Remember Seattle's segregated history

Tuesday, December 12, 2006
JAMES N. GREGORY
GUEST COLUMNIST

The ship canal that bisects Seattle means different things to different people. Younger Seattleites know that it means traffic jams during rush hour and when the bridges rise. Older Seattleites who are African American or Asian American may have a different association. They remember when the ship canal was a primary boundary of racial segregation, when people of color could not live beyond the canal and could not travel in North Seattle neighborhoods after dark.

As the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether race can be a factor in admissions to North Seattle's high schools, it is important to recall that older meaning.

Seattle thinks of itself as a liberal city, one that has a reasonable record of racial integration. But we are also a city with a short memory. One of the things we have been forgetting is that only a few decades ago, Seattle was a sharply segregated city. It was a city that kept non-whites out of most jobs and most neighborhoods, even out of stores, restaurants, hotels and hospitals.

I am a history professor and the director of the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, an online project based at the University of Washington that is devoted to helping Seattle remember its history of segregation and remember the activists who won civil rights battles, not in the South but right here.

The project represents a collaboration involving a number of faculty members in the History and American Ethnic Studies departments and also many students who are doing research and publishing their findings on the Web site (find it at www.civilrights.washington.edu). Also involved are community people who have donated photos and documents and shared memories in our growing collection of online oral histories.

What we have uncovered surprises many Seattleites, including some who should remember but prefer to forget. Until the late 1960s, Seattle north of the ship canal was a "sundown" zone. That meant that virtually no people of color lived there and it also meant that African Americans were expected to be out of the area when the workday ended. After dark, a black man in particular was likely to be stopped by the police, questioned about his business and informed that he had better not be seen in the neighborhood again.

North Seattle was not alone. Queen Anne, Magnolia and West Seattle also were sundown zones. The suburbs were even worse. Shoreline, Lake Forest Park, Bothell, Bellevue, Burien, even White Center, vigorously and explicitly excluded people of color. But the ship canal was a special kind of boundary, an unmistakable dividing line between the part of Seattle where anyone might live and the part of Seattle that was off-limits to those whose skin was not white.
Until the early 1950s, North Seattle was also home to Coon Chicken Inn, which for almost 20 years stood as a beacon of bigotry on Lake City Way Northeast. Whites of a certain disposition made it a hugely popular restaurant and no one could drive along Lake City Way without noticing the massive grotesque "coon" head and the big-lipped mouth that served as the restaurant's front door.

Other restaurants, barber shops, bars, grocery stores, real estate offices, doctor's offices, hotels, even hospitals refused to serve African Americans, Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans as late as the 1950s. We have uncovered documents that are deeply embarrassing to some of Seattle's most venerated institutions.

In 1945, an inquiry by the state Department of Health revealed that most of Seattle's hospitals refused to treat African Americans. Providence Hospital would do so only if the patient paid for a private room. Swedish Hospital "will not receive Negroes at this time." We have a 1946 letter from the Virginia Mason Nursing School that reads simply, "In regards to our policy, we do not accept Negroes, Japanese, etc."

Seattle has much to remember.

James N. Gregory is a history professor at the University of Washington and directs the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, a multi-media educational Web site that examines the history of Civil Rights activism in the greater Seattle area. www.civilrights.washington.edu
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