by Doug Merlino
If Giovanni thought about his role in the larger history of European adventures in Africa, he didn’t mention it to my grandfather. He returned home to his village in the mountains of southern Italy and found there was no work. His brother had already left for America, one of several men from the area who had sailed to New York and then headed across the country, drawn by the promise of jobs in the coal mines outside Seattle. Giovanni followed, arriving in 1898.
The brothers had good timing. In the late 1890s, with the Klondike Gold Rush in full swing, Seattle was in the midst of one of its occasional economic booms. Thousands of prospectors, dreamers, and drifters poured money into the city as they geared up for the journey to Alaska. Giovanni went to work as a miner while Angelo opened an Italian grocery. In 1908, Giovanni returned to the village in Italy and asked a girl he knew to marry him. When they came back, my great-grandmother told him she had no desire to live in a mining camp, so they moved to Seattle, where he took a job in an iron foundry.
The Italians lived in the Rainier Valley area of Seattle, just south of the Central Area. “Garlic Gulch” was full of “wops” who, like Giovanni, grew tomatoes and zucchini in their backyards, kept chickens and rabbits, and fermented homemade wine—known as “Dago red”—in their basements.
As their numbers began to grow, the Italians settled in on Seattle’s economic ladder about one notch above blacks, a status that led to competition for menial work. One such job was shoe shining. At the turn of the century, Italians in Seattle had organized to the extent that they could buy the “rights” to set up shoe-shine stands on the sidewalks outside of downtown businesses. Blacks set up for free in alleys and side streets. After the Italians complained, the City Council passed a motion that required shoe shiners who operated on public property to pay for their spaces. The language of the law was race-neutral, but the effect was to shut down the black competition and give the Italians—on the cusp of being considered full-fledged “whites”—a leg up. It’s a small example that shows the difficult compromise behind Booker T. Washington’s theory of advancing through self-improvement: Without equal protection under the law, blacks could never know how secure their futures were.
Seattle’s preeminent black family in the early 1900s was that of Horace Cayton, publisher of the Seattle Republican, the city’s second-largest newspaper, and his wife, Susie Revels, the daughter of the first black U.S. senator, Mississippi’s Hiram Revels, who served during Reconstruction. In 1909, when Booker T. Washington came to visit Seattle for the Alaskan, Yukon, and Pacific Exposition, the Cayton family had the honor of putting him up and showing him the city. One night at dinner, Horace Cayton confronted Washington about his insistence on staying in the South and accepting segregation. As Cayton’s son, Horace Cayton Jr., recounts in his autobiography, Long Old Road, his father told Washington that he had been swayed by the arguments of W. E. B. Du Bois that blacks did not need to compromise but should make a stand for their freedom. “Here in the Northwest, we are striking out in every direction,” the elder Cayton said. “Negroes in this town have become small businessmen or skilled mechanics and live a good life. Their children are getting good educations and will be able to stand up and compete with other men.”
Washington answered calmly. “The Negro is not in a position to make a bid for his freedom at present, Mr. Cayton,” he said. “The South was defeated, not destroyed, today it is influencing more of the country than you are perhaps aware. You speak of the insanity of the South in regards to the Negro. I sincerely hope, Mr. Cayton, the insanity of the South does not overcome you here in the relative freedom of the Northwest. I hope that the infection of Negro prejudice does not spread to this part of the country. If it does, you may find that you have been living in a fool’s paradise.”
The warning was prophetic. Seattle’s black population grew markedly during the first decade of the twentieth century—many African Americans came to Seattle after being recruited to break strikes in the coal mines east and south of the city, where my great-grandfather had first worked. By 1910, twenty-three hundred African Americans lived in the city, a little less than 1 percent of the overall population. Over the next decade, segregation and discrimination in Seattle—following a trend across the country—began to harden. As more African Americans came to Seattle, Horace Cayton gradually included more “black” news in his paper, which led to a slow loss of white subscribers. In 1917, Cayton ran a front-page story that detailed a hideous lynching in Mississippi. The story shocked and offended many of his white readers, and the paper began to bleed subscribers and advertisers. Within three months, the Seattle Republican went broke. “With the new immigration the pattern [of race relations in Seattle] was beginning to change,” writes Horace Cayton Jr. of the time. “There was no longer a place for an in-between group, and everyone became identified either as a Negro or white. We were, to my knowledge, the only Negro family to feel so dramatically the impact of those social forces, and our fall from our unique position was swift and, for us, painful.”
The start of World War I in 1914 abruptly ended the great wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe that had begun in the 1870s. Suddenly, with the nation gearing up for war, there was an acute shortage of workers for the factories and mills in cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and New York. As it happened, the country had a large population of able-bodied men who were underemployed and waiting around for a chance for better jobs. Agents from northern factories traveled south to recruit workers, giving free transport tickets to young black men willing to move. This was the start of the Great Migration, which saw one million black Americans migrate north by the onset of the Depression in 1929. For African Americans it was a profound adjustment, the beginning of a change from being a mostly rural to a mostly urban people. In New York, the Harlem Renaissance birthed an explosion of artistic talent that introduced black culture to white America.
Seattle’s black population hovered at about a few thousand between 1910 and 1940. Though there had been advances in integrating the longshoremen’s and ships’ stewards’ unions—following violent clashes with whites after blacks workers were brought in as strikebreakers—most blacks were still relegated to menial jobs. In 1930, there were 1,405 black men working in Seattle; 62 percent were laborers, bootblacks, janitors, waiters, or servants. Of the 487 black women working in the city, 287 were domestic servants. There were 4 black attorneys, 3 physicians, 3 dentists, and 2 foot doctors.
African Americans only really headed west in large numbers at the start of World War II. Shipyard jobs pulled blacks to cities such as Oakland and Portland that until then had small black populations. In Seattle, Boeing, which had been founded in 1916, ramped up its production of bombers; another local company built Sherman tanks; and some thirty shipyards in the region fired up to round-the-clock production, with an overall capacity to employ 150,000 workers. Between 1940 and 1950, the number of blacks in Seattle rose from 3,789 to 15,666.
As Seattle’s black population grew, it developed institutions, including churches, local chapters of organizations such as the Urban League and the NAACP, and even a short-lived Negro Leagues baseball team, the Seattle Steelheads. A boisterous jazz and nightlife scene centered around clubs on Jackson Street even drew a seventeen-year-old piano player from Florida named Ray Charles, who arrived in 1948, gave lessons to an even younger local kid named Quincy Jones, and tore things up for a couple of years before heading on to Los Angeles. It was something of a golden era, with plentiful defense contracts leading to a booming labor market and decently paid jobs. The increasing numbers of African Americans also brought overt displays of discrimination. Around town, signs went up on restaurants, hotels, and theaters reading “Whites Only” and “We Don’t Serve Colored.”
There also were cultural differences between the new migrants from the South and old-school Seattle African-American families. “I was quite ashamed of them,” LeEtta King, a longtime black Seattle resident, told a historian
of the 1940s influx. “They looked so bad.… Their big shapes—and their heads tied up with a handkerchief.… And they were noisy. I just tried not to see them.”
Willie McClain was born in 1953 in Gulfport, Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast right across the water from New Orleans. At the time, his family didn’t live much differently than it would have fifty years earlier—they hauled water from the well, made medicine from plants when they were sick, and lit their home with kerosene lamps. The family, including Willie’s mom, stepdad, and six siblings, lived in an area called “The Quarters”—the old slave quarters—crowding into a one-bedroom shanty in a U-shaped set of houses centered on a courtyard where chickens pecked in the dirt. The tin-roofed homes were built on four-foot stilts, so that when the rains flooded the river, Willie could jump from his front door into the overflow.
“It was completely segregated,” McClain says of Gulfport. “Totally.” Willie’s mom told him never to cross the railroad tracks, the line that separated blacks from whites. At the time of McClain’s birth, it would still be a year until the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of the public schools was not acceptable; two years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and Martin Luther King Jr. began the Montgomery bus boycott; and also two years before Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black kid visiting Mississippi from Chicago, was tortured, killed, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, three hundred miles to the north of Gulfport. Till’s killers—they later described the murder to a magazine reporter—were acquitted by an all-white jury after an hour of deliberation. Till’s alleged crime was whistling at a white woman behind the counter of a grocery store.
In 1960, when Willie was almost seven, his mom told the kids they were going to take a trip. Her sister, always the go-getter of the family, had already moved to Seattle. She had gotten a nursing job, and her husband had found work as a galley cook in the merchant marine. Willie’s aunt promised that if the rest of the family came, she would help them get settled. There wasn’t much to pack—the family, for example, used wooden pallets as beds. Willie’s mom prepared a whole bunch of food—blacks weren’t welcome in many restaurants along the way—and they boarded a Greyhound bus to start the three-thousand-mile journey. As he sat at the back of the segregated coach as it pulled out of Gulfport, Willie had no idea he wasn’t coming back.
The decades after World War II marked the start of large-scale migrations out of Deep South states such as Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia as the mechanization of cotton picking demolished the demand for unskilled labor. Overall, some five million African Americans left the South between 1940 and 1970. This was the Second Great Migration. During that period, Seattle’s black population climbed from thirty-eight hundred in 1940 to thirty-eight thousand in 1970.
That’s also when the families of most of the black players on our team arrived. In the 1950s, Myran’s grandmother, the daughter of a steel-mill worker who had migrated from Arkansas to St. Louis himself, packed up and headed to Seattle with her sister. Damian’s grandmother and great-aunt left Louisiana’s Cajun Country and landed in Spokane, three hundred miles east of Seattle. JT’s mom was born in Seattle right after her parents came out from Monroe, Louisiana. When he was thirteen, Tyrell’s father was sent from Chicago to Seattle, where he moved in with his grandmother, who had come from Decatur, Alabama, and found a job cooking and doing laundry in a sanatorium.
In 1960, the Central Area was home to four out of five blacks in Seattle. Of the rest, many lived in public housing developments sprinkled throughout the city’s South End. The reality was that black people had few options other than the Central Area. From the late 1920s through 1948, many property deeds in other parts of the city included restrictive covenants that barred sale to blacks, Asians, Native Americans, and, in some cases, Jews. The North End of Seattle was almost exclusively white. After the Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that restrictive covenants could not be enforced, custom and active hostility kept blacks out of white neighborhoods for decades to come. In 1964, Seattle voters overwhelmingly rejected an “open housing” ordinance that would have made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race when selling or renting a home.
Willie McClain’s family moved into the High Point public housing development in West Seattle, a bulge of land that juts into Puget Sound south of downtown Seattle. High Point had been built during World War II for defense industry workers. In 1960, as Willie remembers it, the vast majority of High Point’s residents were black. The kids had a fairly idyllic life as long as they stayed within the projects—they played tetherball, basketball, and capture the flag on the playfield, rode their bikes down a steep dirt hill, and hunted for frogs in the wetlands. If they ventured from the development, though, it was different. McClain remembers walking down the street with his friends and white people yelling at them, “Go back to the projects!” and “You’re in the wrong part of town!” When the kids tried to walk to a big public park nearby, the police stopped them and told them to go back to High Point. “In Gulfport, you were liable to get hit, shot, killed, and disappeared,” McClain says. “Here, I guess you could say it was open and blatant, but not life-threatening. It was more of a threat: ‘You better get yourself back up there before we do something to you.’ ”
In November 1961, Martin Luther King Jr., then only thirty-two years old, made his only visit to Seattle. Thousands of people came out to the University of Washington, a downtown auditorium, and Garfield High School in the Central Area, where he gave speeches calling for an end to segregation. Carrying on the intellectual tradition established by Du Bois, King pressed for the full legal, economic, and social integration of blacks into American society. In New York, Malcolm X represented another prong of the movement. He led the Nation of Islam’s Mosque No. 7 in Harlem and used his position to deliver blistering indictments of white treatment of blacks in America. Picking up on the strand of black intellectual thought that flowed from Booker T. Washington through Marcus Garvey, who led a Harlem-based movement in the 1910s that called for blacks to repatriate to Africa, Malcolm X advocated the establishment of a separate homeland in the South for African Americans. In probably his most famous quote, he insisted that blacks should achieve freedom “by any means necessary.” At the same time, King and Malcolm X, though very different in philosophy, worked somewhat in tandem. “If the white people realize what the alternative is,” Malcolm said, “perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.”
In the early 1960s, after a few years in public housing, Willie McClain’s family moved into a home in the Central Area. At the time, the neighborhood was brimming with new arrivals from the South—between just 1960 and 1967, the number of African Americans living in the Central Area shot up from 20,800 to 32,400. Seemingly overnight, the city developed a “ghetto.” In 1950, the median income of blacks in Seattle was 73 percent that of whites; by 1967, the median income for blacks living in the Central Area was 54 percent that of Seattle’s white population. Blight spread as banks and insurance companies redlined the neighborhood, refusing to insure or provide loans to property owners there. Black enrollment at some neighborhood schools topped 90 percent, while black unemployment in Seattle ran at up to triple that of the city’s overall rate during the 1960s.
Gradually, the local media began to venture into the Central Area to see what exactly was going on there. In 1965, Seattle magazine ran an article titled “The World That Whites Don’t Know,” warning that the neighborhood was “seething with unrest and bitterness” over job and housing discrimination, and police brutality. The article profiled David Garner, a young migrant from Louisiana who had newly arrived with his family. He’d found work as a janitor at a building downtown, starting his shift in the evening after the office workers had left and finishing before they arrived the next day, all but invisible to white Seattle. “I feel like a visitor from Mars,” Garner said. The author, a white man, wrote, “Somehow, the white masses in Seattle have developed a tradition—or a talent—for looking right through
black skin, as if they thought that Negroes were a form of non-people.”
Willie McClain—who was known to his friends by his nickname, “June Bug”—found the Central Area to be a safe haven, but also a boundary. His main contact with mainstream Seattle as a kid came through an older man Willie and his friends knew only as “Coach.” He was a white man who came to watch them play baseball and then picked them up on weekends and drove them in his station wagon on excursions to the beach, the movies, and an all-you-can-eat restaurant in a wealthy white suburb. McClain compares Coach’s role in their lives to the one the organizer of our team, Randy Finley, played in those of my black teammates. “He never did anything inappropriate,” McClain says. “He just seemed to have an interest in exposing us to things outside the Central Area.” If they left without Coach, the reception was different. When they rode their bikes to the all-you-can-eat restaurant by themselves while in middle school, the police told them to head back to Seattle. McClain remembers that white shopkeepers would wipe the counters after black customers touched them and spray air freshener as they were leaving.
The civil rights movement saw its greatest successes in the middle of the sixties. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination and segregation in public places, employment, schools, and housing. The next year the Voting Rights Act gave the federal government the power to end disenfranchisement in the South.