Conclusion

This study of African American Seattle began as an intellectual exercise to situate one small black population’s history in the national urban context of 1890 to 1940, the period when most modern black communities assumed their twentieth-century character. It was a search for unambiguous indications of similarities with the experience of the rest of urban African America, to ratify black Seattle’s legitimate claim as an integral component of urban black life.

The similarities were not difficult to discover. A racially defined residential district emerged by 1910 which remained the home of the vast majority of the city’s blacks until 1980. Seattle’s African American workers experienced employment discrimination and its entire black population confronted the ubiquitous social segregation so common for the pre–World War II era. Black women and men responded to these challenges in a manner characteristic of most of their urban counterparts. They created branches of the Afro-American League, the NAACP, and the UNIA to defend their rights. They formed churches, fraternal orders, theatrical groups, and sports organizations to minister to their spiritual and secular needs as well as celebrate their history and heritage. Moreover, black Seattle’s collective synergy forged a distinctive African American urban culture which, much like black urban populations elsewhere, provided a psychological haven from a hostile world.

Yet black Seattle prior to World War II was different. Many of the problems considered endemic to northern black communities during this era, while intermittently present, certainly did not dominate the Seattle scene as in other major cities. Much of what occurred—or did not occur—can be attributed to the small size of Seattle’s African American population, which prior to World War II never exceeded 4,000 people or constituted more than 1 percent of the city’s population. But the explanation lies beyond mere numbers. The nature of the local economy, in which the majority of blacks held domestic service rather than manufacturing jobs, the ability of local black residents to quickly absorb and assimilate newcomers, the presence of a significantly larger Asian population, and Seattle’s ambiguous racial environment, rooted in its relatively recent frontier period, which denied blacks economic opportunities while allowing a select complement of civil rights, all contributed to a significantly different early history. This is not to argue that Seattle was unique, but it is to suggest that the Seattle experience—of a small, slowly growing black community in a major city, much like Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Denver—may be indicative of an urban black America heretofore neglected by historians. If anything, the extraordinary course of history of the 3,700 women and men of black Seattle on the eve of World War II persuasively illustrates the fallacy of the idea of a single African American urban experience.¹

But as this study advanced to the Second World War, it became increasingly apparent that black Seattle would be permanently and profoundly transformed by the influx of newcomers arriving during and after that global conflict. By 1950 the African American population was 15,666, and in 1970 it stood at 37,868. Deteriorating buildings and rigidly segregated housing practices, crime, drugs, de facto school segregation, chronic intergenerational poverty, and welfare dependency all increasingly characterized the Pacific Northwest’s largest African American community, and generated growing alienation, despair, and anger among black Seattleites.

Yet through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, numerous Seattle African Americans remained optimistic that conditions in their city could be addressed. When Reverend John Adams, testifying before a U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearing in the city in 1966, declared, “Seattle is one of the few cities left in America which can solve its racial problem before it becomes unsolvable,” he was speaking for many black, white, and Asian residents who still summoned the courage to believe in a peaceful racial future for the city and the nation.² Moreover, his declaration implicitly recalled the prewar era when the sense of shared community mitigated the harsh realities of the urban environment, creating a place very much different from the image of black urban America.

The Central District is no longer the center of black Seattle. The 1960s prediction of demographers and community activists that Seattle would continue to attract newcomers who would propel the African American population above 100,000 by the mid-1970s was widely off the mark.³ As of 1990 only 60,000 blacks lived in Seattle, comprising 10 percent of the population. Asians now constitute the fastest growing racial minority and, for the first time since 1940, the largest nonwhite group. Some Central District African Americans openly express their concern that they will be supplanted by upper income whites seeking inexpensive housing opportunities and convenient access to the downtown area, or recently arrived Southeast Asian “boat people,” who flock to inexpensive inner city neighborhoods. Although black community reactions to these “invasions” have not taken on the intensity of the white resistance to residential integration in the pre-1970 era, it is strangely ironic to see those Central District residents, so very long excluded from other neighborhoods, now struggling to retain their own small homes and apartments.⁴

Nonetheless, black fears of displacement are more than a simple reaction to someone ethnically different moving onto their “turf.” Even in the days of rampant segregation on the boundaries of the Central District, African Americans lived in enclaves, if not neighborhoods, which had sizable nonblack populations. The resentment toward upwardly mobile whites is grounded in apprehensions that the affluent newcomers will drive housing prices and rents beyond the affordability of most impoverished blacks. Concern about Asian immigrants, moreover, is based at least partly on the troubling prospect that one of Seattle’s newest ethnic groups might be accepted into the social and economic mainstream more readily than one of its oldest. Thai, Cambodian, and Vietnamese cultural adjustment problems notwithstanding, blacks fear that the success of the new arrivals, much like the earlier educational and economic accomplishments of the Seattle residents of Chinese and Japanese ancestry, will be used to undermine public awareness of the continuing problem of racial discrimination and the subsequent necessity of compensatory programs in public schools and the workplace.⁵

Table 18

Seattle Population Groups, 1980–1990

Of the 46,565 blacks counted in all of Seattle in 1980 (Table 18), only 38 percent lived in the Central District. For the first time in the twentieth century the greater number of blacks resided outside the traditional core of black Seattle. Each of Seattle’s 122 census tracts now shows some African American residents. This diffusion resulted from the citywide discourse on race, housing, and segregation which marked the open housing debates of the 1960s, as well as the growing body of federal, state, and local legislation which effectively outlawed housing discrimination based on race, sex, age, color, and religion. Yet the rapid spatial expansion of black Seattleites from their former Central District neighborhoods remained subject to the vagaries of race. Although African Americans reside in virtually every Seattle suburb, many of the blacks who exited the Central District moved southeast into the Rainier Valley. This migration, which began only in the late 1960s, has extended the visible black community to the southernmost city limits, as “valley” blacks now outnumber those in the Central District. Anyone familiar with the city’s neighborhoods during the last three decades can only marvel at, or decry, the rapid expansion of the black residential area.⁶

If much of the rest of the United States is only now beginning to acknowledge and accept the growing racial and ethnic diversity of its population, Seattle can provide lessons for the entire nation. Seattle has always been a multiracial and multicultural city. However, the rapidly growing numbers of people of color as reflected in the 1990 census (Table 18) suggest that the dynamics of group interaction must, of necessity, change. While the Asian, Native American, Latino, and black populations constituted 25 percent of the population in 1990, the children in these categories were 40 percent. To argue that white Seattle must learn to accommodate this growing population is to reiterate much of the thesis of this study. But acceptance of multiethnicity also requires the various groups of color to begin to understand the complex nature of their own interaction—their commonality of interests as well as their competing interests. It is also to argue that they must begin to discern the historical dynamics of interaction among themselves as well as within the larger society, both on an organizational level and as individuals. The history of Seattle illustrates both what can be accomplished when the interaction proceeds and the disastrous consequences when it does not.⁷

For all that has changed over the past century in black Seattle, one feature remains as unmistakable as during the first years of the Yesler-Jackson and East Madison neighborhoods. Two African American economic and social classes co-exist in precarious balance. One is the middle class—socially conservative, staid, and increasingly successful and visible in the professions, in metropolitan area corporations, and at all levels of government. The other is a much larger impoverished population—derisively called “transients” in the late nineteenth century, “sharecroppers” during World War II, and now euphemistically the “underclass” by social scientists and social service agencies. For much of the past century these affluent and impoverished city dwellers inhabited the same spatial community (although now middle-class African Americans are as likely to live on Mercer Island or in Kirkland as in the East Madison area), but in many ways the two groups have always been worlds apart. Moreover, the division is, of late, exacerbated as the most affluent segment of the contemporary African American population now confronts dilemmas similar to those of the Nisei soon after World War II, with comparable consequences. Since their interests are no longer circumscribed by the overt racial segregation and discrimination that physically and psychologically linked them to the black community, middle-class black Seattleites do not provide the social cohesion, institutional support, economic resources, inspired leadership, or the vision of a united, communitywide struggle for social justice which characterized the Central District well into the 1960s.⁸

Yet the affluent and impoverished blacks of Seattle remain inextricably bound, not simply by skin color but by the many historical and cultural forces which continue to shape their lives in the city and in the United States. Indeed, when the Northwest Enterprise published its now famous editorial cartoon in 1944 showing middle-class black Seattleites looking on in horror at the sight of a desultory, inebriated migrant couple leaning against a lamppost, with the caption “Better try to lift them, you can go no higher than they,” it reflected a past, present, and future reality for this African American community.⁹ It also issued a challenge, which has yet to be effectively met. Those who have successfully negotiated the city’s ambiguous economic and racial boundaries must offer guidance and assistance to those who could not. These groups are interdependent; between them lies the heart of the African American community.¹⁰

But the history of the largest black community in the Pacific Northwest also reminds us of the prospects and perils of racial liberalism. For most of the city’s history, numerous black and white Seattleites were proud of their community’s absence of racial animosity, of abrasive interracial encounters, and the threat of racial violence. Moreover, as a self-proclaimed politically progressive city, Seattle celebrated its image as a multicultural, multiracial democracy where opportunity was open to all. The reality for the entire century between 1870 and 1970 was vastly different for most of black Seattle. This is not to claim that sincere people, committed to racial equality and social justice for African Americans and for all Seattleites, failed to make significant contributions to the creation of an integrated community. Each era in the city’s history reveals countless examples of individual courage from people of all racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds who struggled heroically to create a humane, inclusive city for all of its diverse citizens. Yet the forces arrayed against black aspirations were supported sometimes consciously, and often unwittingly, by the vast majority of Seattleites who chose to ignore the plight of the impoverished, the uneducated, the economically disadvantaged—particularly if they were of a different color.

Racial toleration is meaningless if people are excluded from the vital economic center and relegated to the margins of the urban economy. Seattle, whether in the 1870s or the 1960s, provided substantive evidence of the limits of a racial liberalism incompatible with economic inclusion.¹¹ Indeed Seattle’s apparent success, and its underlying failure, in its race relations paradigm has been its meticulously crafted image which promoted the illusion of inclusion. True societal integration—the creation of a single community that simultaneously reflects the diversity of its varied segments while recognizing the vital interdependence of all its citizens—must be constructed on a foundation of substantive economic integration. It is incumbent on all Seattleites who believe in a just and equitable society to ensure that unfair economic and social conditions that restrained black lives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries do not prevail in the twenty-first century.