NOTES

1  See Seattle Times, November 8, 1989, pp. A1, A3, B3.

2  Du Bois’s work stood alone until a series of sociological studies written principally by reformers emerged to explain the black urban condition. See, for example, Ray Stannard Baker’s Following the Color Line (New York: Harper and Row, 1964; first published in 1908); Mary White Ovington’s Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969; first published in 1911); and John Daniels’s In Freedom’s Birthplace: A History of the Boston Negro (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1969; first published in 1914), all of which captured the sense of the small black communities before the World War I migration. For a discussion of these early works, see Florette Henri, Black Migration, Movement North: The Road from Myth to Man (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 124–25; and Kenneth L. Kusmer, “The Structure of Black Urban History: Retrospect and Prospect,” in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., The State of Afro–American History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), pp. 91–94.

3  See, for example, Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh (New York: Arno Press, 1969; first published in 1918); Herbert J. Seligmann, The Negro Faces America (New York: Harper and Row, 1969; first published in 1920); Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration during the War (New York: Arno Press, 1969; first published in 1920); Louise V. Kennedy, The Negro Peasant Turns Cityward: Effects of Recent Migrations to Northern Centers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930); and Clyde V. Kiser, Sea Island to City: A Study of St. Helena Islanders in Harlem and Other Urban Centers (New York: Atheneum, 1969; first published in 1932). James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan (New York: Atheneum, 1968; first published in 1930) attempted to capture the evolving worldview of urban blacks. However, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s Black Metropolis (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945), an examination of Chicago’s South Side, returned to the familiar ground of a black community in profound disarray, traumatized by economic and political forces the newcomers neither anticipated nor understood.

4  The two most influential 1960s studies were Gilbert Osofsky’s Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper and Row, 2d ed., 1971; first published in 1966); and Allan H. Spear’s Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). By the 1970s and 1980s a number of influential studies emerged, including Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976); David Levine, Internal Combustion: The Races in Detroit, 1915–1926 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976); Thomas Philpott’s The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-Class Reform, Chicago, 1880–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Douglas Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion and Folklife in the City, 1850–1970 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); Joe W. Trotter, Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916–30 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and James R. Grossman, The Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Ironically, the first important monograph of this decade has been a study of a southern city affected by the black migration, Earl Lewis’s In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). For a comprehensive review of the literature on black urban history, consult Joe William Trotter, Jr., “Black Migration in Historical Perspective: A Review of the Literature,” in Trotter, ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 1–21.

5  See Lawrence B. de Graaf, “The City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890–1930,” Pacific Historical Review 39:3 (August 1970): 323–52; and Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites.

6  Blaine A. Brownwell, The Urban Ethos in the South, 1920–1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), p. xvi.

7  John Blassingame was one of the first urban historians to call for an examination of black aspirations, ideals, and institutions as a more rewarding way of reconstructing the significance of African American urban life. See his “Before the Ghetto: The Making of the Black Community in Savannah, Georgia, 1865–1880,” Journal of Social History 6:4 (Summer 1973): 484–85. For a background discussion of the cultural ethos, see Quintard Taylor, “The Question of Culture: Black Life and the Transformation of Black Urban America, Seattle’s Central District, 1900–1940,” in Essays in History: The Journal of the Historical Society of the University of Lagos, Nigeria 6:4 (December 1989): 13–20.

8  Recent studies of black communities in Chicago and Pittsburgh emphasize the strong ties between northern urbanites and their rural homes—ties that were reinforced by the frequent movement between the regions. Such a migratory pattern was probably common in other border cities such as St. Louis and Cincinnati but was far more difficult to maintain in Seattle. For an analysis of this migration and its impact on black urban community life, see Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way, pp. 28–33.

9  See Quintard Taylor, “Black Urban Development—Another View: Seattle’s Central District, 1910–1940,” Pacific Historical Review 58:4 (November 1989): 429–48.

10  For a discussion of the “proletarianization” of the African American work force in one midwestern city, see Trotter, Black Milwaukee, pp. 39–40, 275–77.

11  Few of the works on black history study the period after 1930. For two rare exceptions, see Dennis R. Dickerson’s Out of the Crucible: Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875–1980 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), a study of the metropolitan Pittsburgh area, and James Borchert’s Alley Life in Washington, which describes events through the 1960s.

12  See Lewis, In Their Own Interests, pp. 167–98, for a discussion of the impact of World War II migration on another African American community.

13  Richard White, “Race Relations in the American West,” American Quarterly 38:3 (1986): 397. See also Albert Broussard’s Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993).

14  Quoted in Larry S. Richardson, “Civil Rights in Seattle: A Rhetorical Analysis of a Social Movement” (Ph.D. diss., Washington State University, 1975), p. 32.

1  The term “open housing” was commonly used to describe one of the major goals of civil rights organization—to end discrimination against blacks in the selling and renting of houses and apartments. See John H. Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), pp. 452–53.

2  For an assessment of the paradoxical impact of the black power campaign, see Thomas L. Blair, Retreat to the Ghetto: The End of a Dream? (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).

3  Larry S. Richardson, “Civil Rights in Seattle: A Rhetorical Analysis of a Social Movement” (Ph.D. diss., Washington State University, 1975), p. 32. Rillmond Schear describes the Garner family in his article, “The World That Whites Don’t Know,” Seattle Magazine 2:19 (October 1965): 14–15.

4  Schear, “The World That Whites Don’t Know,” p. 16.

5  Roger Sale, Seattle, Past to Present (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), pp. 246–47.

6  Schear, “The World That Whites Don’t Know,” pp. 16, 18.

7  For a discussion of the intensity and wantonness of such violence in the civil rights era, see David E. Colburn, Racial Change and Community Crisis: St. Augustine, Florida, 1877–1980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), chapters 1–3.

8  See James Halpin, “Discrimination by Whites Has Kept Negroes Locked in Jobs That Lead Nowhere,” Seattle Magazine 5:51 (June 1968): 20; Schear, “The World That Whites Don’t Know,” p. 16; and Seattle Urban League, Seattle’s Racial Gap: 1968 (Seattle: Seattle Urban League, 1968), p. 4.

9  Quoted in Schear, “The World That Whites Don’t Know,” p. 16; see also Halpin, “Jobs That Lead Nowhere,” p. 20.

10  Of the 207 cities surveyed by the Taeubers, only 30 percent had ratings below 79 and more than half the cities were above 87.8. The 79.7 rating indicated that nearly 80 percent of Seattle’s black population would have to move to achieve integrated housing. See Karl E. Taeuber and Alma F. Taeuber, Negroes in Cities (Chicago: Aldine, 1965), pp. 30–37. For a background discussion of the growing isolation of black Seattle, see Reuel Seeman Amdur, “An Exploratory Study of Nineteen Negro Families in the Seattle Area Who Were First Negro Residents in White Neighborhoods, of Their White Neighbors, and of the Integration Process, Together with a Proposed Program to Promote Integration in Seattle” (M.A. thesis, University of Washington, 1962), pp. 8–12.

11  See Sale, Seattle, p. 218.

12  Ericson is quoted in the Seattle Times, March 15, 1961, p. 32. Westberg’s comments appeared in the same newspaper on August 1, 1963, p. 46. See also Schear, “The World That Whites Don’t Know,” p. 15.

13  Sale, Seattle, p. 219.

14  A typical effort was the campaign to support the Haywood County Civic and Welfare League initiated by the Seattle NAACP and a newly formed branch of CORE in 1961. The two organizations raised money for black sharecroppers and tenant farmers near Brownsville, Tennessee, who had been evicted for registering to vote. See Seattle CORE Newsletter, April 1962. Seattle NAACP Records, University of Washington Libraries.

15  See John Guernsey, “Seattle Works to Widen School Integration,” Portland Oregonian, October 6, 1963, p. 28.

16  For a discussion of Reverend Samuel McKinney, see Seattle Times, January 28, 1968, p. 32. Dr. John H. Adams is profiled in a January 9, 1968, article in the same newspaper (p. 31).

17  Interview of Reverend John H. Adams by Larry Richardson, quoted in Richardson, “Civil Rights in Seattle,” p. 77.

18  Seattle Times, December 6, 1962, p. 16.

19  See the Seattle Times, March 22, 1964, p. 43, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 22, 1964, p. 4, for accounts of typical “shop-ins” at local grocery stores. CORE’s newsletter for its January 1963 meeting, held at the East Cherry YWCA, described the organization’s ongoing negotiations with the targeted businesses. See “Regular Membership Meeting, Thursday, January 23, 1963,” in Seattle Urban League Records, University of Washington Libraries. See also Richardson, “Civil Rights in Seattle,” pp. 76–81.

20  On the Nordstrom agreement, see Seattle Times, May 16, 1964, p. 1; May 26, p. 16; and Richardson, “Civil Rights in Seattle,” pp. 79–80.

21  The other project cited by Meier and Rudwick was the Syracuse, New York, chapter’s campaign against the Niagara Mohawk Power Company. See August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942–1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 371.

22  Charles A. Valentine, DEEDS: Background and Basis, a Report on Research Leading to the Drive for Equal Employment in Downtown Seattle (Seattle: CORE, 1964), p. 8.

23  Ibid., pp. 19–31.

24  Ibid., p. 44.

25  Ibid., pp. 5, 38–40, 43. See also Report of Seattle CORE Meeting, January 17, 1964, in NAACP Records; Seattle Times, October 14, 1964, p. 41.

26  See Seattle Times, January 12, 1965, p. 2.

27  See Meier and Rudwick, CORE, pp. 184, 227, 241.

28  See, for example, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 21, 1964, p. 24, and The Facts, November 6, 1964, p. 1, for discussions of the new job training and job placement centers in the Central District.

29  Seattle Times, August 28, 1964, p. 12; Seattle Argus, September 11, 1964, p. 1.

30  Quoted in Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 8, 1967, p. 1.

31  This example was extracted from Sidney Gerber’s personal journal, which he facetiously titled “Diary of a Do Gooder.” See Sidney Gerber Papers, University of Washington Libraries. Realtors were professionally committed to racial discrimination until 1950. Although Article 34 of the National Real Estate Board’s Code of Ethics, which forbade the introduction of “members of any race or nationality … whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood,” was repealed in that year, over a decade later most Seattle realtors continued to direct potential black homebuyers to Central District listings. See Howard Droker, “The Seattle Civic Unity Committee and the Civil Rights Movement, 1944–1964” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1974), p. 145.

32  See, for example, L. K. Northwood and Ernest A. T. Barth, Urban Desegregation: Negro Pioneers and Their White Neighbors (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965), pp. 3–29.

33  NAACP Miscellaneous Records, boxes 1–25, 2–1, 2–32. See also Droker’s detailed description of early civil rights efforts through 1964 in his dissertation, “The Seattle Civic Unity Committee,” pp. 154–59; and Gerber, “Integrated Housing,” in K-Zam Kazette, September 26, 1962, p. 6.

34  Droker, “The Seattle Civic Unity Committee,” p. 155.

35  This controversial decision stemmed from a dispute between John J. O’Meara and Robert L. Jones over the sale of O’Meara’s house. In 1961, O’Meara, a commander in the U.S. Coast Guard, and his wife owned a single-family residence at 3004 East Seventieth Street in Seattle. In the spring of that year they placed the house on the market after O’Meara received transfer orders to Washington, D.C. On Sunday, April 19, Jones, a black Postal Service worker, and his wife visited and inspected the O’Meara home. Two days later the Jones’s attorney went to the O’Meara home and left a $1,000 down payment with Mrs. O’Meara in anticipation of an “all cash” sale of the home for $18,000. Mrs. O’Meara would later claim that the deposit and an earnest money receipt were left over her protest. One day later Commander O’Meara returned the receipt and check to the attorney. Jones subsequently lodged a complaint with the Washington State Board against Discrimination, which, after an eleven-hour hearing, found the O’Mearas had discriminated against the Jones family on the basis of color. The O’Mearas, in turn, challenged the WSBAD decision in King County Superior Court. For a fuller discussion see O’Meara v. Washington State Board against Discrimination, Case No. 35436, September 29, 1961, pp. 795–96; and Arval A. Morris and Donald B. Ritter, “Racial Minority Housing in Washington,” Washington Law Review 37 (Summer 1962): 139–40.

36  Seattle Times, July 26, 1963, p. 1. Only two of the nine-member City Council favored the ordinance: Wing Luke, the city’s first Chinese American councilman, and A. Ludlow Kramer. Other council members reluctantly voted for the open housing ordinance, anticipating its defeat by referendum. See Droker, “The Seattle Civic Unity Committee,” pp. 158–64.

37  Ibid., p. 2; The Facts, July 17, 1963, p. 2.

38  Quoted in Seattle Times, October 21, 1963, p. 6. For an account of the August march, see the Seattle Times, August 28, 1963, p. 1.

39  Philip Bailey, “ ‘Open Housing’ the Wrong Approach to Negro Problem,” Argus, March 6, 1964, pp. 1, 3. See also Droker, “The Seattle Civic Unity Committee,” p. 168.

40  Later that night shotgun blasts also ripped the home of Raymond Flavors, a cement finisher who lived three doors from the Green family. The following week Kent experienced another incident when two white youths threw a firebomb onto the front porch of Reverend D. L. Crowder’s home. Seattle Times, October 27, 1963, p. 1; and November 1, 1963, p. 7.

41  Seattle Times, March 11, 1964, p. 1; and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 11, 1964, p. 1. See also Droker, “The Seattle Civic Unity Committee,” p. 170.

42  Argus, April 3, 1964, p. 1.

43  For a detailed discussion of the sit-in, see “A Report on Seattle CORE’s First ‘Sit-in’ Demonstration at a Real Estate Office; Picture Floor Plans,” March 22, 1964, in Seattle Urban League Records.

44  Quoted in the Seattle Times, October 22, 1963, p. 29. The Schoenfield letter was reprinted in The Facts, November 21, 1963, p. 4. See also Northwood and Barth, Urban Desegregation, p. 71.

45  Seattle Times, August 17, 1965, p. 6; and August 19, 1965, p. 3.

46  The Facts, November 10, 1967, p. 1; Seattle Times, November 27, 1967, p. C3.

47  See the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 14, 1968, p. 2. The Central Area Motivation Program, popularly known as CAMP, was one of the most remarkable locally initiated antipoverty programs in the nation. CAMP was organized in the spring of 1964, before Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act, by Central District residents and their supporters in their campaign against poverty in Seattle. CAMP was the first program to receive OEO funding and is the oldest surviving agency launched during that era. Its myriad programs include job counseling and training, family support services, university recruitment, housing rehabilitation, antigang services, community organization, and creative arts. Walter Hundley, after relinquishing the presidency of the Seattle CORE chapter, became CAMP’s first executive director. For a history of CAMP, see Ivan King, The Central Area Motivation Program: A Brief History of a Community in Action (Seattle: Central Area Motivation Program, 1990), pp. 5–12.

48  Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 27, 1967, p. 15.

49  Seattle did experience some arson and sporadic violence immediately following Dr. King’s assassination. See Seattle Times, April 6, 1968, p. 13; and April 7, p. 4.

50  Quoted in the Seattle Times, August 11, 1967, p. 6.

51  For a discussion of the Kirkland Fair Housing Organization and Operation Equity, Federal Way Unit, see Seattle City Council, Seminar on Equal Opportunities and Racial Harmony, March 22 and April 6, 1968: Summary of Proceedings and Recommendations (Seattle: City of Seattle, 1968), n.p. See also The Facts, May 23, 1968, pp. 7–8.

52  For a discussion of the changing spatial demography of black Seattle, see “Racial Migration Stood Out Clearly in Recent Census,” Seattle Times, June 7, 1981, p. C4.

53  Quoted in the Seattle Times, May 13, 1965, p. 53.

54  For a detailed discussion of the Chicago campaign against de facto segregation, see Alan Anderson and George Pickering, Confronting the Color Line: TheBroken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986).

55  Quoted in Doris Hinson Pieroth, “Desegregating the Public Schools, Seattle, Washington, 1954–1968” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1979), pp. 4, 5. Pieroth’s dissertation is by far the most comprehensive and the most perceptive of the studies of public schools in Seattle in the 1960s. See also Pieroth, “With All Deliberate Caution: School Integration in Seattle, 1954–1968,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 73:2 (April 1982): 50–61.

56  Pieroth, “Desegregating the Public Schools,” p. 52.

57  Seattle School District, Racial Distribution in Seattle Schools, 1957–1968 (Seattle: Seattle School District, 1969), p. 19.

58  Pieroth, “Desegregating the Public Schools,” pp. 172–74. For a discussion of Edwards and Keve Bray, another Central District activist opposed to the integrationist thrust of CACRC, see “Black Backlash,” Seattle Magazine 1:7 (October 1964): 7–8.

59  Pieroth, “Desegregating the Public Schools,” p. 170.

60  The Facts, August 13, 1964, p. 11.

61  Seattle Times, August 29, 1965, p. 12.

62  Walter Hundley interview with Doris Pieroth, “Desegregating the Public Schools,” p. 252.

63  Although School Superintendent Forbes Bottomly characterized the boycott as “an illegal thing,” the School District attempted no disciplinary action against participants. Moreover, the district increased its efforts to recruit students for the voluntary transfer program and initiated two new programs: a Central District “counseling bank” where parents and schools could take problems involving their children, and recruitment and promotion of black administrators. See Seattle Times, April 1, 1966, p. 6; and Pieroth, “Desegregating the Public Schools,” pp. 55, 281–82.

64  Seattle Times, July 1, 1966, p. 19; Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 25, 1966, p. 7.

65  Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 20, 1967, p. 1; Seattle Times, April 20, 1967, p. 5. Civil rights leaders were in a quandary over Carmichael’s visit. While they had not opposed it, they also knew that his speech would solidify the evolving opposition to their objectives in the de facto school controversy. The best CACRC could muster in response to Carmichael’s presentation was a community meeting at First AME Church, where about one hundred persons turned out to hear California Assemblyman Willie Brown, who warned of the “sophisticated tactics” of northern cities, including Seattle, to maintain de facto segregation. Seattle Times, May 20, 1967, p. 12.

66  Pieroth, “Desegregating the Public Schools,” p. 336.

67  Ibid., pp. 380–81.

68  Seattle Times, December 15, 1967, p. 28.

69  Pieroth, “Desegregating the Public Schools,” p. 402.

70  On December 19, 1967, Hundley was appointed Model Cities director by Mayor Braman, with whom he had often clashed as local president of CORE, and as the first director of the Central Area Motivation Program. Eventually recognized as one of the best Model Cities administrators in the nation, Hundley remained head of the agency until it was terminated in 1973. He then became an administrative assistant to Seattle Mayor Wesley Uhlman. See Richardson, “Civil Rights in Seattle,” p. 267.

71  Alfred Cowles interview with Doris Pieroth, “Desegregating the Public Schools,” p. 404.

72  Pieroth, “Desegregating the Public Schools,” pp. 452–53. For a background on the Ocean Hill–Brownsville controversy and the debate over school decentralization, see Alan A. Altshuler, Community Control: The Black Demand for Participation in Large American Cities (New York: Pegasus, 1970), and Maurice R. Berube and Marilyn Gittell, eds., Confrontation at Ocean Hill–Brownsville: The New York School Strikes of 1968 (New York: Praeger, 1969).

73  The Garfield percentages are derived from a report of the Citizens’ Committee for Quality Integrated Education. A copy of the report is in the Donald Kazama Papers, University of Washington Libraries. The desegregation controversy that began in the early 1960s would continue to rage through the 1970s and 1980s in a school district that shrank dramatically in enrollment. By 1984–85, Seattle public schools had only 44,000 students, 51.4 percent of whom were white, 23.3 percent black, 18 percent Asian American, 4.4 percent Hispanic, and 2.9 percent Native American. In 1978, Seattle adopted an extensive mandatory busing plan, without court order, which, according to a National Education Association report, had by January 1984 “succeeded in eliminating racial and ethnic imbalance in all of the city’s schools.” The report also noted that the “Seattle Plan” had been adopted despite the opposition of two-thirds of the city’s residents. Those residents did indeed voice their opposition in November 1989 when they voted to end the seventeen-year-old mandatory busing plan. See the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 8, 1989, p. 1; Nand Hart-Nibbrig, “Policies of School Desegregation in Seattle,” Integrated Education 17:97 (January–April 1979): 27–30; Harriet Elaine Adair, “Trends in School Desegregation: A Historical Case Study of Dayton, Denver, Los Angeles and Seattle” (Ed.D. diss., Brigham Young University, 1986), pp. 303, 306.

74  The March against Fear was a continuation of the protest march of James Meredith, interrupted when he was shot, and provided the forum for the introduction of the term and subsequently the new militancy titled “black power.” Stokely Carmichael, one of the principal leaders, surprised listeners and challenged both the local audience and the nation when he, after describing the pent-up frustration and anger of blacks, called for black power. For a fuller discussion of the origins of black power, see Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage, 1967), chap. 2; Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), chap. 14; and William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 31–34.

75  Seattle reporter Hilda Bryant explored the growing popularity of the black power ideology, particularly among younger Central District African Americans, in her article, “Black Power: Threat or Promise?” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 27, 1967, pp. 1, 8.

76  Ibid., p. 8.

77  Seattle Times, November 13, 1966, p. 45.

78  Ibid., July 19, 1967, p. 34.

79  Ibid., August 26, 1967, p. 12; and September 14, 1967, p. 8. For a discussion of the transformation of the national CORE organization from nonviolence to black power, see Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, pp. 132–40.

80  As early as 1963, Seattle had a “Friends of SNCC” chapter which sponsored educational and fundraising activities for the then integrationist organization whose activities were centered in the South. By 1967, however, SNCC had undergone a transformation, embracing black power and shifting its organizational focus for the first time to northern black communities such as Seattle’s Central District. The election of Stokely Carmichael as chair symbolized that transition. For background, see Carson, SNCC, pp. 200–203. On the cultural manifestations of black power, see Nancy Giebink, “Bold Experiment in the Ghetto,” Seattle Magazine 5:51 (June 1968): 11–12, for a discussion of CASPA; and King, The Central Area Motivation Program, p. 7, for the origin of Black Arts West. See also returned questionnaires on black Central District organizations included in Seattle City Council, Seminar on Equal Opportunities and Racial Harmony, n.p.

81  Seattle Times, August 11, 1967, p. 6; and August 15, 1967, p. 33. See also the editorial titled “Negro Proposals Reasonable,” Seattle Times, August 14, 1967, p. 10; and Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Civil Disorder, Race and Violence in Washington State: A Report of the Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Civil Disorder (Olympia: State Printing Office, 1969), p. 30.

82  Seattle Times, September 4, 1968, p. 5; Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 24, 1968, p. 4. See also Seattle City Council, Seminar on Equal Opportunities and Racial Harmony, n.p.

83  Sections of the Panther campaign platform were quoted in Seattle Times, July 3, 1968, p. 1. See also July 6, p. 16; July 31, p. 47; the Vancouver, B.C. Province, September 7, 1968, p. 5; and Esther Hall Mumford, “Washington’s African American Communities,” in Sid White and S. E. Solberg, eds., Peoples of Washington: Perspectives on Cultural Diversity (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1989), p. 101.

84  The carefully crafted image the Panthers hoped to promote was challenged by events in late July 1968. On July 29, twelve heavily armed police raided Panther headquarters with a search warrant for a stolen typewriter. When they discovered it, Dixon and fellow Panther Curtis Harris were arrested. But the presence of police officers in riot gear dispatched to search the headquarters and, if necessary, arrest its occupants touched off two consecutive nights of rioting, resulting in the arrests of 101 Central District residents. The violence began with the second of two rallies to protest the arrest of Dixon and Harris. The first, by the Students for a Democratic Society at the downtown police headquarters, was uneventful, but the second, at the Garfield High School playground, resulted in the firebombing of Central District businesses, the burning of vehicles including a firetruck, and rock throwing attacks on the police interspersed with gunfire that continued into the following night and culminated when two black men were shot and wounded by a white Central District resident. While small by the standards of the Detroit or Newark riots of 1967, Seattle had nonetheless experienced its third outburst of urban racial violence in one year. See Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Civil Disorder, Race and Violence in Washington State, pp. 8, 57–59; Richardson, “Civil Rights in Seattle,” pp. 249–52; and Pieroth, “Desegregating the Public Schools,” pp. 435–37, 453–54. For a recent assessment of the impact and legacy of the Black Panther Party, see Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, pp. 152–66.

85  The spring of 1968 was the apex of racial and political conflicts throughout the United States. In April, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, touching off violent confrontations between angry blacks and various public authorities in hundreds of cities across the nation. In Seattle three days of rioting, looting, and arson had followed King’s murder. One month later the city still seethed with anger and resentment as both black and antiblack groups predicted violence during the coming summer. This was also a time of escalating student protests over the war in Vietnam, racism on campuses and in the communities, and the role and relationship of universities to the military-industrial complex. At least thirty-four confrontations, beginning with the University of California Free Speech Movement in 1964, had violently disrupted colleges and universities. The largest, the Columbia University protests in April and May 1968, had succeeded in closing the university. Indeed before the end of spring term there would be 2,000 protests on campuses nationwide. See Dianne Louise Walker, “The University of Washington Establishment and the Black Student Union Sit-In of 1968” (M.A. thesis, University of Washington, 1980), pp. 3–4, 47.

86  See Seattle Times, May 21, 1968, p. 5; Walker, “The University of Washington Establishment,” pp. 3–4.

87  The university also created an apparatus to assist the incoming black students. The Special Education Project (SEP) was created, headed by Professor Charles Evans. The UW Fund for Disadvantaged Students provided tuition support. To that end, university officials requested of the legislature $1,000 for each minority student brought in under SEP. Graduate students—most of them white—were recruited to provide tutorial assistance. BSU President E. J. Brisker warned them during orientation that SEP students had “enough problems without having to like you.” Brisker urged them to be tough and demanding but also to remember how “galling” it is to need help. See Walker, “The University of Washington Establishment,” pp. 47, 74.

88  Sidney Gerber, “Diary of a Do Gooder,” Gerber Papers.

89  Amy Uyematsu described the growing militancy of young Asian Americans and their organizational and philosophical debt to African American activists of the 1960s in her article, “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America,” GIDRA (October 1969): 8–11. For a discussion of young Asian activists, see Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991), pp. 174–75.

90  Quoted from Donald Kazama, “Chapter Involvement,” p. 1, Japanese American Citizens League Records, Acc No.217–6, box 10, University of Washington Libraries (hereafter cited as JACL Records). The JACL was founded in Seattle thirty-four years earlier to advance Japanese American civil rights. Until the creation of the Human Relations Committee in 1964, the organization had ignored the grievances of other groups. But the JACL seemed far ahead of other Asian groups in the city. Although Victorio A. Velasco, a prominent Seattle Filipino American activist, described his involvement in various human rights activities during the 1960s, I could locate no other records of Asian groups or individual Asians that reveal the detail of the JACL Records on the civil rights–black power issue for that decade. See Victorio A. Velasco Papers, University of Washington Libraries.

91  Ibid., p. 3. See also Minutes of Human Relations Committee, October 5, 1965, p. 1, JACL Records.

92  Memorandum from Philip Hayasaka to Pat Okura and Jerry Enomoto, October 19, 1967. See also Minutes of Human Relations Committee, April 12, 1965, p. 3, JACL Records.

93  See Central Seattle Community Council Records, “History,” University of Washington Libraries.

94  See letter from Toru Sakahara to George Fugami, President, Seattle Chapter, JACL, August 12, 1968, in JACL Records, box 9; and Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Civil Disorder, Race and Violence in Washington State, pp. 8, 58–59.

95  Memorandum from Sakahara to Fugami, August 7, 1968, in JACL Records, box 9.

96  Sakahara to Fugami, August 12, 1968, JACL Records. The meetings between the JACL and various black community leaders continued into the fall with speakers such as attorney Gary Gayton who “represented the black middle class” and Edward Banks, from the Seattle Model Cities office. See Pacific Citizen, November 15, 1968, p. 1.

97  For a discussion of Takisaki and the involvement of the Asian and Latino communities in the campaign for jobs in the construction industry, see William A. Little, “Community Organization and Leadership: A Case Study of Minority Workers in Seattle” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1976), pp. 46, 51, 194–95.

98  Alan Sugiyama, “Co-optation: A New Game?” (editorial), Asian Family Affair, May 1977, p. 2.

99  Ibid. See also Uyematsu, “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America,” pp. 8–11.

100  Nationally the JACL had an ambiguous record on the subject of black civil rights, just as the NAACP and other predominantly black groups were mostly silent on the grievances of Japanese Americans stemming from their World War II incarceration. While the JACL publicly prided itself on its support for African Americans struggling to gain their rights and pointed to its participation in the March on Washington in 1963, its own survey of chapters in 1967 revealed that only nine of its thirty-six chapters were sponsoring programs on the black civil rights movement or had made any contribution to that cause, and only half of the chapters had members who had individually participated in some activity related to the movement. Thus Seattle’s JACL had one of the most active records of involvement during the decade. See Donald Kazama, “Chapter Involvement,” box 10, JACL Records.

101  Quoted in David Brewster, “Solidarity Forever! Black Demands for Construction Jobs Have Revived Labor’s Old Fighting Spirit—Not on Behalf of All Workers, but White Workers,” Seattle Magazine 6:69 (December 1969): 34. For a discussion of the origins and early progressive influence of Seattle’s labor union culture, see Robert L. Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964); and Dana Frank, “Gender, Consumer Organizing and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929,” in Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Towards a New History of American Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 273–95.

102  The long struggle of Seattle blacks against organized labor began in the nineteenth century with the generally unsuccessful efforts to prevent complete African American exclusion when labor organizations such as the Cooks and Stewards or the Barbers’ Union (the union was finally integrated in 1966) were first established in the city nearly a century earlier. The struggle continued into the early decades of the twentieth century with the focus on the longshore union, which was finally desegregated in the 1934 waterfront strike. In the early 1940s Seattle blacks campaigned against the exclusionary policies of the Aero Mechanics Union, utilizing the labor demands prompted by the rapid wartime expansion of the Boeing Company to establish a foothold in the manufacturing section of what would soon be termed the aerospace industry. See Quintard Taylor, “Black Urban Development—Another View: Seattle’s Central District, 1910–1940,” Pacific Historical Review 58:4 (November 1989): 436–38; and Taylor, “The Great Migration: The Afro-American Communities of Seattle and Portland during the 1940s,” Arizona and the West 23:2 (Summer 1981): 110–12.

103  William B. Gould, “The Seattle Building Trades Order: The First Comprehensive Relief against Employment Discrimination in the Construction Industry,” Stanford Law Review 26 (April 1974): 774–75. See also Little, “Community Organization and Leadership,” p. 25.

104  Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 4, 1965, p. 2, quoted in Richardson, “Civil Rights in Seattle,” p. 209.

105  James Halpin related the experience of Howard Lewis and his subsequent decision to file suit against Iron Workers Local 86 in “Jobs That Lead Nowhere,” p. 22. See also Gould, “The Seattle Building Trades Order,” pp. 785, 787.

106  Many skilled black workers often became “contractors” in order to circumvent union membership restrictions. As independent contractors they did not have to qualify for union membership to work on various construction projects. See Little, “Community Organization and Leadership,” pp. 22–23.

107  Scott interview quoted in Gould, “The Seattle Building Trades Order,” p. 782. The tactics of the CCA were soon duplicated by African Americans in other cities. In September and October 1969, various groups ranging from Chicago street gangs to Detroit black “hardhats” shut down construction projects with all-white work forces. See, for example, New York Times, September 23, 1969, p. 56; and Detroit Free Press, October 11, 1969, p. A3. For additional information, consult Little, “Community Organization and Leadership,” 27–30, 43–51, 120–21.

108  Gould, “The Seattle Building Trades Order,” p. 784. See also Brewster, “Solidarity Forever!” pp. 34–41.

109  Gould, “The Seattle Building Trades Order,” pp. 785–88.

110  Ibid., p. 799.

111  Writing in 1974, William Gould urged that the remedy applied by Judge Lindberg in the Seattle Plan—quotas and specific programs to ensure implementation—be used to address discrimination in other areas. “Hopefully,” he advised, “other courts will follow [Judge Lindberg’s] lead and act more quickly against discrimination than they did against school segregation.” Gould, “The Seattle Building Trades Order,” p. 811. Subsequent court cases involving affirmative action have proved Gould correct.

112  See Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Civil Disorder, Race and Violence in Washington State, pp. 23–25.

1  See Quintard Taylor, “Black Urban Development—Another View: Seattle’s Central District, 1910–1940,” Pacific Historical Review 58:4 (November 1989): 447–48.

2  Reverend John H. Adams, remarks before the Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission Hearing, Seattle, Washington, January 20, 1966. Quoted in Larry S. Richardson, “Civil Rights in Seattle: A Rhetorical Analysis of a Social Movement” (Ph.D. diss., Washington State University, 1975), p. 166.

3  The 100,000 figure was projected early in the 1960s and was often quoted by civil rights spokesmen such as Walter Hundley to alert Seattle’s political, civic, and business leadership to the urgent need to address the housing, de facto school segregation, and job discrimination issues facing the city’s African American population. See for example the Seattle Times, May 13, 1965, p. 53; and Patrick Douglas, “ ‘Yeah, Baby, You Almost Got Burned’: Must Act II of Our Negro Revolution Produce as It Did in Watts—a ‘Reign of Terror’?” Seattle Magazine 4:43 (October 1967): 16.

4  See “The Changing Face of the Central Area,” Seattle Times, June 7, 1981, pp. Cl, C4.

5  By the 1980s numerous neoconservative social theorists, aided by media focus on the spectacular success of well-educated middle-class native or immigrant Asians, began to advance the “model minority” concept, suggesting that African Americans would obtain economic success and social acceptance by emulating their example rather than continuing to pursue the confrontational political and civil rights strategy identified with organizations such as the NAACP. For a discussion of the fallacy of the model minority concept and its potentially negative implications for Asian American and African American relations, see Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), pp. 184–85; and Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), pp. 474–79.

6  For a discussion of this rapid diffusion and its implications for the entire city, see “Racial Migration Stood Out Clearly in Recent Census,” Seattle Times, June 7, 1981, p. C4.

7  For an example of the international dimension of intergroup dynamics in Seattle, see Larry Gossett, “A Perspective on the African American Community in the United States,” speech delivered at Kobe, Japan, March 23, 1992, as part of an international forum sponsored by the Sedaka Foundation of Tokyo, Japan. Gossett is executive director of the Central Area Motivation Program, the city’s largest and oldest antipoverty agency.

8  The discourse on the origin, size, and particular characteristics of the “underclass” is now entering its second decade with little more agreement on the origin, size, and particular characteristics than in the early 1980s. For a provocative discussion of the history of this debate and a proposed solution to their dilemma, see Roy L. Brooks, Rethinking the American Race Problem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 106–16, 122–24. See also William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 3–19; and Douglass Glasgow, The Black Underclass (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), pp. 3–8, for background on the evolving divisions in the black community prompted by the middle-class flight from the inner city. Seattle sociologist S. Frank Miyamoto describes the impact of the exodus of middle-class, educated Japanese from the postwar Seattle Nihonmachi in “An Immigrant Community in America,” in Hilary Conroy and T. Scott Miyakawa, eds., East across the Pacific: Historical and Sociological Studies of Japanese Immigration and Assimilation (Santa Barbara: Clio Press, 1972), p. 240.

9  Northwest Enterprise, March 22, 1944, p. 1.

10  Roger Sale in the mid-1970s perceptively anticipated the interclass dynamics inherent in the growing division between successful middle-class blacks who vacated the Central District for the predominately white city neighborhoods and the suburbs beyond, and the impoverished people left behind. See Roger Sale, Seattle, Past to Present (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), pp. 246–47. For an analysis of the trend nationally and a proposed program of middle-class self-help initiatives to revitalize the inner city, see Brooks, Rethinking the American Race Problem, pp. 131–49.

11  See Seattle Times, February 26, 1985, p. C2.