catches, even though the bays were being

increasingly poisoned by petrochemical plants and oil spills.

As tensions escalated, there were cross-burning death threats, arson attacks on boats and one

home, and a violent encounter that led to the shooting death of a white fisherman.

Kirk Wallace Johnson's writing has appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Times.

He's the author of two previous books to be a friend is fatal in the feather thief.

His latest is The Fisherman and the Dragon, fear, greed and a fight for justice on the Gulf Coast.

Kirk Wallace Johnson, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thanks for having me.

So set the scene for us.

This is the late 70s, early 80s.

It's heard in bays on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

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