Introduction

Election day, November 7, 1989, was a political milestone for African Americans. Douglas Wilder of Virginia became the first elected black governor in the history of the United States, David Dinkins the first black to be voted mayor of New York City, and Norman Rice the first black mayor elected in Seattle. Wilder, Dinkins, and Rice—all elevated to these offices by an overwhelmingly white electorate—represented, according to conventional political wisdom, the dawning of a new age in African American politics where black office seekers could successfully appeal to nonracial issues and themes to garner support across the political spectrum despite their race. Nowhere was that more evident than in Seattle, where Rice’s convincing victory paralleled the narrow defeat of a referendum on the city’s controversial eleven-year program of crosstown busing to promote racial integration in the public schools.¹

Rice’s election was significant for Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, and it may indeed have reflected a new era in American politics. But his ascent from the city council to the mayor’s chair came simultaneously with the success of a bitterly divisive antibusing initiative, thus underscoring a century-old paradox of race relations for black Seattle. Since the arrival of the first African American resident in 1858, the ideal of racial toleration and egalitarianism proudly espoused by the vast majority of the city’s residents has been precariously juxtaposed against a background of racial fear, prejudice, and discrimination. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere in the nation, particularly in the South, who have until recently faced a clearly defined racial order placing African Americans in an unequivocally subservient position, African Americans in Seattle confronted the uncertainty generated by the public endorsement of equality and the private practice of discrimination. How they approached that dilemma in the northernmost and westernmost major city in the continental United States provides a model for understanding how contemporary America can address the contradiction between the professed ideal of equality in a political democracy and the stark reality of competitive, acrimonious intergroup dynamics in an increasingly multiracial and multicultural nation facing profound economic transformation as it enters the twenty-first century.

Ever since W. E. B. Du Bois investigated black Philadelphia and reported his findings in The Philadelphia Negro in 1899, social scientists have analyzed urban African American communities, searching for solutions to the complicated problem of race and class in our urban society.² Between the two world wars, for example, various monographs on urban black America appeared, building on the intellectual foundations provided by Du Bois’s study. They focused on myriad issues including rural-to-urban migration, adjustment to the urban milieu, the reaction of white urbanites, and the paradoxical impact of urban life on African American families and social institutions. Like The Philadelphia Negro, these were largely sociological or anthropological surveys, but they were crucial in advancing the concept of a distinct African American urban culture evolving in the nation’s cities.³

The civil rights movement of the 1960s gave the examination of urban black America new urgency. By the middle of the decade, that movement, born in the urban South ten years earlier, commanded center stage of national attention and reached a critical turning point in 1965 with the Watts rebellion in Los Angeles. More than any previous racial conflagration, Watts forced the nation to confront the disturbing reality of the black urban experience. Northern ghettos, bypassed by the civil rights legislation the nation so proudly embraced, remained angry, ignored, and alienated, and expressed their dissatisfaction in unfocused urban violence.

The black urban history case study, the model for most post-1965 writing on African American communities, emerged out of this sense of urgency. Historians turned to the past to provide salient insights into contemporary African America’s troublesome accommodation to the urban environment. Not surprisingly, most of these studies examined the largest African American communities shaped, as they were, by rapid growth during the World War I era “Great Migration,” which brought 500,000 rural southern blacks to northern industrial centers in search of economic opportunity and racial justice. While these studies varied in style and approach, virtually all examined the urban experience between 1890 and 1930, the years when northern black communities emerged as a visible segment of the urban landscape.⁴ These monographs broadened our knowledge of black urban communities but frequently failed to ask significant questions concerning the African American urban experience. The history of Seattle’s black community provides numerous answers even as it raises important new questions about the dynamics of black life in the urban milieu.

Black Seattle through much of the twentieth century was synonymous with the Central District,^a a four-square-mile section near the geographic center of the isthmus that constitutes the city. From the evolution of two small, disparate black neighborhoods at opposite ends of the city in the late nineteenth century through the seventh decade of the twentieth century, the Central District was home to the vast majority of Seattle’s African Americans. This study delineates the spatial and institutional development of the Central District, stressing its origins in the Yesler-Jackson and East Madison neighborhoods and its employment and residential patterns over the century. Furthermore, it examines the community’s civil rights and political struggles and the rapid growth of the district prompted by the massive influx of rural blacks beginning with World War II and continuing until the 1970s, as well as the profound changes in both the district and the city initiated by that growth.

While this survey is analogous to the urban case studies written over the past two decades, it places black urban history in a broader context. First it analyzes racial perceptions, attitudes, and expectations in light of the presence of another group of color, Asian Americans. In Seattle, in contrast to virtually all other cities in which an African American community has been surveyed, Asians rather than blacks constituted the largest racial minority until World War II. Thus blacks were drawn into intense competition with the city’s Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino populations for employment and housing opportunities. Yet the virulent racism of the 1890–1940 era usually directed against blacks in urban communities was diffused among Seattle’s Asian Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans. Consequently, Asians and blacks, admittedly uneasy neighbors, became partners in coalitions challenging racial restrictions while remaining competitors for housing and jobs. No study of western urban communities has adequately explored the impact of competition and cooperation among various peoples of color in urban America.⁵ The implications of that exploration are important, for Seattle blacks are once again finding themselves the “third group” in a city that since 1970 has seen an influx of Southeast Asian and Taiwanese immigrants, and much of urban America is undergoing yet another wave of immigration, this time largely involving groups from Asia and Latin America.

The history of the Central District also affords an opportunity to analyze the forging of a black urban community ethos, “a guiding complex of beliefs,” to borrow a phrase from urban historian Blaine A. Brownwell.⁶ Urban history case studies have focused almost exclusively on residential segregation, employment discrimination, and political subservience in determining the social, psychological, and spatial limits of the black community. In short, the community has been defined by denial and exclusion. These forces are understandably important in shaping black urban life, but they have not exclusively determined the nature of the African American community. Black urban culture is not simply the distinctive food, dress, music, or language emanating from city streets; it is ultimately the infinite variety of interactions that allow a people to define their sense of collective identity and values. Thus it is crucial for the urban historian to examine how institutions and organizations service that process and forge it into a black urban ethos.⁷

The study of black Seattle affords such an opportunity. Its religious, cultural, and social institutions and organizations, its kinship networks, were a crucible of this new urban culture. They served the needs of the community in traditional ways, but they also help define the parameters of that community. Because of its distance from the rural South and its correspondingly small African American population, Seattle’s churches, fraternal lodges, and social clubs loomed large in preserving the community’s links both to the past and to the national black community.⁸

The history of black Seattle should also prompt a rethinking of generalizations concerning the rise of the pre–World War II African American ghetto. Mounting racial tension in the nation’s largest cities, which invariably followed the rapid influx of African Americans and their growing percentage of the urban population, was virtually absent in pre-1940 Seattle. The city’s African Americans never comprised more than 1 percent of the total population before 1940, and the entire African American community grew by fewer than 1,500 persons between 1910 and 1940. While the largest northern black communities witnessed, in varying degrees, the rise of urban ills such as fragmented families, segregated education, and social anomie, Seattle blacks avoided most of these problems. Poverty was widespread among Seattle’s African Americans, particularly during the Great Depression, but it did not automatically result in family disintegration and community disruption, which would unfortunately become commonplace in other black communities. That the Central District experienced such a significant variation in family structure, residential segregation, educational attainment, and housing conditions from black communities in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and other cities suggests that the northern black urban experience prior to World War II was far less monolithic than historians previously assumed.⁹

Black Seattle also varies from the northern pattern of African American urban communities in the impact of its labor force. Pre–World War II black workers posed a competitive threat to organized labor in many northern cities. Their sheer numbers mandated their role as a significant segment of the emerging urban proletariat. Black Seattle’s unskilled labor force, however, was never large enough to constitute a major challenge to the city’s powerful labor unions or dominate any industrial employment category. Consequently black workers in prewar Seattle made only slight progress in eroding union barriers or in upgrading their occupational level. Furthermore, unlike their counterparts in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and other industrial cities, Seattle’s African American workers remained concentrated in domestic service occupations. Those occupations were, to be sure, unlike the agriculturally related work common to most Seattle blacks before their migration to the city, but the nature of the economy, the resistance of most unions to the inclusion of black or Asian workers, and the city’s minute African American population relegated black Seattle’s female and male workers to the periphery of the city’s economy at least until World War II.¹⁰

Virtually all extant black community histories trace the experiences of African Americans in one city between 1890 and 1930, the critical years of black community formation. This history of black Seattle, however, examines one community for an entire century (1870–1970), following not only the late nineteenth-century origins of black Seattle but also its growth and maturation through two world wars and the turbulent 1960s.¹¹ World War II in particular proved a major turning point in the history of the African American community as the demand for defense industry workers generated an unprecedented influx of newcomers who enlarged the city’s black population from 3,700 to 10,000 in less than three years, and who joined the city’s industrial work force for the first time. As this study will illustrate, changing occupational and housing patterns, and shifting racial attitudes generated by that influx, created profound consequences for black Seattle and the entire city.¹²

The transformation initiated in the Central District during the 1940s and 1950s would lead to the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s, when Seattle African Americans challenged housing discrimination, employment bias, and school segregation. Inspired by the courage and commitment of black and white activists in the Deep South, but responding to local grievances, Seattle African Americans, supported by sympathetic whites and Asians, used direct action tactics—sit-ins, economic boycotts, protest marches—to challenge the continuing manifestations of bigotry in the city, and in the process forced the entire community to reexamine its long-cherished reputation for racial toleration and equality. The movements succeeded in energizing and empowering significant segments of the black community. But they also exposed a growing “underclass” whose ongoing plight suggested that the source of the most troubling contemporary urban crisis was located in the nexus of race and class.

Ironically, the question of race and class, although discovered by social scientists in the 1970s, is as old as the city’s African American community, and it has been played out against a backdrop of intragroup conflict in the Central District. Black Seattle, despite its small size and outward appearance of unanimity, was never a single community. Class differences were expressed in neighborhood preference, in the objectives of community leadership, and often in the conflict between “old settlers” and newly arrived migrants. Such differences were evident in the black community as early as the 1890s. The rapid growth of black Seattle in World War II drew to the surface these differences, and they became the basis for the schism in the civil rights movement in the city in the 1960s. Such class differences reveal the fallacy of ascribing the worldview of the leadership cadre to the entire community, and serve to remind urban historians of their responsibility to extend their examination of the past beyond “representative” women and men and their organizations.

Although Seattle’s black community from 1870 to 1970 is the primary focus of our examination, the history of the Central District also affords the opportunity to study nonblack racial attitudes and practices, and measure their impact on African American community development over an extended period. Despite Seattle’s liberal reputation, racism and discrimination were widespread through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet both changed over time, subject to variables such as the industrial base of the city, the type of leadership in organized labor (particularly the influence of the Left) and in the business community, the relative size of the African American population in relationship to white Seattle and to other peoples of color, the level of economic prosperity, and, of course, national trends and legislation. Such variations prompted changes in the strategies and approaches of African Americans dedicated to the eradication of racial inequality in the city. They also say much about the vagaries and vicissitudes of the local racial order influenced by class, ethnic, economic, and political rivalries in the white and Asian communities.

If nothing else, the examination of Seattle should prompt comparable studies of other western black communities. Richard White’s assertion that “without the special experience of its minorities, the West might as well be New Jersey with mountains and deserts” should be tested by the applicability of the model advanced here to other communities such as Los Angeles, Denver, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Portland, to determine if the themes highlighted in Seattle apply with equal saliency to other western urban locales.¹³

Ultimately, however, this history is a study of a distinct group of black people who, numbering no more than a few hundred in the late nineteenth century, a few thousand through World War II, and slightly less than forty thousand in 1970, attempted to fashion a better life for themselves, often pursuing across a vast continent their hopes, dreams, and aspirations. For them Seattle was, literally and figuratively, “the end of the line both socially and geographically. There was no better place to go.”¹⁴ These Seattleites chose to nurture a distinct African American culture and community, in a city and region that remain overwhelmingly white. They confronted a young urban society vastly different from the nation’s great metropolises in the South and East, one deeply ambivalent about its commitment to racial equality. And it is within that setting that they forged their particular experience.

1. a The term “Central District” came into currency in the 1940s, about the same time as the name “Central Area.” Both terms were used interchangeably to describe the various residential neighborhoods between downtown Seattle and Lake Washington.