The intensified migration of African Americans to Seattle continued unabated into the 1960s as the black population rose from 26,901 in 1960 to 37,868 a decade later (Table 13). That population, which for decades had hovered at 1 percent of the city’s total, was almost 5 percent in 1960 and over 7 percent by 1970. But the growing visibility of black Seattle stemmed not simply from their larger numbers and concentration in the Central District, which by the 1960s had an overwhelming black majority. It was also the result of a remarkable civil rights campaign by community activists which although inspired by national goals and leadership nonetheless pursued a distinctly local agenda. Those activists would, in a single decade, mount the greatest challenge to Seattle’s racial order in the city’s century-long history. For many black Seattleites, “the Movement” was not simply a television or newspaper report of confrontations between demonstrators and police in Birmingham or Selma, Alabama, or agonizingly frustrating legislative debates in Congress. It was a direct action campaign to end job bias, housing discrimination, and de facto school segregation in Seattle as an integral part of the national effort to eradicate racism, empower African Americans, and achieve the full and final democratization of the United States.

Table 13

Growth of Seattle’s Black Population, 1950–1980

The Seattle “Movement” was an entirely local effort mounted by African Americans and sympathetic whites and Asians. Like the southern challenge, it had both striking victories and ignoble defeats. And the campaign, like the national effort, did not eliminate the basis for the poverty which disproportionately plagued the black community. Whether it succeeded in ending all the discrimination it challenged is still debatable. What is not debatable is the education it provided the city on the causes and consequences of racial inequality. By the end of the decade the entire city had wrestled with the questions of school desegregation, employment discrimination, and “open housing.”¹

Yet as important as this campaign was for both the city and the Central District, it also revealed the traumatic transformation of the political views and values of black Seattle which reflected and anticipated the changes occurring throughout black America in the 1960s. Integration, a term that symbolized the desire of African Americans to participate equally in every aspect of American society, was the watchword for most Seattle blacks at the beginning of the decade. By the end of the 1960s, however, a significant number of black Seattleites had turned away from that goal and sought instead to build a community within the Central District free of the economic and psychological control of white Seattle. For them the term “black power” signaled a radically different mood and future for race relations in the city and nation.²

David and Jean Garner, in October 1965, were typical of the ten thousand black migrants streaming into Seattle that decade. Having arrived eighteen months earlier from Louisiana, the Garners and their infant son, Xavier, lived on an all-black street in the Central District. The Garner residence was a one bedroom apartment rented for $50 per month. It was on an unpaved street, surrounded by ramshackle houses dating from the turn of the century. Cramped accommodations notwithstanding, the Garners, like many recent black migrants from the South, were optimistic about their future in the city. Seattle, they believed, offered far greater opportunity than the Louisiana town that was their former home. The Garners’ optimism was hardly atypical. “African Americans who migrated west to improve their lot,” declared Larry S. Richardson in his study of the Seattle civil rights movement, came to realize that Seattle was probably the “end of the line both socially and geographically. There was no better place to go.”³

When he first arrived, twenty-five-year-old David Garner, a high school graduate, obtained a job unloading banana boats. He later moved up to dishwasher, which paid $1.50 per hour. Despite his twenty job applications to places ranging from Boeing to a Central District service station near his home, Garner was finally hired at $1.92 per hour as a janitor at a downtown building. Reporting for work each day at 6:00 p.m., he never saw or was seen by the lawyers, businessmen, and secretaries who worked there. He was, according to Rillmond Schear, who profiled the Garner family in a 1965 Seattle Magazine article, “a phantom who comes and goes by night” and who “in an important sense … symbolizes the relationships between Seattle’s Negro and white residents.”⁴

For the Garners and countless other black Seattleites, the “invisibility” of the black community was a haunting reminder of the nearly century-old paradox of Seattle’s reputation for liberalism. While both blacks and whites agreed that the racial climate was less hostile than in comparable cities, the African American community nonetheless faced what one longtime activist termed “a wall of vast indifference.” “The deepest of our racial sins,” declared Roger Sale in his interpretative history of Seattle, “is ignorance. In the south, where whites and blacks have lived, however badly, for generations, that ignorance turned out to be shallower than in many parts of the north; in Seattle the ignorance runs deep. People here were uninterested in the Chinese in the 1880s, in the Japanese in the 1940s, in the blacks in the 1960s.”⁵

White Seattleites had a particular propensity for isolating themselves from any knowledge or concern about the local black population and its plight. Residents in Magnolia, Ballard, or West Seattle might acknowledge in principle the existence of some racial grievance by blacks, but most felt justified in ignoring the issue. “For them,” according to Schear, “the Central District might just as well be a foreign country, which they occasionally pass through in their automobiles, peering with mild distaste at ‘them’ and their funny way of life.”⁶

Thus Seattle’s liberal image masked deeply held racial antipathies and anxieties. Although the city’s black citizens had voting rights and access to public accommodations and never lived in fear of collective white violence, which so often undergirded race relations in southern communities,⁷ racism nonetheless impacted the black community in many ways. Much of the poverty of the Central District rested on a foundation of job discrimination. Despite the 1949 state antidiscrimination law and a state agency, WSBAD, dedicated to monitoring bias in the job market, Seattle blacks, particularly the unskilled, made surprisingly little progress during the 1960s. That their employment stagnation coincided with the rapid growth of the Boeing Airplane Company, which generated the “biggest economic boom since the Alaska Gold Rush,” was all the more frustrating (see Table 14). Between January 1965 and December 1967 more than 148,000 new jobs, many of them unskilled, were created in the Seattle-Everett metropolitan area. Yet that unprecedented boom did not absorb the estimated 3,000 unemployed in the Central District. In October 1967, black unemployment stood at 10 percent, triple the rate for the entire city and a full percentage point above the national black rate. Moreover, an ominous sign both locally and nationally appeared in a 1968 Urban League study of unemployed black males. Among those under twenty-four, the jobless rate had reached an all-time high of 25 percent.⁸

Table 14

Black Employment at Boeing, 1962–1970

The persistent poverty stemming from unemployment and underemployment increasingly generated cleavages between working- and middle-class blacks. Kenneth Latcholia, the black executive director of the Jackson Street Community Council, expressed the fear of many social service agency representatives about the inability of existing agencies to address the needs of what would two decades later be described as “the underclass” when he declared in 1965, “These are people who are poorly educated, frustrated and unhappy. Somebody’s got to get through to them because, right now, nobody is touching them.”⁹

Much of Seattle’s rapidly growing African American population was concentrated in areas of deteriorating housing. Seventy-five percent of the city’s 26,901 black residents in 1960 lived in four Central District census tracts, and by 1965 eight out of ten black residents lived there—the highest percentage in the city’s history. Seattle remained less segregated than most American cities in 1965, with a 79.7 rating compared with the national mean of 86.2 in the “segregation index” devised by social demographers Karl and Alma Taeuber. Nevertheless, the number of all-black blocks in the Central District, like the one where the Garner family resided, increased as African Americans filled multiple-residence structures that were either newly constructed apartment houses or, more likely, converted single-family houses, many dating from the beginning of the century.¹⁰

If racially restrictive residential covenants no longer carried the force of law, then tradition, income, geography, changing land use patterns, and discrimination proved equally effective in limiting black residence to the Central District. To the west lay First Hill, originally a residential area but by the 1960s the center of a complex of hospitals and related medical facilities; to the north lay Capitol Hill, whose elegant homes were well beyond the price range of all but the most affluent Central District residents. To the east were the ridges overlooking Lake Washington, which had long been settled by other members of the city’s affluent elite. Only to the south, toward Rainier Valley and Beacon Hill, largely working-class districts, was there any possibility of expansion, and indeed this is the area that absorbed the growing population in the 1960s and 1970s. But ten years earlier, opposition to such expansion was so adamant that blacks discounted the possibility of moving there as much as they dismissed their wholesale migration to Capitol Hill.¹¹

Some public officials recognized the potential danger of continued employment and housing discrimination. Carl B. Erickson, probation director of the Youth Service Center, concluded in 1961 that the Central District was the city’s “trouble spot” in juvenile delinquency because the population had grown larger and more isolated: “If we don’t develop housing opportunities in other parts of the city [for blacks], we will in time build a ghetto right in the center of our city.” Erickson’s comments were echoed two years later by Arthur Westberg, chair of the newly formed Seattle Human Rights Commission, who provided a sobering assessment challenging the widely held idea that Seattle had escaped the urban problems common among the nation’s urban centers. The Central District, according to Westberg, had 5 percent of the city’s population but it contained three thousand African American families in substandard housing. The area’s school dropout rate was the highest in the city, and the district had five thousand single-parent families (25 percent of the citywide total). Over 40 percent of Seattle’s welfare costs were incurred in the district.¹²

But Seattle was not, as Roger Sale reminds us, Detroit, Newark, or Watts. Because of its relatively small black population, the Central District had few blocks reflecting the physical deterioration so common in the racially exclusive slums of eastern cities, prompting most whites and some blacks to argue that “there was no racial problem” in the city, while ignoring the obvious signs of decay and discontent. Yet the small population guaranteed an equally small political base. Even though the African American population increased 72 percent between 1950 and 1960, as late as 1967 black Seattle had one state representative and no voice in the State Senate, the City Council, or School Board to advance its concerns.¹³

Black Seattle was unquestionably affected by the massive southern civil disobedience campaigns in the early 1960s. The city’s African Americans, including many with roots in the South, gave moral and financial support to the efforts of civil rights activists in that region and the national organizations sponsoring their activities.¹⁴ Seattle blacks, however, increasingly came to recognize that the racism they encountered in the Pacific Northwest differed only in intensity. Indeed, local leaders eagerly challenged the problems facing black Seattle, naively believing that a brief but well-orchestrated campaign of civil disobedience would inform the white community of the plight of the city’s African Americans and subsequently usher in a new era of racial understanding and economic opportunity. Such thinking was hardly unique to Seattle; national black leaders also assumed that eliminating job discrimination and, in the South, obtaining black voting rights, would generate a new egalitarian age in American race relations.

“Seattle is unique on the West Coast,” remarked John Guernsey in his article on the local school segregation crisis for the Portland Oregonian in 1963, “in having a unified front pressing for city-wide racial reform.”¹⁵ He was referring to the newly created Central Area Civil Rights Committee (CACRC), which included the leaders of local racial amelioration groups ranging from CORE to the Urban League. This self-appointed leadership cadre reached a remarkable consensus on strategy and tactics which eluded their national counterparts throughout the 1960s. It provided a single voice on civil rights issues and, through 1968, determined the local civil rights agenda. Included in this group were Edwin Pratt, executive director of the 1,000-member Seattle Urban League. Holding his position from 1961 to his assassination in 1969 by unknown assailants, Pratt was considered the dean of the local civil rights establishment. But that establishment also included the ministers Mance Jackson of Cherry Hill Baptist Church, Samuel B. McKinney of Mount Zion Baptist Church, and John H. Adams of First AME Church. The 1,500-member NAACP was represented through the decade by attorneys and a physician. At the beginning of the 1960s, Charles V. Johnson, who by 1969 had become a municipal court judge, spoke for the NAACP in CACRC. E. June Smith, president of the branch in the mid-1960s (and the only female member of CACRC), and Andrew Young,^a a former solicitor in the state attorney general’s office, who assumed the presidency in 1967, continued that representation. Although an NAACP board member rather than an officer, Dr. Earl Miller was also a frequent spokesperson for CACRC. Walter Hundley and John Cornethan, presidents of the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), represented that organization in CACRC. With an interracial membership of 300, CORE provided the “shock troops” of the Seattle Movement. Two members of CACRC, McKinney and Adams, boasted personal ties with the foremost civil rights leader in the nation, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. McKinney attended Morehouse College with King, and Adams and King were fellow graduate students in the divinity school at Boston University.¹⁶

In a 1973 interview five years after he left Seattle, Adams recalled the early days of the civil rights movement. The impetus, he claimed, came from local issues—job discrimination, school segregation, housing bias—which mirrored national problems. But it was also sparked by “new militant personalities”—women and men such as Pratt, Smith, Jackson, and Adams himself who were prepared to use civil disobedience tactics already tested in Montgomery, Albany, Greensboro, and Atlanta to challenge the local racial order. “By 1963,” declared Adams, “the Civil Rights Movement had finally leaped the Cascade Mountains.”¹⁷

Seattle’s civil rights leadership first confronted employment discrimination. The extent of the problem was revealed in October 1961, when WSBAD Executive Secretary Malcolm B. Higgins, at a luncheon of business representatives, depicted downtown Seattle as a place where “few, if any, negroes [were] employed in sales positions in major Seattle retail stores.” He urged the business leaders to hire more blacks in “visible positions.” Merchants attending the luncheon argued, however, that they wanted to hire black clerks, but feared incurring the public’s wrath.¹⁸

Black Seattle responded to the downtown merchants with its first direct action campaign orchestrated primarily by the newly formed chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. Seattleites created the chapter in 1961, electing Reginald Alleyne, Jr., as president. With its membership drawn mainly from college-age blacks and whites, CORE was originally intended to be a support group for the national organization’s civil rights activities in the South. The Seattle chapter, however, after appraising local employment patterns, chose to launch its own campaign for black employment. Its tactics would alternate between negotiation with store managers and direct action boycotts with accompanying picketing of businesses.

In October 1961, CORE initiated the first of numerous “selective buying campaigns.” Coordinated by Jean Adams and Walter Hundley, the campaign chose the Bon Marché department store as its first target but eventually included J. C. Penney, Nordstrom, Frederick and Nelson, A&P, Tradewell, and Washington Natural Gas among other firms by 1962. Picketing, the most widely used direct action, was conducted in front of these businesses, but CORE activists also engaged in controversial protest tactics which disrupted normal business operations. Such tactics included the “shoe-in,” where demonstrators filled the shoe section of a department store and demanded to try on numerous pairs of shoes without purchasing any, and the “shop-in” at grocery stores, where they filled carts and went to the checkstands, waited for the costs to be tallied, and left the store without taking or paying for the items.¹⁹

The Seattle chapter’s demonstrations generated the first boycott victories for CORE anywhere in the nation. By the end of 1962 the protests resulted in five positions at Safeway, and the following year twenty jobs at J. C. Penney and forty positions in other supermarkets. By January 1964 ten black workers had been placed at A&P, four at Wonder Bread, and twenty-eight at Frederick and Nelson. In the spring of 1964, Seattle CORE signed a landmark agreement with Nordstrom, one of Seattle’s largest department stores, which instituted a broad-based “program of equal opportunity employment” for minority workers. Nordstrom promised to integrate its office staff as well as its branch stores and advertise itself as an Equal Opportunity Employer for minority workers. In announcing the accord, Elmer Nordstrom, company vice president, pledged to CORE representative Tim Martin the “general integration of the Nordstrom working force through accelerated recruitment of minority employees, a training program for black salesmen, and seminars on civil rights issues.”²⁰

By the summer of 1964, however, it became apparent that CORE’s approach to employment discrimination by targeting single stores or supermarket chains had not altered the job prospects for the majority of black workers. Thus the chapter launched the Drive for Equal Employment in Downtown Stores (DEEDS), which August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, historians of the national organization, characterized as one of the two “most ambitious employment projects undertaken by CORE chapters” anywhere in the United States.²¹

A downtown campaign, CORE leaders presumed, would focus the attention of the entire community on employment discrimination. Before initiating direct action, however, CORE formed a thirty-person research team comprising university social scientists as well as university and high school students and “housewives” who conducted surveys and interviews of downtown business owners and employees. After two months of research, the team issued a report on the scope of employment discrimination in downtown Seattle.²²

The study found that only 2 percent of the 62,000 downtown employees were black and one-third of those were janitors. Of over 2,000 employees in sixty-five downtown restaurants there were no black managers, hostesses, cashiers, or waitresses, but 14 percent of the dishwashers were black as were all of the janitors. Ironically, retail stores with the largest number of African American customers also had the worst record of black hiring.²³

Scrupulously careful to avoid the impression that white workers would be replaced, the researchers contended that 5,000 new hires would be made downtown in the next year and suggested that 1,200 of these be African American. “The proposals are … neither racial quotas nor rigid demands,” the study solemnly announced. “They are negotiable suggestions put forward as first steps toward … full integration in the downtown work force and equal individual opportunity in downtown employment without regard to race.”²⁴

Federal governmental agencies located downtown were responsive to CORE’s “suggestions” and Mayor J. Dorm Braman indicated a willingness to hire additional black city employees. However, most business leaders ignored the request, prompting CORE to respond with a downtown boycott on October 19, 1964. Striking the moralistic tone typical of pre-1965 civil rights activists convinced that their cause was righteous, and invoking the imagery of southern civil rights campaigns, CORE issued a call to battle: “An aroused community will now present its just grievances through the persuasion of popular protest, the strength of economic pressure, the force of an undeniable moral position, and the power of public opinion. We shall overcome!”²⁵

The boycott lasted until January 1965 but produced no spectacular victory. Although some stores increased their hiring and promotion of black employees, the majority of businesses simply affirmed their belief in “equal opportunity” while making little apparent attempt to alter their policies. Moreover, the budget of Seattle CORE was exhausted by the downtown boycott and the simultaneous open housing campaign it mounted with other Seattle civil rights groups.²⁶

While CORE’s direct action protests did not generate employment for 1,200 black workers, the four years of protest demonstrations succeeded in making job bias a prominent citywide issue. Furthermore, CORE could, by the summer of 1964, remind downtown merchants that the recently passed Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination. Equally important, downtown store managers, after increasing their African American personnel, found that the argument that white customers would object to black sales personnel proved groundless.²⁷

CORE’s provocative, confrontational tactics lifted the veil of invisibility and ignorance concerning local job discrimination. By the summer of 1964, for example, civil rights leaders were regularly negotiating with city officials and leading businessmen about black employment opportunities. Both the city and the Chamber of Commerce initiated programs involving recruitment, training, and counseling to increase minority hiring. Though both plans were criticized by civil rights leaders as inadequate, they, along with the creation in the Central District of job training and placement facilities such as the Urban League–sponsored Job Opportunities Center and the Chamber of Commerce–sponsored Employment Opportunity Center, signaled, finally, a recognition of the problem of black employment.²⁸ Mayor Braman, for example, helped craft one of the nation’s first affirmative action programs. When announcing the plan to increase minority city employees, he declared that the city would be “very aggressive” in seeking candidates for civil service jobs among blacks and other minorities, particularly for the police and fire departments, which at the time had seven and two blacks respectively.²⁹

By the fall of 1965, CORE and other civil rights groups had embraced different issues. Nonetheless, as a growing number of African Americans appeared in downtown stores as sales personnel, and in its offices as secretaries, receptionists, and office managers, it was apparent that CORE’s four-year effort had persuaded many employers to change their “age-old” practices. It would be naive, however, to assume that employment bias had been eliminated in the city. Toward the end of the decade, the employment question would be revisited by a new group of activists with decidedly different goals and philosophies.

Of the simultaneous campaigns waged by local civil rights groups in the 1960s, open housing was the most acrimonious and yet ultimately the most successful. The extent of the problem was metaphorically summarized by Gerald Hatcher, a black real estate agent: “In an attempt to upgrade himself and his surroundings, the Negro in the Central Area finds himself moving from slightly better house to slightly better house until he has crisscrossed the narrow district with almost ludicrous redundancy—like a fly buzzing about in a closed jar.”³⁰

Although racially restrictive residential covenants were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, the widespread belief among white homeowners that black entry into a neighborhood ensured its demise as a desirable area forestalled any significant movement of blacks beyond the Central District. Moreover, realtors, who influenced the homebuying public, were often pressured to maintain existing racially based residential patterns. In January 1964, for example, a realtor in the Seattle suburb of Mercer Island who showed some houses to blacks was quickly told by her boss that she would be fired if she did so again.³¹

But open housing advocates were divided on how to achieve their goal. Many preferred a campaign of public education in conjunction with quiet attempts to locate “pioneer” black families in white neighborhoods.³² Others argued that this voluntary approach represented tokenism which capitulated to the public’s ignorance and prejudice. An open housing ordinance, they contended, would be the most effective means of integrating the neighborhoods because it would provide legal penalties for those who chose to discriminate. Toward the end of the decade a third view emerged that questioned residential desegregation in principle. Advocates of this view, influenced by the growing appeal of “black power,” pronounced the entire open housing campaign as a misguided waste of black political capital at best, and at worst an insidious plan to destroy black Seattle.

The open housing campaign in Seattle began inconspicuously in the 1950s with the efforts of the NAACP, the Urban League, and the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to assist blacks, Asians, and other persons of color who wanted housing outside the Central District. Typical of this voluntary approach was the Greater Seattle Housing Council formed in 1956 to encourage dialogue between proponents of open housing and the real estate industry. In the summer of 1962 the Fair Housing Listing Service was created by twenty-four organizations. It brought together African Americans willing to move out of the Central District and white homeowners amenable to selling to blacks, Asians, or Native Americans. The voluntary approach also benefitted from the efforts of Sidney Gerber, president of Harmony Homes, a nonprofit organization that constructed houses for African Americans in previously all-white housing tracts. By the time of his death in 1965, Gerber had built fifteen homes in various Seattle suburbs. Yet even this effort met with concerted opposition. The Seattle Times refused to run ads for Harmony Homes and only one real estate broker in the city listed Gerber’s houses.³³

The Fair Housing Listing Service and Harmony Homes were modest successes. But the voluntary approach was increasingly criticized by civil rights groups who wanted a citywide fair housing ordinance. CORE in particular called for direct action against the entire real estate industry. Influenced by this growing militancy, the Urban League and NAACP resigned from the Greater Seattle Housing Council in 1963, declaring its “program of gradualism … incompatible with the aims and aspirations of minority groups.”³⁴

Subsequently they joined other civil rights groups to campaign for a citywide fair housing ordinance. The ordinance’s impetus can be traced to the state legislature’s passage of the Omnibus Civil Rights Act of 1957, which made housing discrimination illegal. However, the law was successfully challenged two years later when King County Superior Court Judge James W. Hodson ruled against it in O’Meara v. Washington State Board against Discrimination. He declared that while he was “fully cognizant of the evils which flow from discrimination because of race … the court rules for the right of the owner of private property to complete freedom of choice in selecting those with whom he will deal.”³⁵ Both the Washington State Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Hodson’s ruling.

With the state law effectively emasculated, Seattle civil rights groups began their campaign to institute a citywide open housing ordinance. In 1962 those supporters were heartened to learn that Mayor Gordon Clinton’s Citizen’s Advisory Committee on Minority Housing recommended the ordinance. When the mayor and the City Council delayed action on the measure for nearly a year, Reverend Mance Jackson and Reverend Samuel McKinney on July 1, 1963, led a 400 person protest march from Mount Zion Baptist Church in the Central District to City Hall. Thirty-five young people from an interracial group called the Central District Youth Club left the march and staged Seattle’s first sit-in, occupying the mayor’s office for nearly twenty-four hours. Shortly afterward the City Council agreed to establish a Human Rights Commission and authorized it to draft an open housing ordinance. Fearing additional delay by City Hall, civil rights groups continued protest demonstrations, and on July 20, sit-ins involving nearly 300 people took place for the first time at City Council chambers. When a protestor tripped one of the councilmen, twenty-three demonstrators were arrested.³⁶

The City Hall demonstrations, and the resultant public outcry, polarized the city along racial lines. Predictably the Seattle Times, the city’s largest newspaper, declared that the demonstrations hurt the cause of open housing. However, Reverend Jackson spoke for the civil rights demonstrators, and reflected the growing impatience of African American Seattle, when he regretted the “violence” at the City Council chambers and defiantly declared: “A paternalistic concept of human relations in this country is all over.… We don’t need to be taken care of. We want to be equal participants in our own problem-solving processes.”³⁷

Open housing demonstrations continued with a 1,000 person march on August 28 from First AME Church to the Federal Courthouse in downtown Seattle to coincide with the 250,000 person March on Washington in the nation’s capital. Although U.S. Attorney Brock Adams welcomed the local demonstrators, “congratulating them on the peaceful exercise of their constitutional rights,” Reverends Jackson, McKinney, and Adams, with Mayor Clinton looking on, denounced the City Council’s failure to enact an open housing ordinance and vowed a continuation of the demonstrations. Those demonstrations extended into the fall of 1963. An October 20 protest march began at Mount Zion Baptist Church and concluded with a series of speeches at the Garfield High School playground where 1,200 people, about 25 percent of them white, braved a chilling rainstorm to call for open housing. Reverend McKinney, cognizant that an anticipated citywide referendum would likely reject open housing, declared “the white majority should not decide on my basic rights.… The question has already been settled in 1776.”³⁸ Two days after the rally the City Council reluctantly enacted Seattle’s first open housing ordinance after impassioned pleas from council supporters Wing Luke and A. Ludlow Kramer. The new law made discrimination in any kind of housing a misdemeanor punishable by a fine. Open housing opponents immediately instituted a successful petition campaign to place the measure on the ballot for the March 10, 1964, citywide election.

White homeowners feared the law would initiate declining property values. On the eve of the election, homeowner Philip Bailey wrote a guest editorial in the Argus, a weekly Seattle newspaper, voicing the fears of many opponents: “In America for the first time in history … almost every man can own his own home. It might be in a small subdivision or a pretentious house … but it is home, it is the owner’s castle, safe and secure.… Suddenly these homeowners are asked to surrender part of this gain … for something called open housing.… For this surrender the voter gains nothing but the feeling that he may be helping the oppressed … negroes.… The homeowner today is not willing to weaken his right to privacy and freedom of choice.”³⁹

The open housing ordinance generated fears, rumors, and sporadic violence in white neighborhoods throughout the city and in suburbs beyond the scope of the law. Crosses burned in yards and incendiary devices thrown on porches attested to the anger of the most militant open housing opponents. In the suburb of Kent, for example, shotgun blasts were fired into the homes of two black families. One of the homes was owned by Reverend Luther Green, a twenty-one-year resident of Seattle who indicated that he had moved to Kent three months earlier “from [the] crowded Central District for more room to rear his children.”⁴⁰

The intensity of the opposition surprised and baffled civil rights leaders who resignedly coalesced behind the Citizens Committee for Open Housing which began a public relations campaign to educate Seattle’s citizenry about the measure. Their efforts were palpably unsuccessful. Seattle voters rejected the ordinance 112,448 to 53,453. Moreover, in the simultaneous citywide elections for mayor, Dorm Braman, a leading opponent of open housing, handily defeated John Cherberg, the former University of Washington football coach, who supported it. One black leader bitterly declared: “If we got a majority to pass the law, we wouldn’t have needed the law.” Reverend John Adams was more explicit: “The Civil Rights battlefield is moving north and west, and Seattle may become a major battleground in the near future. I think we’re in for a long hot summer.”⁴¹

Taking up that theme, Seattle’s civil rights leaders vowed to continue their campaign of civil disobedience for open housing. “We are not going to rest,” declared E. June Smith, president of the NAACP, one month after the referendum, “until this city becomes in truth an All-American city.” Black leaders promised “waves of picketing, phone-ins, sit-ins, buy-ins and even more types of civil disobedience.”⁴² Seattle CORE, however, was the only organization to initiate the threatened civil disobedience when it began a series of weekend sit-ins at the Green Lake and Lake City offices of Picture Floor Plans, the realty firm owned by the president of the Seattle Real Estate Board. These tactics prompted a court-ordered injunction which terminated the protests. Although CORE saw the injunction as a brief interlude in the struggle for open housing, it was, in fact, the last attempt to use direct action to generate desegregated housing in Seattle.⁴³

Yet the citywide debate over the open housing ordinance persuaded a small but growing segment of white Seattle to reassess its opposition to residential desegregation. Following the referendum there was a noticeable increase in the activity of voluntary organizations such as the Fair Housing Listing Service. By 1965 the organization had “directly negotiated fifty-two sales with a dollar volume over $1,000,000” to black families in outlying Seattle neighborhoods and suburbs. Moreover, some white homeowners invited blacks to integrate their neighborhoods. In November 1963, Mrs. Felicita M. Schoenfield of Fir Meadows sent a letter to the Seattle Human Rights Commission announcing to realtors and Central District residents that “many here in the neighborhood would welcome them.… We would regard any new neighbors equally, with a little plus on the side of Justice for the deprived. In home, school, and church, we’ll be friends.”⁴⁴

By the summer of 1965 even the staunchest proponents of the defeated open housing ordinance were slowly conceding that the voluntary approach allowed a growing number of blacks to purchase homes outside the District. Some Central District residents now feared that the most successful blacks would move elsewhere as housing outside the black community became available. Central District businessman and political activist Keve Bray suggested that the community would have little patience with “social climbers who were trying to get away from their people.” Reverend McKinney, who just two years earlier was a forceful proponent of open housing, now declared, “I have little tolerance for the Negro who has received his education and acceptance and removes himself … from the problem.”⁴⁵

Despite such opposition, local civil rights groups intensified their efforts to encourage African Americans to vacate the district. In November 1967, Seattle became the second city in the nation (after Cleveland) to receive a $138,000 grant from the Ford Foundation for Operation Equity. Established the previous June, Operation Equity arranged, on average, ten sales per month to black families in white neighborhoods. The grant, announced in Seattle by Whitney Young, the executive director of the National Urban League, was designed to expand the program. Citing the acute housing segregation in the District, Young challenged Seattle to prove itself a “decent, democratic city” by accepting open housing.⁴⁶

Seattle also initiated programs to improve housing in the Central District and undertook an ambitious program of rehabilitation designed to save nearly three hundred condemned houses in the area. That effort symbolized the nexus of a number of federal War on Poverty programs created to empower ghetto residents. The $110,000 development fund for the program came from antipoverty grants provided by the Seattle–King County Office of Economic Opportunity and private funds from the Olympia Diocese of the Episcopal Church. The rehabilitation work was performed by the “hard core” unemployed who were hired as on-the-job trainees with the Seattle Community Organization for Renewal Enterprises (SCORE), a division of the city’s major antipoverty agency, the Central Area Motivation Program (CAMP). The initial training of these workers as carpenters, tile setters, and drywall installers came through the Central District’s largest job training facility, the Seattle Opportunities Industrialization Center (SOIC). The program generated multiple advantages including vital job training, reduction of chronic unemployment, the rebuilding of deteriorated neighborhoods, and the continued development of single-family dwellings in the Central District rather than multiunit apartment complexes.⁴⁷

Citizen involvement also helped prevent “neighborhood succession,” a euphemism for the rapid transformation of predominately white neighborhoods on the edge of the ghetto into all-black areas. The best example of this involvement was the Leschi Improvement Council whose interracial membership included blacks such as Powell Barnett, an eighty-four-year-old community activist, Gene Warren, a jazz musician, and Leon Bridges, an architect, as well as whites such as James Sanders, another architect who was president of the organization, Roger Sale, a University of Washington English professor, and Sheila Bodemer, wife of a University of Washington Medical School professor. The neighborhood, one of the most racially and economically diverse in the city, included the “Gold Coast” of elegant homes and apartment houses along Lake Washington and, just a few blocks to the west, deteriorating housing typical of the expanding ghetto. Despite the differences in race and income, the residents made common cause in battling the blight and decay of their neighborhood of five thousand. Early in the 1960s, council members worked to allay fears of whites that African Americans would take over the community; later in the decade, they calmed the apprehensions of blacks that they would be edged out by high income whites returning to Leschi through gentrification.⁴⁸

The dramatic decline in white opposition to residential segregation over the decade of the 1960s was best symbolized by the City Council’s unanimous passage of an open housing measure in 1968, sponsored by its first black member, Sam Smith. The ease with which the ordinance was enacted reflected profound changes in local and national race relations. No doubt much of the council’s attitude was predicated on keeping racial peace, for April 1968, the month the measure was adopted, was a time of uprisings in over one hundred cities in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Many feared Seattle might also join the list, especially if a deeply divided City Council forced a second open housing referendum.⁴⁹ But the council also realized that extensive residential integration had occurred voluntarily since 1964.

In contrast to city officials, Governor Daniel J. Evans spoke out forcefully on the open housing issue. Evans, a liberal Republican, indicated the extent to which his dramatic meeting during the summer of 1967 with grassroots blacks in the Central District had shaped his thinking on open housing:

I think all citizens of this state must search their own background to recognize that people ought to be able to live where economics and where their desires would put them. Even though we obviously have no legislation that says today people can’t move anywhere, there is no question in my mind that it is very difficult, if not impossible for some citizens of our central area to live where they might wish to live. This is an area where every citizen just joins in because legislation alone cannot solve the problem.⁵⁰

Some Washington citizens did join in. Open housing advocates in Seattle suburbs began providing information on homes available in their areas. Typical of these voluntary groups were the Kirkland Fair Housing Organization in a northeast Seattle suburb and Operation Equity of the far south suburb of Federal Way. Consequently, by 1968, unlike the beginning of the decade, few Seattle suburbs were without some black families (see Table 15). The extent of that transformation became apparent one month after the City Council enacted the open housing measure. Thirty thousand King County residents—primarily white, non–Central District homeowners—signed petitions supporting open housing.⁵¹

The voluntary efforts of individuals such as Sidney Gerber, and organizations like Operation Equity, as well as the demands of CORE and other civil rights organizations engaged in direct action protests, had succeeded in persuading many whites of the desirability of residential integration. At a time when fears of “black power” and “white backlash” stalled resolution of the housing question in other areas of urban America, in Seattle, at least, significant progress was made. Few black or white Seattleites would recognize the magnitude of that progress until the next decade, when numerous black homeowners and renters moved southeast into Rainier Valley, and smaller numbers migrated east into Mercer Island and Bellevue, and north into Snohomish County. By 1980, for the first time in Seattle’s history, the Central District would no longer be the home of the majority of black Seattleites.⁵²

Table 15

Growth of Seattle’s Black Suburbia, 1960–1990: Black Population in Seattle and Its Suburbs

De facto school segregation was the most troubling outgrowth of the concentration of black Seattle in the Central District. In 1957 the Seattle School Board took its first census of enrollment by race and found that only 5 percent of its 91,782 students were black. That same census also showed black pupils heavily concentrated in certain schools. Nine elementary schools, eight of which were in the Central District, contained 81 percent of all elementary age black pupils. All-black schools in a city where African American residents had long prided themselves on their integrated educational setting were particularly frustrating to civil rights leaders, even if such schools were partly the result of continued black migration to the city. “We know the consequences when Negroes are forced to go to school together—in their penned up section of the city,” asserted CORE Chairman Walter Hundley in 1965, “they learn to hate.”⁵³

Although it was relatively simple to assess the problem, the solution would be excruciatingly difficult. Seattle schools were not segregated by law, and no public official encouraged de facto segregation, as occurred in Chicago and other major northern cities.⁵⁴ The enemy in Seattle was indifference in the white population, born of its perception that there was no problem in the city. Thus civil rights leaders who complained about ghetto schools were often viewed as publicity seekers intent on blaming the entire community for the educational deficiencies of black children. Recalling the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Seattle School Board’s reaction, Mrs. Henry B. Owen, president in 1954, said, “Our feeling at the time was ‘it was not our fault that the schools [in Seattle] were segregated.’ ”⁵⁵

The segregation issue was further complicated by the quality of some Central District schools. One school board official remarked about the Central District’s only high school: “There was [in the early 1960s] a type of euphoria that sort of centered around Garfield High School … what a great multi-racial educational institution it was. We weren’t in too bad shape as long as we had more people in any given year who were Garfield graduates getting their Ph.D.’s than graduates of any other school.” Such euphoria was sustained by statistics which showed 55 percent of the Garfield class of 1959 going to college. By race the figures were 66 percent of the 160 white graduates, 57 percent of the 71 Asian graduates, and 27 percent of the 124 black graduates.⁵⁶

Pride in Garfield notwithstanding, the continuing growth of the black population of the Central District accelerated the concentration of blacks in the area’s schools. In 1962, Garfield became the first predominately black high school in the state when school district census figures indicated it was 51.4 percent black. (See Table 16 for a comparison of black and Japanese enrollments in Seattle high schools.) The closest high school in percentage terms was Franklin, which was only 9.2 percent black, while six of the remaining nine high schools in Seattle had five or fewer black students.⁵⁷

On August 28, 1963, the date of the March on Washington, Seattle became the first major city in the United States to undertake a districtwide school desegregation plan. The School Board voted to initiate the Voluntary Racial Transfer Program (VRT) that would send an estimated 1,400 of the 7,000 black pupils in the city to various schools outside the Central District to arrest the growing racial isolation of black children in the public schools. Only 238 of the anticipated 1,400 black students participated in the transfer in 1963–64 along with seven white students, who, when apprised of Garfield’s academic reputation, made “reverse” transfers.

Seattle’s civil rights leaders, however, began working for rapid desegregation. In 1964, CACRC made Horace Mann school the center of a three-sided controversy between itself, the School Board, and grassroots community activists. The school, with a 97 percent black enrollment in 1964, was a sixty-two-year-old, two-story frame structure scheduled for eventual demolition. CACRC seized this opportunity to press for the immediate closure of Mann to encourage the dispersal of blacks into other schools. To provide additional pressure, CORE announced that the city faced the prospect of “peaceful, nonviolent direct action” if the board refused to move expeditiously to end de facto segregation. Neighborhood activist Isaiah Edwards and his supporters, however, citing the extreme overcrowding in Central District schools, wanted a new facility to replace the building. The immediate education of “their children,” he argued, took precedence over school integration. To show their support they presented a petition to the School Board signed by 447 Central District parents.⁵⁸

The division of the community over the fate of Horace Mann school and desegregation in general highlighted the growing divergence among the city’s blacks on the entire civil rights agenda, and anticipated the conflict between “integrationists” and “black power” advocates later in the decade—a conflict that would soon be replicated on the national level. The middle-class activists who dominated CACRC, and who were unalterably committed to integration, increasingly saw their position challenged by working-class black Seattleites. These blacks, although silent at the beginning of the decade because they, too, wanted improved educational opportunity for their children, began to express publicly their reservations about an integration effort which disproportionately burdened their children.

Integration advocates genuinely believed that any segregated school was a substandard one. Such leaders were well aware of the decades-old struggle in the South and in some northern cities to end both de facto and de jure segregation. Any public school enrollment pattern which even inadvertently appeared to support such segregation locally was immediately attacked. CACRC spokesman Dr. Earl Miller expressed as much when he declared, “One cannot have quality education when it is incomplete. Where whole vistas of human experience are absent, education is incomplete.”⁵⁹

Isaiah Edwards and his supporters, however, were equally sincere in their critique. In a guest editorial in The Facts, the local black newspaper, Edwards challenged CACRC’s “integration at all costs” approach and its presumption to speak for the entire black community. Positioning his views as in the mainstream of Central District thinking on education and characterizing CACRC as a small minority, Edwards cited the failure of “responsible Negro citizens” to speak out against “irresponsible extremism on the part of individuals, and relatively small groups who appoint themselves as leaders and spokesmen for the Negroes of the Central Area.”⁶⁰

Edwards was joined in 1965 by Gertrude Dupree, another neighborhood organizer who attacked integration. “People who don’t know the feelings of the Negro community,” she declared, “are the ones who have been pushing for ‘integration’ of our children.” She was particularly critical of CACRC member Reverend Samuel McKinney, who called for the closure of Horace Mann school, publicly asking why his two children were not relocated from mostly black Madrona “under the voluntary transfer program, if it were so important.”⁶¹

Despite the attacks from neighborhood spokespersons, CACRC continued to support integration of Central District pupils into the other schools of the city, even if it required closing local schools. Moreover, for the first time, the civil rights leadership group called for mandatory busing of black children to distant neighborhoods. When the School Board appeared unreceptive to the latter demand, CACRC called for a school boycott to show black community displeasure over the slow pace of integration.⁶²

The boycott took place on March 31 and April 1, 1966, and included nearly 4,000 students. An estimated 55 percent of the overall black enrollment in the school district participated, although in some elementary schools it exceeded 80 percent. Black students and sympathetic white and Asian students and teachers reported to various “Freedom” schools in the Central District. Five hundred children appeared at Reverend McKinney’s Mount Zion Church and the overflow was accepted at nearby Temple De Hirsch. Integrated classes were held where students were taught black history, the meaning of the boycott, music and crafts, and Native American culture. To the surprise of its organizers, the boycott showed considerable white and Asian support for desegregation. Grace Katagiri, daughter of Reverend Mineo Katagiri, the only Japanese member of CACRC, and herself among the boycotters, said, “It was shocking to Roosevelt High School [teachers and administrators] when a lot of Roosevelt kids walked out in sympathy and attended the freedom schools.” The freedom schools were a novel experiment where many white children attended schools with black children for the first time in their lives.⁶³

Nonetheless, the boycott was the last example of African American political unity on the de facto segregation issue, as growing numbers of black parents came out against mandatory busing, the closing of Central District schools, and the disproportionate burden carried by black Seattle in the voluntary transfer program (over 500 black students were transferring out of the Central District while no more than 20 whites transferred in). That opposition would crystallize into two distinct factions: a group of conservative black parents allied with Gertrude Dupree, and a much larger group comprising primarily young radicals who identified with “black power.” Dupree launched a well-publicized effort in the summer of 1966 to block the voluntary transfer program. Supported by the predominately white Save Our Neighborhood Schools (SOS), she urged resistance to CACRC plans for integration. Central District support for Dupree and SOS soon waned, however, when it became apparent that the organization was primarily motivated by its fear of integration of white schools throughout Seattle.⁶⁴

If Dupree could be quickly dismissed, much the same could not be said of the “black power” advocates who by 1967 had became a major force in the school controversy. While individuals such as Keve Bray and organizations such as the Nation of Islam provided critiques of the “integrationists” before 1966, the first major “black nationalist” alternative emerged in the spring of 1967 with the appearance of Stokely Carmichael at Garfield High School. After addressing an audience at the University of Washington, Carmichael made a rare visit to a high school campus, where 4,000 turned out for his speech. He chided the white press for distorting black power and said, “No one is talking about the blacks taking over the country, but about taking over our own communities.” Carmichael attacked the integrationists for slowly destroying the black community: “What must be abolished is not the black community, but the dependent, colonial status forced upon it.… White people assume they can give freedom, but nobody gives freedom. They can only deny it. We are all born free. We are enslaved by institutionalized racism.”⁶⁵

Walter Hundley, acknowledging the speech as “a set-back for integrationists,” provided a succinct assessment of the impact of Carmichael’s visit and revealed his own frustration over CACRC’s inability to maintain the loyalty of many young black Seattleites: “Kids get turned on with rhetoric. Stokely Carmichael was like one of those rock groups.… And there was no way we ‘old heads’ could tell them, ‘Man, that’s rhetoric!’ Some of it was good … for a black person the kids respected to tell them that they are somebody, to stand up for themselves—this was good.… And I must admit that Carmichael got that portion of the message over much more strongly than our organizations had been able to do.… That’s good. But the rest of it was [nonsense]. So the kids wandered around defiantly … instead of taking the whole message and working as hard on achievement.”⁶⁶

The first political repercussions of Carmichael’s visit surfaced the following August when a new organization, the Central Area Committee for Peace and Improvement (CAPI), presented the School Board with a list of eight demands, including the dismissal of Garfield principal Frank Hanawalt, the introduction of minority history into the curriculum of every school in the city, and the hiring of additional black teachers and counselors.⁶⁷ Growing militancy was also evident among black students who organized a black power assembly at Garfield on December 15, 1967. Speakers included representatives from the University of Washington Black Student Union (BSU) and the newly formed Seattle Black Panther Party. Black administrator Roberta Byrd Barr, Carl Miller of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Bernie Yang of Students for a Democratic Society also spoke. Miller’s speech reflected the sentiments of most of the participants when he declared Garfield “a slum school.… Quit kidding yourselves. They’ve been telling you Garfield’s great. It isn’t.”⁶⁸

Angry Central District parents turned their wrath on the civil rights establishment in a particularly acrimonious March 6, 1968, meeting at the East Madison YMCA which, according to many observers, marked the demise of CACRC as the leadership group for black Seattle. Organized ostensibly to rally support for integrated education, the meeting quickly became a referendum on CACRC and its vision of the future. Attendance was estimated at four hundred who represented the variety of views and voices in the Central District. Reverend John H. Adams opened the meeting by calling for support of integration and was immediately challenged by three dissident groups: the followers of Keve Bray, the Nation of Islam, and black university and high school students affiliated with the University of Washington BSU and the Black Panther Party. The integrationists were, according to one observer, “swept off the platform” and Adams soon left Seattle to assume pastoral duties at a Los Angeles church.⁶⁹

Civil rights leaders saw the meeting as “a capitulation to hysteria,” in the words of Walter Hundley, at that time director of Model Cities.⁷⁰ Yet others saw it as an assertion of working-class blacks in an area heretofore dominated by African American professionals. Future School Board member Alfred Cowles remarked, “The black professional leaders … said integration is going to be painful … so accept the pain that goes with it.” Working-class blacks replied, “We’ve been suffering pain already too long—let the other group suffer some pain.”⁷¹

By 1969 the focus of the de facto segregation controversy had shifted from integration to decentralization and community control when the School Board created the sixteen-member Central Area School Council (CASC), an elective body which would assist the board in administering Central District schools. While this plan was not as sweeping as the most famous example of community control generated by the 1968 Ocean Hill–Brownsville school controversy in Brooklyn, New York, both the School Board and the black community increasingly saw community input through CASC into school curriculum, program structure, and administration as an effective alternative to desegregation. Community control offered a panacea to those who were frustrated with the inability of the larger Seattle community to come to terms with the question of race and education.⁷²

The campaign for school desegregation had gone full circle between 1960 and 1970, with the goal of quality education for black public school pupils as elusive at the end of the decade as at its beginning. The initial effort to desegregate the schools, which seemed vitally important to the black community and which was ignored by much of white Seattle, had now become a struggle by black Central District residents to maintain their own schools in the face of proposed closures and dispersal of their children throughout the city. Whites who in 1961 had hardly known or cared about the educational deficiencies of the Central District, or de facto segregation, had been “educated” in the ongoing public discourse on black concerns. By 1970 virtually no white or Asian resident in Seattle, or its suburbs, could confess ignorance of the desegregation issue. Many had learned to be supportive of black claims for educational equity. Other groups such as Save Our Neighborhood Schools and its successor organization, Citizens against Mandatory Bussing (CAMB), who, while expressing acceptance of integration “in principle,” campaigned against measures that would accelerate that process. Indeed, by 1970 the School District’s overall enrollment had declined by 10 percent but its white enrollment was 66,745, down by almost one-third from the 91,000 registered in 1960. Some of the decline obviously came from the city’s decreasing and aging population, but much of it was prompted by a flight from the public schools in response to the debate over school segregation. White flight invariably meant that many of Seattle’s black pupils were more isolated at the end of the decade than at the beginning. The 1,285 students at Garfield High School in 1970, for example, were 80 percent black, 15 percent white, 4 percent Asian, and 1 percent Native American. The de facto segregation controversy had divided whites and blacks but it also pitted blacks against blacks and whites against whites in the search for an honorable solution.⁷³

The school campaign illustrated the developing intraracial cleavages in the Central District around the growing appeal of black power. Although few observers recognized it as such, black power reflected the deepening class divisions in African American Seattle and across the nation—accelerated, ironically, by the success of the civil rights movement. To well-educated middle-class African Americans, the Movement, with its emphasis on residential integration, access to prestigious universities, and the end of employment restrictions, particularly in white-collar occupations, would demolish long-standing barriers to their full acceptance into American society. Working-class blacks, both those who held regular if poorly remunerated employment and those who constantly sought any work, suffered similar disabilities, but their difficulties were magnified by limited education and skills. For them, ending employment bias, whether it originated with employers or unions, and getting requisite job training to provide access to blue-collar jobs so they could leave welfare or avoid its web, was far more important than access to suburban housing or busing children to achieve racial balance in the public schools.

When the Movement began in Seattle in the early 1960s, it appeared that the aspirations of both groups could be reconciled by a single leadership touting one set of tactics and goals. By the mid-1960s, as middle-class blacks achieved their particular goals, they lost interest in the Movement. Yet the poverty of those with meager education and skills persisted and intensified into the late 1960s, generating resentment not only against the white power structure but increasingly against middle-class blacks, who, with few notable exceptions, exhibited little interest in the plight of the black poor. Indeed after 1966, it seemed the only middle-class African American Seattleites who appeared concerned about the problems of the working and nonworking poor were those who staffed the various antipoverty agencies. For them, and the people for whom they spoke, “black power” seemed a viable alternative to “freedom now.”

The immediate origins of the term “black power” and the aspirations it represented were traceable to Stokely Carmichael’s speech in Mississippi in 1966, during the March against Fear.⁷⁴ That term and the growing militancy it reflected would be given urgency by major urban rebellions in Detroit and Newark in 1967, followed by even more uprisings in the aftermath of the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

The premise of black power both in Seattle and nationally began with the idea that African Americans should define and control the major institutions in their community, whose economic and political resources should be mobilized for its development and eventual parity alongside other communities. Seattle’s black power advocates specifically rejected those blacks “who now serve as spokesmen and leaders for the black community because whites feel at ease with them,” declared Michael Ross, an investigator for the Legal Services Program and a future state representative. They wanted black leaders who could communicate “in the way and manner of the people who sit on ghetto porches and hang out on ghetto street corners.” Ross called for black leaders who listed their occupations as carpenter, machinist, welfare recipient, or simply unemployed.⁷⁵

Operating from the premise that deep-seated racism precluded any meaningful integration, black power advocates argued that their philosophy was the only option that would allow African American survival. “I am not a separatist but I am for independence of choice,” declared Larry Gossett, leader of the Black Student Union at the University of Washington, “and the best choice that I feel black people can make is to continue to build a strong, creative and innovative black community.” Roberta Byrd Barr, community relations coordinator for the Seattle Public Schools, reiterated that view: “Since we cannot, by stated common consent of the white majority, be the same as other Americans, we now use the symbol color ‘black’ to unite widely varying segments of our own people.”⁷⁶

Black power in Seattle, as nationally, had historic roots. The emergence of the Nation of Islam in the city in 1961 and the rise of political dissidents such as businessman-politician Keve Bray by 1964 suggest that some Seattle blacks were unwilling to accept integration as the paramount goal of the black community. They were joined after 1965 by Seattleites long associated with the local civil rights movement, such as Reverend Samuel McKinney and members of CORE, who also began to reassess the idea of a single integrationist objective.

The transformation of Seattle’s CORE chapter symbolized the changing philosophies of both local and national black leadership. When founded in 1961, the interracial organization was “militantly integrationist” and was the principal exponent of the confrontational politics practiced by all of the local civil rights groups before 1965. Led successively by Reginald Alleyne, Walter Hundley, and John Cornethan, it continued its integrationist stance through mid-decade. By 1966, however, it was embroiled in internal controversy over its goals and direction. A November visit by Lincoln Lynch, the associate national director, prompted the schism. Lynch announced that the national organization was now on the “cutting edge” of the new militancy in black America and described his visit as part of a drive to “install that new militancy” in the Seattle chapter and “to clarify” CORE’s position on “black power, self-defense and the Vietnam War,” a conflict he termed “immoral, unjust, and illegal.”⁷⁷

Lynch’s visit was the opening salvo in a confrontation between the integrationists and their black power adversaries. By July 1967 the rift was public. During the national convention in Oakland, California, delegates voted to become a “mass-membership organization, to implement the concept of black power for black people,” and to strike from its constitution the provision that made CORE a “multiracial” organization. John Cornethan, Seattle president, in defiance of the convention declared the Seattle chapter would remain integrated. Cornethan reported that the chapter had 116 whites and 68 blacks and that Seattle’s four delegates to the convention, three of them white, opposed the constitutional revision regarding membership. He also categorically rejected the other national policies, including the development of a black political party and the assumption of ownership by blacks of businesses in their communities. Declaring that the Seattle chapter had ignored numerous portions of the national constitution for the past three years, Cornethan vowed that it would continue to seek integrated quality education, equal employment, and open housing. The black nationalist policies of the national office would, he concluded, be ignored.⁷⁸

At the first postconvention meeting of the Seattle chapter it became evident that such a course would be impossible. Angry members, led by Frances White and Les McIntosh, publicly challenged Cornethan’s leadership, forcing him to adjourn the meeting because it became “unruly.” After Cornethan left, Ed Russell, the chapter’s treasurer, reconvened the gathering with the remaining members, who then voted to hold a special membership meeting to discuss impeachment of Cornethan. Floyd McKissick, the national director, appointed a four-member interim governing committee for the chapter: Ira Oakes, Barbara Robertson, Bob Redwine, and Ed Russell. Russell was designated CORE’s Seattle spokesman. McKissick intervened, he claimed, because Cornethan had “failed to implement national policies.” The new governing committee vowed to bring the Seattle chapter’s goals in line with the national organization, although it indicated it would continue to be an interracial body. But stringent conditions were set: whites who accepted black power had the primary role of working to remove prejudice against blacks in their own communities.⁷⁹

If CORE was the first Seattle group to embrace black power, by 1968 numerous Central District organizations were calling for its adoption in various forms while competing for the allegiance of the Central District’s working and nonworking poor. They included the Negro Voters League (NVL), formed in 1966 by Cliff Hooper, Ed Jones, Keve Bray, and 1950s activist Paul Bowen; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), headed by Mattie Bundy and created in the wake of Stokely Carmichael’s visit to Seattle in April 1967; the Forum Foundation, founded in 1968 and chaired by Pearl Fleming; the Seattle Central Area Registration Program (SCARP), headed by David Mills, and also started in 1968. The cultural and artistic manifestations of black power in Seattle evolved with the establishment of the Central Area School of the Performing Arts (CASPA) and Black Arts West, both founded in 1968.⁸⁰

The Central Area Committee for Peace and Improvement (CAPI), headed by Les McIntosh, emerged as one of the leading black power groups. CAPI grew from a smaller ad hoc organization called We of the Grassroots, which gained notoriety in the summer of 1967 after a meeting with Governor Evans and a heated confrontation with Mayor Braman. The twelve-member Grassroots committee, led by antipoverty worker Infanta Spence and McIntosh, arranged a tour of the Central District for Governor Evans. Following the tour Evans agreed to establish a multiservice center in the district which would include health, employment, and public assistance offices. A similar meeting with Mayor Braman three days later, however, produced no agreement on issues such as the upgrading of the Garfield playground, a police review board, and the rerouting of the proposed Thomson Expressway to avoid dissecting the black community.⁸¹

The proliferation of black power groups prompted the creation of the United Black Front (UBF), which grew out of two days of meetings at the East Madison YMCA in September 1968. The UBF was a coalition of fifty organizations pledged to work for black political and economic empowerment, improved educational opportunity, and the elimination of white oppression. UBF leaders came almost exclusively from various antipoverty agencies, reflecting the importance of such federal programs in generating a new leadership cadre to challenge the integrationist-oriented CACRC in the Central District. UBF president David Mills, for example, was director of the Seattle Central Area Registration Program (SCARP), Vice President Michael Ross was a Model Cities staff member, secretary Gloria Henderson was a staffer with the Youth Opportunity Center, and sergeant-at-arms John Carson headed the Yesler-Atlantic Urban Renewal Project. Only treasurer Therusa Holly, who was listed as an educator, was not a poverty-program staffer. While such leadership was articulate and capable, it was often not indigenous to the Central District, and quickly moved on with the termination of many antipoverty programs in the early 1970s.⁸²

The Seattle Black Panther Party, however, epitomized the new Central District militancy. Although the Panthers never had more than fifty members, they quickly became the most publicized and the most feared black group in the Central District. The Seattle Panthers were a contradictory collage of images. Formed in the spring of 1968 to “combat police harassment,” they organized themselves into a paramilitary unit to monitor police activities in the Central District. They also ran candidates, E. J. Brisker and Curtis Harris, for the Thirty-seventh District legislative seats in the 1968 elections, “not to win but to educate the black community on their platform of full employment, decent housing, education for black people, military exemption for black males, and justice for all.” Led by nineteen-year-old Aaron Dixon, whose official title was “Captain,” the Panthers were the youngest members of the black power groups in the city. Most were in their teens and early twenties. Brisker, an Atlanta native and minister of education for the Panthers, was the oldest member at twenty-five. Simultaneously president of the University of Washington Black Student Union, he symbolized the link between the Panthers and the black university student activists.

Noted for their inflammatory Marxist-oriented rhetoric, provocative literature, and uniform of black leather jacket and beret, the Panthers in Seattle and elsewhere in the United States were quickly dismissed either as publicity-hungry opportunists or as dangerous criminals hiding behind the facade of political activism. Yet the range of their activities suggests that their concerns for the black community extended far beyond confrontation with the local police. Seattle’s Panthers established a free medical clinic, prison visitation programs, a statewide sickle-cell anemia testing program, tutoring programs, and a free breakfast program for impoverished children. They were also credited with quelling random violence and attacks on police and property in the Central District in 1968 and 1969 and with participating in dialogue with Asian American business groups in the District through the Seattle chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League.⁸³

The Panthers immediately became involved in several highly publicized incidents at local high schools and at the state capital. In March 1968, Panther leaders Aaron Dixon, Larry Gossett, and Carl Miller were arrested following an African American student demonstration for black history courses and permission to wear the “natural” hair style at predominantly white Franklin High School. In September 1968, Dixon led fifteen armed Panthers to Rainier Beach High School to “get assurances their ‘black brethren’ would not be molested” following a series of interracial fights. When convinced of the safety of the students by Principal Donald Means, they left the school before police arrived. In February 1969, eight armed Panthers accompanied UBF members Dave Mills, Keve Bray, and Hank Roney, and Ron Carson of CORE, to the state capital at Olympia, where they presented a list of Central District grievances to the Senate Ways and Means Committee. Such bravado endeared them to many Central District youth, and their calls to remove the police from the community generated support from a segment of black Seattle which had long feared police brutality. But many whites and Asians were increasingly convinced that the Panthers were violence-prone thugs seeking to attack outsiders, rather than defenders of a besieged black community.⁸⁴

The most notable achievements of the new militancy occurred not in the Central District but on the University of Washington campus. Although black students had attended the university since the 1890s, they constituted far less than the 1 percent that pre-1940 African Americans represented in the general population of Seattle. By 1967 some university faculty and administrators thought this 30,000-student institution with only 136 blacks, despite its location only a few blocks north of the Central District, should actively recruit African American students. This was the impetus for the Black Student Union, formed in January 1968 by the merger of the UW Student Afro-American Society and the UW chapter of SNCC. The BSU confronted deans and department heads, demanding that they both recruit additional students and accommodate their programs to the special needs of those already on campus. The conflict between widely accepted university practices and the perceived requirements of the black students generated the first serious confrontation on the campus, the Black Student Union sit-in during the spring of 1968.⁸⁵

On Monday, May 20, 1968, at 4:30 p.m., forty Black Student Union protestors entered the building where the University of Washington Faculty Senate executives were meeting. After futile argument between university administrators and student demonstrators, University President Charles Odegaard and two other administrators retreated to the president’s inner office where they were barricaded in by protestors. Despite the tense atmosphere, BSU representatives and university officials carried on negotiations by the telephones connecting the inner and outer offices and concluded an agreement which ended the sit-in by 8:30 p.m. The accord provided for a doubling of black enrollment at the university and allowed minority responsibility for recruitment of the new students. It also called for “adequate” financial support for minority students, a revision of admissions requirements, the recruitment of minority staff, faculty, and administrators, and, finally, a Black Studies Program.⁸⁶

Many of the changes quickly became evident. President Odegaard announced that the number of black professors, already up to ten from one the previous year, would increase to fifteen with special recruiting efforts in Urban Planning, Medicine, Dentistry, and Engineering. The number of African American students grew from 150 in the fall of 1967 to 465 in the fall of 1968. The number of black university employees also increased from 327 in January 1968 to 493 in October. The interdisciplinary Black Studies major was initiated in the fall of 1968, with Professor James Goodman as the first chair. The most important signal of change came from President Odegaard himself, who, at a university memorial for Martin Luther King, spoke of the necessity of racism being “purged.” Later, in a speech to students at Lander Hall, a recently integrated dormitory, he urged white students to make an extra effort to compensate for the past years of unequal treatment.⁸⁷

The local civil rights movement brought into sharp relief the complex relationship between Seattle’s Asian and African American communities. Since World War II the Asian population of the city, particularly the Japanese community, had experienced steady if not spectacular economic progress and far greater social integration than black Seattle. By the 1960s, if white Seattleites considered the “racial crisis” at all in their city, they almost exclusively focused on the black-white dichotomy. As one white homeowner opposed to open housing declared in 1964, “Well, Orientals are O.K. in some places, but no colored.”⁸⁸

Yet Asians, and particularly the business owners whose shops and restaurants still predominated along Jackson Street and in the International District, became concerned about the racial crisis initially out of self-interest. They feared that violent uprisings, like the Watts riot of August 1965 and numerous others during the subsequent summers, might eventually engulf their establishments. These business owners alternated between a strict “law and order” policy, popular with many of their white counterparts in the Seattle community, and a conciliatory approach which sought to understand the sources of black anger. Other Asians, particularly among the younger generation, seemed to genuinely identify with African American anger and aspiration, partly because they, not unlike middle-class white youth of the era, saw the demands of black Seattleites as growing out of legitimate grievances. But Asian identification with black issues also arose from the belief that despite the “success” of their groups, they were similarly marginalized and alienated in a society that refused to recognize racial diversity regardless of educational or economic success. For these Asian activists, the success of the civil rights campaign, and the attraction of black power (which for them became Asian power), represented the full and final conquest of anti-Asian bigotry.⁸⁹

Although individual Asians such as City Council member Wing Luke (the first Asian elected official on the West Coast), Human Relations Executive Director Philip Hayasaka, Reverend Mineo Katagiri, the only Asian member of CARAC, and Victorio A. Velasco, a member of the Seattle Civic Unity Committee, were involved in civil rights activities in the early 1960s, the only institutional involvement of Seattle’s Asian community emerged in 1964 when the Seattle chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League organized a Human Relations Committee. This committee proposed to “work towards the elimination of artificial barriers due to race, color, religion, or national origin, in all forms of community life.”⁹⁰

In the spring of 1965 the committee sponsored a series of community meetings on race relations addressed by University of Washington sociologists Frank Miyamoto and Donald Noel, Robert Bass, intergroup relations coordinator for the Seattle Public Schools, and Walter Hundley, director of CAMP. The JACL later sponsored smaller discussion groups called “confrontation” meetings involving Native American and African American participants. In composing his assessment of the meetings, Donald Kazama, Human Relations Committee chair, suggested that the gatherings helped the Nisei become known beyond their community and intimated that they also encouraged improved Nisei-Sansei communications.⁹¹

Yet black-Nisei tensions began to surface in Seattle. The JACL Human Relations Committee candidly admitted the apathy and occasional hostility it faced from many in the Japanese American community who felt that human rights had “no meaning personally to many Nisei.” Japanese American concerns about juvenile delinquency, intermarriage, and interaction with their own children, the Sansei, were considered more pressing matters. Moreover, many Japanese Americans in 1964 were neutral, and a minority openly hostile, to the open housing ordinance campaign, despite their simultaneous appeals for black support to repeal the Anti-Alien Land Act. Three years later when the JACL executive board voted overwhelmingly to remain neutral on Referendum 35, a statewide antihousing discrimination ordinance, Philip Hayasaka felt compelled to criticize its action, declaring that “such a stand connoted opposition to open housing.”⁹²

The creation of the Central Seattle Community Council (CSCC) in February 1967 represented the strongest effort to arrest the growing rift between the Asian American and African American communities. The CSCC was formed by the merger of the Jackson Street Community Council and the Central Area Community Council. The twenty-one-year-old Jackson Street Community Council, though racially integrated, in fact represented the business and social agencies of the International Area, Seattle’s Chinese-Japanese business and residential community just south of downtown. The Central Area Community Council was created in 1962 to represent neighborhood and voluntary service organizations in black Seattle. The new CSCC sponsored a number of ventures, including neighborhood crime prevention councils, day care centers, the Central Area Neighborhood Development Organization (CANDO), and a Civil Rights Coordinating Committee.⁹³ Moreover, it kept communications open between the Asian and black communities south of downtown which continued to occupy the same residential area. Yet events were conspiring to make communication far more difficult.

By 1968 the growing impatience of black Seattle with the slowly changing racial order contrasted sharply with the rising resentment of local whites over demands of the black power advocates. Many conservative Japanese American business owners, like their white counterparts, expressed scant sympathy for the grievances articulated by the young black leaders and were openly fearful of attacks on their stores and shops. Despite the growing chasm between the Japanese business community and the black power organizations, some JACL leaders remained committed to reconciliation and understanding between the two communities. It was this commitment that led to a remarkable two and a half hour meeting between the JACL and the Black Panther Party. The meeting, organized by Toru Sakahara, a Nisei attorney and past president of the Jackson Street Community Council, occurred on August 6, 1968, at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, where Carl Miller represented the Panthers. Demands by Jackson Street storeowners for compensation for their riot-damaged businesses added extra drama to the gathering.⁹⁴

Miller outlined the programs of the Black Panther Party and described its origin in the ongoing struggle against racial injustice, particularly by African Americans. But he also argued that “Indians, Mexican Americans, American Puerto Ricans, Oriental Americans, and all impoverished people, regardless of color, were oppressed.” Miller offered an apology to the Asian and white small business owners “who were the victims of rocks, incendiaries, and other acts of vandalism” which he blamed on impulse, the exploitative policy of the storekeepers, and the lack of internal control in the black community. Miller then chided the Asians for their notable absence from the civil rights meetings, hearings, demonstrations, and rallies, and he particularly focused on their silence concerning police brutality. The Nisei business owners in attendance responded to his presentation with questions and countercharges. Some pointed to their participation in Model Cities activities and cited their personal interest in many of their African American customers. Although some Nisei explained why they had not been involved in the civil rights campaign that had engulfed the entire city for nearly a decade, their reasons were not reported in the meeting minutes.⁹⁵

Despite the acrimonious debate, some JACL members such as meeting organizer Sakahara clearly believed the confrontation was helpful in making Seattle’s Japanese American community aware of the racial crisis in the city. He suggested to the Nisei business owners, for example, that the black rage directed against them as “exploiters” reflected not anti-Asian bias so much as the culmination of feelings resulting from centuries of economic manipulation. But Sakahara also feared that Nisei quietude on the most troublesome social issues in the city might also generate black anger over the Asian community’s betrayal not only of the ongoing civil rights struggle but of its own historic campaign against anti-Asian discrimination. “We are a minority, too,” declared Sakahara, “and we must be involved in our way. We must not permit whites to use us as ‘whipping boys.’ ” Moreover, Sakahara noted, the legitimate grievances of African Americans must not be sacrificed amid calls for control and order in black Seattle. In a poignant and prophetic statement on the importance of impartial justice, he declared, “The difference between the concept of law and order as distinguished from law and justice is not a semantic quibble. Law can be enforced with understanding, sympathy and compassion without losing its efficacy. In our day, harsh and insensitive justice can only sow the seeds of disaster.”⁹⁶

If calls for black power and black self-determination frightened older, established Asian business owners, they served as a model and rallying point for many in the younger generation. Organizations such as the Asian Student Union at the University of Washington and individuals like Bernie Yang, of Students for a Democratic Society, and Jim Takisaki, a board member and negotiator for the predominately black Central Contractors Association, unabashedly supported the Black Panthers and student and community activism in all its myriad forms.⁹⁷

By 1970, however, some young Seattle Asians were beginning to challenge black leadership’s commitment to the campaign to eradicate racism and create an egalitarian, multiracial community in Seattle. Alan Sugiyama, in an editorial titled “Co-optation: A New Game?” catalogued the grievances Asians had developed against blacks during the civil rights era. Impoverished Asians who still comprised a large part of the Central District population received few services and were excluded from participation in Model Cities decision making, according to Sugiyama, by black administrators who argued that “Asians didn’t deserve any funding because they played no part in getting the money.” Asians who supported the Central Contractors Association efforts to generate more construction jobs for Central District residents received few of the new positions. And although Asian students supported the blacks at Seattle Central Community College who demonstrated in 1969 to get African American administrators, by 1971, Dr. William Moore, the new black president of the institution, refused, according to Sugiyama, to appoint an Asian administrator because “he would not allow Asians to come in through the back door.”⁹⁸

Sugiyama expressed openly what many in other nonwhite communities felt about the 1960s tendency to see both the local and national racial crisis expressly in black-white terms. And the charges leveled no doubt exacerbated the troubled black-Asian relationship in Seattle. Asian spokespersons such as Sugiyama, who admitted that blacks had been the “vanguard for change in this country, and for starting the movement for equality in our local communities,”⁹⁹ nonetheless reminded African American Seattle that not all Central District Asians had scored financial success or repudiated the black struggle.

Attempting to decipher intergroup dynamics through the prism of community organizations, and the opinions of the few individuals who left records, is admittedly problematic. Official groups tend to exaggerate their influence in the community, and representatives who purport to speak for entire groups or communities are often challenged. Yet the tentative attempts by the JACL and various Asian activists to reach out to black groups, from the Urban League and NAACP in the mid-1960s to the Black Panther Party and the Central Contractors Association in the later years of the decade, suggest that at least one Asian organization and several committed individual Asians sought to understand the vortex of racial conflict and change swirling around them.¹⁰⁰

The campaigns against housing bias and de facto segregation produced deep fissures in Seattle’s African American community. Yet the question of employment discrimination produced near unanimity. The struggle for jobs also highlighted the paradox of Seattle’s past. Much of the city’s putative reputation for liberalism stemmed from the decades-old power of organized labor in generating social conditions conducive to working-class well-being, including high wages, good working conditions, good housing, and a significant role in the governance of the city. Indeed Oregon Senator Richard L. Neuberger once described Seattle as “labor’s mightiest fortress.”¹⁰¹ Yet labor unions, instinctively protective of their gains, used race as a line of division.

Black workers were particularly hurt by labor’s exclusion. Decades of educational deficiencies, especially for southern-born blacks, and meager capital resources often compounded by discriminatory bank lending practices, which prevented blacks from becoming entrepreneurs, meant that skilled labor was often the only means of climbing out of poverty—a means frequently blocked by organized labor.¹⁰² Although in the 1960s some powerful unions, such as the Teamsters, still discouraged African American membership, Seattle blacks chose to concentrate particularly on the building trades for both historic and contemporary reasons. Skilled southern black construction workers who migrated to Seattle found they could not pursue their crafts because they lacked union membership. Moreover, the highly visible major construction projects near or in the Central District, employing white workers who almost always lived outside the area, while unemployed but capable blacks were denied opportunity, underscored the consequences of racial exclusion. According to a Model Cities employment survey of the Central District in 1968, unemployment for black residents was 11.7 percent while that of whites in the city was 2.9 percent. That white construction workers made substantial wages, often in excess of $10 per hour, while denying union membership to impoverished blacks trapped in a pattern of welfare dependency and unemployment, generated anger and frustration far out of proportion to the actual job opportunities denied.¹⁰³

The first salvo of the campaign to desegregate the construction unions came in 1965, and not surprisingly from CORE. When city officials announced the construction of a new federal office building in downtown Seattle, Walter Hundley of CORE wrote the General Services Administration about black participation in the project. “We insist that the contractors for this project,” Hundley wrote, “be explicitly required to have Negro employees.…” Hundley believed these jobs more important to blacks than poverty funds, job training, and compensatory education since such employment would allow African American workers the opportunity “to become a part of our society and be integrated into normal community life.”¹⁰⁴ The protest was registered, but no black workers were hired.

By 1968, as barriers to employment were falling throughout the city, the construction unions adamantly adhered to their discriminatory system apparently in defiance of city, state, and federal pressure to integrate their membership. Union leaders routinely refused to answer surveys on the racial composition of their membership or to participate in citywide forums designed to address employment discrimination. Their membership, they argued, was open to anyone. Black workers simply failed to meet their requirements. Their membership rolls suggested otherwise. The five major building trades unions in Seattle had a total membership of 14,850 in 1969, but only 29 workers were nonwhite (Table 17). Electricians, for example, had two nonwhite workers out of 2,700 members. Plumbers, with 2,600 members, had only one nonwhite in their ranks. The experience of Howard Lewis, a black welder with thirty years’ experience, graphically illustrated the difficulties faced by African American workers in obtaining union membership. When Lewis, a permit workman (one obligated to pay union dues but prohibited from becoming a full union member), appeared before the Iron Workers examination board in 1966, one examiner told him, “There is no question about your welding. We know you are a damn good welder.” Yet he was asked if he could tie knots and was advised that he could not become a member of the union unless he could do so. Lewis spent the next few weeks learning to tie various knots and then received another membership examination. After showing his knot-tying ability, he was asked to tie a knot he had never heard of. He angrily left the examination convinced he would never be allowed to join the Iron Workers Union.¹⁰⁵

In 1969, Tyree Scott, a black Seattle contractor, emerged as the leader of the campaign to end black exclusion from the building trades. Scott joined the Central Contractors Association, a group of Seattle-area black construction workers. Concerned about the exclusion of black workers from the union and their own difficulty in obtaining construction contracts, they chose direct action protests to publicize their grievances.¹⁰⁶

On August 28, 1969, the CCA led a demonstration which closed the swimming pool project at Garfield High School to protest the employment of an all-white construction crew. The following day Scott led 200 black workers and CCA supporters downtown to close the King County Courthouse construction site. From there they marched up First Hill to the Harborview Hospital construction site. CCA protests spread to sites at the University of Washington, where national television cameras recorded the overturning of bulldozers, and to the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, where demonstrators marched single file onto runways to prevent airplanes from landing.¹⁰⁷

Less dramatic but ultimately more crucial in its campaign, the CCA brought suit against five Seattle unions: Iron Workers Local 86, Sheet Metal Workers Local 99, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 46, Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 32, and Operating Engineers Local 502. The CCA soon found a powerful ally in December 1969, when the U.S. Department of Justice joined the case on behalf of the plaintiffs. Two months later Federal Judge William Lindberg found all the unions except IBEW Local 46 had violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.¹⁰⁸

Taking into account what the court found to be pervasive discrimination “on a continuous basis,” including the provision of false information to black workers about employment conditions, exaggerated estimates of training requirements for black apprentices, and aptitude tests imposing higher standards for blacks than whites, Judge Lindberg created the “Seattle Plan,” which required the unions to end discrimination and also to take “affirmative action” to rectify past racially motivated exclusionary practices. Under the plan the federal court ordered the craft unions to open membership to African American workers and specifically decreed that they have a special apprenticeship program. It also altered the grounds of admission to the journeymen level and ordered the immediate admission of forty-five black journeymen.¹⁰⁹

The campaign for opening the construction trade unions in 1969 was predicated on the same premise that had in the early 1960s stirred black Seattleites to protest against de facto school segregation and support open housing. Yet the strategy employed by the CCA also owed much to the black power period of the late 1960s when community empowerment supplanted integration as the goal of grassroots activists. As Tyree Scott asserted, “We don’t just want the jobs … we want some control over them.”¹¹⁰

The decade’s last direct action campaign also reflected the ambiguous legacy of the Seattle civil rights movement. There were far more opportunities for black construction workers, and black contractors, in Seattle in 1980 than in 1970. Moreover, the public was educated on the extent and impact of racial discrimination in the construction industry. But the unions, despite the Seattle Plan, remained overwhelmingly white, and they continued to alternate between subterfuge and defiance, including public appeals to support them against “coercive” federal judicial power and “reverse discrimination.” Moreover, the recession of the early 1970s reduced opportunities for all Seattle-area construction workers, intensifying the rivalry between black workers and the building trades unions.

The Seattle Plan’s major legacy rests with the legal precedent it set in establishing affirmative action guidelines to redress structural and institutional inequality and in strengthening the Equal Opportunity Commission by giving the federal agency the authority to sue in the courts on behalf of plaintiffs.¹¹¹ The Plan itself stemmed from the decision by a group of Seattle black workers to challenge job discrimination and of numerous community supporters of all racial backgrounds to help sustain that challenge, as well as the decision by a courageous federal judge and the Justice Department to support them.

The civil rights and political struggles of the 1960s highlighted the contradictions between the ideal and the reality of African American life in the Pacific Northwest. While racism certainly existed in Seattle before that period, the continued migration of blacks and the subsequent reaction of many whites to that migration shattered the illusions of many old settlers and newcomers that the region would readily accept and assimilate its new residents of color. This optimism initially permeated even the usually cautious civil rights organizations. These organizations, and blacks generally, began to make a more sober appraisal of their status and by the 1960s initiated a vigorous campaign to make the ideal a reality. They succeeded in eliminating some of the most egregious forms of discrimination in public accommodations and residential housing. They achieved far less success in generating employment opportunities, particularly for the most impoverished black Seattleites. Indeed, the problems of unemployment and, more important, underemployment—the inability of many local African Americans to obtain positions or income commensurate with their skills and education—proved as intractable at the end of the decade as at the beginning, and generated a host of ancillary symptoms including rising criminal activity, drug abuse, and single-parent homes headed by young, poorly educated women.¹¹²

Nonetheless, courageous Seattleites—primarily blacks but also some sympathetic Asians and whites—had, during the 1960s, demolished decades-old barriers to opportunity and equality throughout the city. But, as they would soon learn by the early 1970s, simply demolishing barriers would not ensure equality or opportunity. That challenge would await a future generation.

1. a Seattle’s Andrew Young was not related to Martin Luther King’s lieutenant—with the same name—in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.