By the 1920s, sugarcane plantations dominated the Hawaiian economy, and Filipino workers had become the largest segment of the labor force. They were also the most poorly treated. As the most recent immigrant group, they occupied the bottom of the plantation hierarchy. The Hawaiian Territorial Legislature had already passed a series of laws designed to suppress organized labor: the Criminal Syndicalism Law of 1919, the Anarchistic Publications law of 1921, and the Anti-Picketing Law of 1923, each carrying penalties of up to ten years in prison. Despite this legal barricade, discontent festered. The planters had actively recruited workers from the Philippines, yet they deliberately turned away any arrivals who could read or write, rejecting as many as one in six. They wanted labor, not advocates.

In the fall of 1922, Filipino labor activist Pablo Manlapit and George Wright, head of the American Federation of Labor, founded the High Wage Movement. Building on networks Manlapit had established through the Filipino Labor Union, they drafted a petition of demands that gathered over 6,000 signatures. The strike that followed spread across multiple plantations, and tensions ran high. At the Hanapepe strike camp on September 9, 1924, a dispute broke out when two Ilocano youths, accused of breaking the strike, were detained and harassed by a group of Visayan strikers. Local police were called to intervene, but they arrived accompanied by heavily armed special deputies. Between 100 and 200 Filipino strikers carried pistols, knives, and clubs. The confrontation was a powder keg, and it detonated.

The Associated Press wired the aftermath across the United States: "Twenty persons dead, unnumbered injured lying in hospital, officers under orders to shoot strikers as they approached, distracted widows with children tracking from jails to hospitals and morgues in search of missing strikers." The dead included sixteen Filipino workers and four policemen, killed in a violent exchange at the McBryde plantation. In the days that followed, police rounded up every male protester they could find. A total of 101 Filipino men were arrested. Seventy-six were brought to trial, and sixty received four-year jail sentences. Other accounts put the number of arrested at 130, with 56 convicted and many later deported. Pablo Manlapit was charged with subornation of perjury and sentenced to two to ten years in prison. The Hawaii Hochi newspaper argued he had been railroaded, a victim of fabricated evidence, perjured testimony, racial prejudice, and class hatred.

Manlapit was paroled on the condition that he leave Hawaii. Within eight months, the strike collapsed. The labor movement in the islands dwindled to near-silence. Meanwhile, the ten leading sugar companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange paid dividends averaging seventeen percent in 1924 alone. Over the previous decade, the eleven leading firms had paid cash dividends totaling over 172 percent. Manlapit returned to Hawaii in 1932 and attempted to organize across ethnic lines, but the Depression years offered no traction. Small strikes in 1933 made no headway. The massacre had taught a lasting lesson: from that point forward, protests in Hawaii discouraged the carrying of firearms.

For nearly a century, no one knew where the sixteen slain Filipino workers were buried. A commemorative marker was placed in Hanapepe Town Park in 2006, but the actual grave site remained a mystery. Then, on October 20, 2019, researchers from the Hawaii State Chapter of the Filipino American National Historical Society, working with a technician and an engineer, discovered a trench at the Hanapepe Filipino Cemetery that they believe may contain the remains of twelve of the strikers. In 2024, the Kauai County Planning Department commemorated the centennial of the massacre with a ceremony attended by nearly 150 participants, including descendants of the workers who died. The effort to identify the sixteen by name, through court records and Hawaii Sugar Planters' Association archives, continues.