Research Guides
Janelle White
John Vallier
June 8th, 2012
HONORS 394 B
Here Today, White Tomorrow:
The Need for Both a Historical and Contemporary Central District
Archive Amid Recent Gentrification
The Great Migration of World War I—a mass exodus of African Americans from the South to northern cities via railroad lines, was the cause of the first major growth in black populations that urban, industrial centers experienced in the early 20th Century. The second, and last, wave of major African American city growth can be attributed to the Welfare and Warfare Eras of the 1930s and 1940s, in which Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Project Administration, and later, his entrance into World War II, opened up new employment opportunities in many northern cities. When compared to other sprawling metropolis centers, Seattle had, and continues to have, quite a small black population, predominantly concentrated in one neighborhood, the Central District. However, this does not mean that Seattle’s black community has been static. Over the course of the 20th century, African Americans in Seattle grew not just in numbers, but in musical and cultural production—building churches, forming community bonds, and participating in national musical movements while maintaining their own unique regional flair. For such a small community, Seattle’s Central District produced a number of national stars, and groomed countless other Seattle transplants, all while maintaining a united sense of identity through community. Unfortunately, this strong community would begin to shift and slowly crumble in the late 20th century, due to gentrification. Gentrification, explained by the Oxford English Dictionary as, “The process by which an (urban) area is rendered middle-class,” is far more complicated than this simple definition, for the shift to middle-class often requires the displacement and fragmentation of the original urban community. In the case of Seattle’s Central District, that is precisely what began to happen. As lifelong family friends and neighbors, who could tie their roots back to the Great Migration or wartime days, were slowly moved out by gentrification, members of Seattle’s longstanding black community found new homes scattered further and further South, leaving many angry, confused, and scared. Over the past few years, the largely insular historic community that produced both Quincy Jones and Jimi Hendrix, began fading slowly into extinction. It is because of the uncertainty of the future that brings a sense of urgency to preserving the past of Seattle’s Central District’s, a unique black community and history.
The Evolution of Seattle’s Black Population: From Scattered to the Central District
Though Seattle’s early black community was small, it began a legacy of involvement and community building, uniting the undersized population through whatever means possible. In 1858, Seattle welcomed its first black resident, but the growth of a black community would not follow, and by 1900 there would be just 406 African Americans in a budding Seattle. As transcontinental railroads were opened up in 1889, and Seattle became a premier stop on several lines, “more African Americans trickled into the Northwest,” Despite limited growth, Seattle was emerging as a notable place to relocate for African Americans across the country due to its uniquely progressive history. While growing economic opportunities over the decades would attract some, many others would come to Seattle fleeing their lives in a turbulent post-Civil War South. Unlike its neighbors Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, “Washington…never contemplated a segregated school system…black male Washingtonians voted with out restrictions, and when the Washington Territorial Suffrage Act of 1883 made it possible for women to vote for the first time, so did African American women,” Additionally, “Black Laws” initiated in Oregon prevented blacks from land ownership or intermarriage with whites. Washington was very appealing to blacks who had experienced legal prejudices elsewhere. And though everybody came from somewhere different, the early blacks who settled in Seattle tried their best to make the region feel like home, one early settler, speaking of her time in Seattle’s early black community said, “There weren’t too many colored people in Seattle then. There were all kinds of things we did, though, just as if there were a lot of people here…” Seattle’s early black community tried to make life normal and foster a strong sense of unity.
Slowly, the region’s black population grew, and thanks to the brief boom of World War I, Depression Era Welfare projects and defense mobilization in the area, Seattle’s “Central District” would be born. While in 1920, a few years after the start of World War I, African Americans would account for just 1 percent of Seattle’s total population, totaling 2,894, it was a significant growth from just thirty years prior. While Washington was more liberal when compared to its neighbors, and a 1890 equal accommodation law made the state non-segregated, “African Americans were barred from residence in most neighborhoods,” forcing them to concentrate heavily in certain pockets in the city. While Seattle’s black community in the 1930s was “small, concentrated, and largely invisible to a white society,” due to this insularity, it fostered a developing community and rich cultural production. However, in these early years of development, “emerging economic segregation fostered two distinct black residential concentrations: the Yesler-Jackson area, a working-class transient neighborhood; and the East Madison Street area…which soon became home of Seattle’s upwardly mobile African American population”. As the black population continued to swell, a wary white Seattle became more and more restrictive, and white apartment owners refused to rent to blacks while real estate covenants halted blacks from owning homes outside of these two neighborhoods. As the two neighborhoods grew, they “slowly expanded toward each other,” and by World War II, Seattle’s first and only African American community was born: the Central District.
The height of Seattle’s African American growth, however, was due to World War II. Thanks to the war mobilization of the 1940s “African Americans poured into the Northwest cities looking for work.” If World War I had provided a substantial population boost because there were “good Jobs for Negroes, in the shipyards and in many other places where we had not worked before…” then World War II did the same on a much larger scale. Boeing airline company, quickly became a pillar of the region’s economic growth, and “began accepting black applicants in 1942, and in two years the African American population soared from 3,879 in 1939 to over 10,000” Additionally, with an increased visibility of blacks, whites became even more restrictive than in the past and all downtown dance halls “enforced a rigid whites-only policy,” Now, in addition to the restrictive housing options blacks had, they could only experience the nightlife of their own community, and these restrictions fostered a rich entertainment hub in Seattle’s Central District that would aid the growth of the 1940s and 1950s peak in Jazz, and go on to foster additional musical artists and acts.
“Seattle Hunch”: The Growth & Importance of Jazz to Seattle’s Black Community
When Jelly Roll Morton visited Seattle for the first time, he wrote a song about the city entitled “Seattle Hunch”. Though he nearly lost everything in a gambling game his last night in the city, the song he wrote was uplifting and cheerful, immortalizing the city’s vibrant black community and budding jazz scene. Despite the fact that Seattle took a long time to fully develop its black population, since the 1900s it possessed a small but tightly knit African American community that fostered unity through organizations, events, and parties. Seattle also developed as an integral part of the national entertainment circuit. As early as 1910, Seattle had the largest vaudeville circuit in the country, “between 1864 and 1912, no fewer than 156 touring minstrel troupes passed through Seattle” Despite their racially offensive content, these early troupes offered a way for early jazz musicians to get their foot in the entertainment door. But the true start of Jazz in Seattle began shortly after the 1900 boom in 1918, when Lillian Smith and her band come to Seattle’s Central District and played Washington Hall, as part of a benefit to raise money for the NAACP—the presence of such an organization suggesting a flourishing black population in the area.
For Seattle’s Central District though, jazz would really take hold in the 1920s. As the district became a vice emporium during prohibition, “an authentic black jazz scene developed around the hub of Jackson Street and Twelfth Avenue.” While many of the clubs of this period are no longer around, it is not difficult to imagine the excitement and contraband that passed through the area as Seattle’s small black population blew off steam at the end of a hard day. These black nightclubs “were the heart of the night-life scene” and consisted of “the Ubangi Club, the Black and Tan, the Blue Rose, the Hi-Hatter’ Club, and Club Royale” to name a few. Seattle quickly became known for its vibrant scene, and in the early 1920s a great number of national entertainers made a stop in Seattle, from Cab Calloway to Duke Ellington. However, even though Seattle’s Jazz scene was comprised of a lot of acts which traveled through the city and were not permanent fixtures, the vibrant music regardless of where it came from produced a strong sense of community for African American musicians, who in the 1930s, would congregate after gigs in the basement of Evelyn Bundy’s home, a swing band leader and pillar of the jazz scene.
While Seattle was participating in the national production of Jazz, and often gets lost in musical history, it produced a very unique jazz sound. Largely distinctive from Southern and East coast jazz, where many musicians played by ear, many of Seattle’s musicians were trained classically, schooled at church and taught to read sheet music. In fact, one of the first things early black settlers in Seattle established, were churches, and thus Seattle has always had a variety of religious establishments catering specifically to a black community. Billy Tolles, one of Seattle’s prominent Jazz saxophone players, honed his musical craft at church, not in college—where he had received an extensive and expensive arts education, “the real music came from Mount Zion Baptist Church, where I sang in the junior choir. That’s where I got my foundation” Additionally, Seattle was “not very bluesy,” giving Seattle jazz a unique tone.
Seattle’s Jazz scene would reach it’s peak in the 1940s and 1950s, as war mobilization brought in new players and a few faces that would one day be nationally recognized. The height of the jazz scene was between 1937 and 1951, “years in which Seattle came of age as a nerve center of the defense industry [and] a plentiful supply of soldiers and civilians…[making] Seattle a boomtown for musicians,” Life long musicians, amateur and professional, migrated to the region during this period in search of employment, and when they got off work from the shipyards or assembly line, they played their instruments with friends and neighbors, or in night clubs—jazz in Seattle was bursting at the seams. At the age of ten, a little boy would move from Chicago to Bremerton with his family, so his father could accept a position at the shipyards, and in 1947 his family would relocate to Seattle, that boy was Quincy Jones, who would do on to enroll in Garfield High School. However, it would be the meeting of Jones and Ray Charles on the Central District’s Jackson Street that would be a pivotal moment in Seattle’s Jazz history. The details and the circumstances of their introduction is hazy, but it kindled a life long friendship and musical partnership that can only be attributed to the Seattle’s jazz scene and growing black community in the Central District. Charles taught Jones how to write, and Jones provided enthusiasm, creativity, and young talent. Both men went on to have prolific musical careers. While the partnership of these two men is truly unique, Jones’ story, of a working class black family in the central district, and of music as an outlet, was common. The region would produce many jazz artists from Quincy Jones to Patti Brown.
The Forgotten and the Infamous: Jimi Hendrix, Wheedles Groove, Sir Mix A lot, and Seattle’s Black Community in the 1960s and 1970s
Jazz experienced a decreased interest in the 1960s, and other music blossomed in Seattle’s Central District community. Born in Seattle during the jazz peak, Jimi Hendrix had roots in Seattle’s entertainment community—his grandparents, Nora and Ross Hendrix, were vaudeville performers in the region. Hendrix, like Quincy Jones, had attended Garfield High in the Seattle Central District, and had got his start playing with nationally acclaimed musical acts such as Sam Cooke and Little Richard. While he did not become famous until he left the U.S. and toured England, his experiences in Seattle’s Central District, jamming and honing his craft with other black musicians in the vibrant community, no doubt contributed to his sound. In the late 1960s he would finally return to Seattle as a mega star, but outside of the rock and roll of Jimi Hendrix, Seattle’s black community during the 1960s produced a breadth of music. During this period, finally, “the black community could enjoy round-the-clock gospel, rhythm and blues, and jazz on its own radio stations KZAM and KYAC,” The community enjoyed diverse musical options and continued using musical production as a glue that bonded the community together, one of which was soul and funk music.
Seattle’s soul and funk scene would never go national, eventually slipping into obscurity, but the music produced by the bands and musicians of the movement, sustained the strong ties of Seattle’s Central District community. Seattle’s soul movement arose out of R & B, which was an offshoot of jazz in the 1960s. It fostered a rich culture in which everyone went out every week, Thursday through Saturday, “from working class people…to pimps and drug dealers” The bands of the era, Black and White Affair, Deep Soul, Cold, Bold & Together and Cooking Bag, entertained in the same clubs and on the same local circuit. One or two prominent figures also trickled out of this period, such as Kenny G. The tight knit Central District community fostered musical production during this period not unlike during the jazz period—most local musicians knew the other musicians, and sometimes they collaborated. Many of these soul and funk bands also paralleled the national changes that were happening in regards to race, their music offering social commentary on politics, or the “black and proud” rhetoric of the period. However, while many bands rose to prominence locally, they never achieved national fame, which many attributed to the racial climate of the period, and the isolation of Seattle itself. The insularity of the Central District though, without a doubt produced a rich sound for every generation.
Perhaps the only R & B artist to achieve national notoriety from Seattle’s Central District, was Sir Mix-A-Lot. While he received national acclaim for “Baby Got Back,” Sir Mix-A-Lot immortalized Seattle, and more specifically, Seattle’s Central District through his music. In “Posse On Broadway,” he described the various shenanigans and happenings he and his crew got into in Seattle. Though the song is about Broadway, he made several mentions of key points in the Central District, “Picked up the posse on 23rd and Jackson // headed for the strip, yes we're lookin' for some action…On Martin Luther King // the set looks kinda dead,” later he added, “at 23rd and Union the driver broke left // Kevin shouted Broadway it's time to get def,” Though Broadway served Sir Mix-A-Lot and his crew as their entertainment hub—later in the song they get cheeseburgers at the Dick’s on Broadway—he makes the rounds on various Central District streets to pick up his friends. The Central District was Sir Mix-A-Lot’s home community, and despite his fame, he did not forget it or what it had done for his musical development, when describing his childhood in the Central District Sir Mix-A-Lot said, “incredible culture, incredible depth…I took it for granted, I thought everybody lived like that,” The Central District over the years had established itself as a vivacious and wonderful West Coast hub for black musicians, artists, and everyday people.
Impenetrable Cultural Walls: The Slow Gentrification of the Central District and What it Means for a Historical Black Community
The gentrification of Seattle’s Central District cannot be pinpointed to a specific moment or instance, but its development in the last twenty-five years has undeniably shaped the district today. Gentrification is by no means unique to Seattle, and has altered communities in New York City’s Harlem, Chicago’s South Side, South Central Los Angeles, and San Francisco’s Fillmore District, but gentrification has had an especially unique affect on Seattle. Seattle, as it has already been explained, unlike many major U.S. cities has a particularly small black population Twenty-two years ago, in 1990, “there were nearly three times as many black as white residents in the area, but by 2000, the number of white residents surpassed the number of blacks for the first time in 30 years,” Not only are whites moving in, but blacks are moving out, sometimes by choice, but more often by rising home prices. Ironically, the only part of the city African Americans could live for the greater portion of the 20th century, is being overrun by the very people who forced them our of the city’s center.
Today’s displacement of blacks in Seattle is not one of restrictive real estate covenants like in the 1920s and 1930s, but real estate prices and property taxes. Households in the area that reported an annual income of over $55,000 had rose significantly by 2000 in comparison to 1990, and compared to the fact that the majority of black families, who were less numerous in 2000 than previous years, reported an annual income of $15,000, a racial and economic shift is evident. Furthermore, gentrification has caused increased home values, causing property taxes to skyrocket. A three bedroom, one bath, 1,200 square foot home in the Central District in 2001 was worth $190,000; by 2005 it was worth $355,00. For many residents, tax bills have grown larger than their annual mortgage payments, and often ineligible due to their income to apply for loans, they have been forced “to sell to younger, more affluent, and credit eligible buyers who in many instances were white” Even if some blacks remain, others have been forced to go elsewhere. Though today, the community is highly racially mixed, it is unforeseen whether gentrification will fully turn the area into a homogenous district. Regardless, the vibrant, predominantly African American community that had developed over the 20th century, producing unique music and culture, is no longer, and will likely never be, the same.
Preserving A Colorful History on The Corner of 23rd & Union: The Why, How and Where Issues of a Central District Archive
Since Seattle’s black population is unique in that it is small, especially when compared to its cultural production over the years, or the black populations in other major cities, it is crucial that we preserve the sights, sounds and memories of the district before they are gone. Considering the materials being preserved, an audiovisual archive would be optimal because, “an audiovisual archives is a place where recordings are stored for the purpose of both preservation and use”. An archive places a strong sense of emphasis on preserving recordings and materials for the future, carefully storing all materials and keeping multiple copies. The idea of a Central District Archive would encompass oral histories, newspaper publishings over the decades, assorted relevant audio and visual recordings, as well as any already published CDs, movies, or multimedia content that would be relevant to patrons interested in the region. Such an archive would serve students and scholars interested in regional history or projects relating to Seattle’s black population or Central Distinct, but more importantly, “audiovisual archives may be of the greatest interest to the families and communities that were recorded…this is especially true as the recordings and archives grow older” It is particularly through this lens that a Central District archive would be unique. It would work to serve a disintegrating community hoping to preserve a quickly fading past. For those in the Central District who have found their life long friends or old bandmates scattered, recordings of the music they produced, or their own oral histories of the vibrant environment they lived in before gentrification, would be invaluable.
In some respects, oral history preservation has been immortalized in Paul De Barros’s book, “Jackson Street After Hours,” or through a community archiving project entitled, The Corner: 23rd & Union. From June through August 2009, The Corner opened a simple phone line that lead to a voicemail box. Anyone could call in and share their own stories or perspectives on Seattle’s Central District and it’s recent changes. Some callers expressed anger, some ambivalence, others sad acceptance. One caller, an elderly black woman, Jeannie Barnes, said, “The neighborhood started changing...Once it was Italians and Jewish, they left, then it turned black, we’re gone, so the next generation is coming along…you just have to let the past go and look towards the future…its no more like the way it was when we were living in there…you just have to leave stuff in the past,” But not all callers were so accepting, Aj Mitchell said, “I feel that the Central District needs to go back to its old ways, BLACK PEOPLE…We need to come together,” Additionally, not all voices were on the losing side of gentrification, what was unique about the project was the range of perspectives. White residents called in, directly addressing their own awareness that they were a part of gentrification. One young man, a white artist said, “I know that I am definitely one step of gentrification that is happening, being the poor artist that's living here. The poor white artist I should say,” The Corner: 23rd & Union was a brief community project. It was funded by a small grant and is housed at KUOW 94.9 studios with all of the oral histories available to the public online. However, while The Corner 23rd & Union is a great archive, in the future it would be beneficial to develop a holistic and all-inclusive Central District Archive, that includes not just these stories, but also all of the music, memories and other media that has been produced in the area since the early 20th century.
The development of a Central District archive, instead of individual archives reflecting specific aspects of the Central District, would provide a much more holistic look at Seattle’s black presence. Quite frankly, despite the Central District’s rich musical history, “black urban culture is not simply 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,” The amalgamation of multimedia, oral histories, and other sources in one central location would allow users to quickly unlock a past too soon extinct. More importantly, it would be a useful tool to the people within the community.
The major issue with such a project is that of accessibility. Undoubtedly, the archive would be housed at the library within the Puget Sounds collection, but since the notion of a Central District is essentially the idea of preserving a community, the recordings and materials would also belong to the community, not simply the library. A partnership with The Corner: 23rd & Union would be the first step. Additional grant money could be applied for and the library may be able to partner up with the organization to extend the documentation of oral histories. The library could link to the site, or create a separate website branch for this aspect of the project. However, in order to be holistic the archive should also document published and unpublished musical recordings, newspaper clippings, journals, and other materials. These items would need to be tracked down and catalogued, but the more important question is where would they be housed? Once again, I think that the library should partner up with a community organization, specifically the Northwest West African American Museum (NAAM) in the heart of Seattle’s Central District. While members of the community can come to the library and freely use the materials, the University District is not simple to get to from the Central District. Housing many files at NAAM allows members of the Central District quick access if they do not have Internet access or cannot make it to the University. Issues of copyright for published works would be subject to the restrictions of the library, and all oral history participants openly consented to the use of their words. Creating a Central District Archive is an issue of preserving a community, and the first concern of the archive should be sharing its collection with said community.
Distant Memories & New Beginnings: Closing remarks on Jazz, Violence, and a Future in Seattle’s Central District
Paul De Barros posed a question as he began his book, Jackson Street After Hours, “Why…one might ask, write the history of jazz here [Seattle]?” His answer, was to learn about who we are now by looking at who we were then, to seek out clues in identity and community identity, and to write a history from the perspective of an insider, not an outsider glorifying or making exotic what was so common place for Seattle’s working class black population. The same can be said for a Central District Archive. Instead of allowing sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and the media to write about Seattle’s most turbulent district, preserving oral histories, music, and other materials in an archive, and opening up that archive to the public, lets the Central District’s key figures, musicians, and everyday people, speak for themselves. Such an archive, may also offer answers to some of the districts biggest problems. Though the Central District was once described as a vice capitol where a man would get into any kind of trouble he wanted, violence ran less ramped than it does today. Some of these narratives offer a glimpse into a way of life that offers an alternative to the “streets”. When musicians like Charlie Taylor got bored as a child, instead of joining a gang, he and his friends would play make-believe musicians, “All the black kids I knew had a favorite instrument that they liked to listen to and could ‘pose’ to…We didn’t really know how to play, but we just kept on doing it, so it went from posing to playing,” Make believe, soon became reality, and this reality served as an outlet for extra time, keeping many youth off of the streets and out of trouble. Perhaps such an explanation is too romantic a look at the past, but regardless, the Central District is changing, and if we do not archive the stories it has been telling for years, when we go to find answers, it may be too late—the district’s history will have vanished.
References
Archives and the Future. In Archives for the Future: Global Perspectives on Audiovisual
Archives in the 21st Century (2004)
Armbruster, Kurt E., Before Seattle Rocked, (University of Washington Press, 2011)
De Barros, Paul, Jackson Street After Hours, (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 1993)
Hendrix, Jimi, Don Covay, Rosa Lee Brooks, Little Richard, Frank Howard, Ray Sharpe,
Jimmy Norman, et al, West Coast Seattle boy the Jimi Hendrix anthology. (New York, Experience Hendrix/Legacy, 2010)
Jepsen, David J., Old-fashioned Revival, (Oregon Historical Society, 2006)
Maas, Jennifer, Michelle Witten, Matt Sullivan, and Sir Mix-A-Lot. Wheedle's groove
[Seattle's forgotten soul of the 1960s and '70s]. (Seattle, WA: Cinewax, 2011)
McGee, Henry W. Jr., Seattle 1990–2006: Integration or Displacement, (The Urban
Lawyer, 2007)
Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1994)