A Smoldering Fire -- 24 Years After Racial Violence Rocked Seattle's Central Area, Some Who Were There See The Same Danger Signs Today

She remembers the rocks and the Molotov cocktails whirring through the air, the breaking glass, the splashes of fire, the blood trickling down a man's face.

It was a hot July night in 1968, and Kathy Jones was a young black woman living in Seattle's Central Area.

The sound of gunfire was new and harsh to her ears.

As a police helicopter whipped the steamy air, angry black youths hurled rocks at passing white motorists, smashed police-car windows and pelted fire trucks with homemade firebombs.

Jones, then 17, says she doesn't remember whether or not she picked up a rock. Violence, which both compelled and repulsed her, was something she had struggled with.

"We've been trying peacefully for three years to get you to listen to us," she remembers thinking. "Maybe there's another way. Maybe then then you'll listen."

She remembers being consumed by a feeling that things had to change for black people. It was a desperate, all-or-nothing feeling.

"It was like there was no tomorrow if this was not done today," she says now.

Nearly a quarter-century of tomorrows have come and gone since. Among them was April 29, 1992, the day a jury acquitted the Los Angeles police officers who had beaten Rodney King.

The verdict and the subsequent riots left much of Los Angeles charred and shattered and sparked scattered violence in other cities, including Seattle.

In Los Angeles, those sweeping up ashes in the South Central

section - near the ashes left from the 1965 Watts riots - couldn't help but wonder if anything had really changed.

And in Seattle, Kathy Jones and others whose lives had been touched directly by the Central Area riots in 1968 asked themselves the same question.

One thing is very different: Jones and others who came to 23rd Avenue and Cherry Street that night July 1, 1968, had dreams.

Jones, who would soon become a mother, dreamed of a future without obstacles for black children.

Virgil Walker, a black Marine, saw a world where people would treat each other as they wanted to be treated.

Tim Harvey, a white reporter, believed he could help the black struggle.

Mike Ross, a black youth worker, thought he could change urban conditions by working within the political system.

Alex Thole, a white policeman, planned to make society safer.

Larry Gossett, a black student activist, saw a time when black children would grow up with pride.

Aaron Dixon, Black Panther leader, envisioned a society with equal justice for all.

Now, nearly 25 years later, it's as though they've all awakened abruptly from a long nap, says Jones. Their dreams have been dashed by cold reality, tempered by real life.

"We're discovering that something happened while we were napping," she says. "And it's real ugly."

A DREAM GONE SOUR

In the 1960s, black was beautiful and hope was in the air.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected president at the dawn of the decade, and anything seemed possible.

In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King shared his dream with 200,000 marchers in Washington, D.C.

But it wasn't until Stokely Carmichael came to town in 1967 that "pride" and "power" became connected to the word "black" in Seattle.

"Black power" meant black people would "fight for their liberation by any means necessary," said Carmichael, the 27-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to a cheering audience.

"Without the power to control their lives and their communities," he added, black people "will exist in a constant state of insurrection."

A crowd of 4,000 people gathered to hear him at Garfield High School, and another 4,000 at the University of Washington.

Just two short years before, when Watts erupted in a six-day race riot that left 34 dead, there had been little reaction from the black community in this corner of the West Coast.

"We didn't have any social consciences," recalled Larry Gossett, now executive director of CAMP, the Central Area Motivation Program. "We said, `That's terrible, those people tearing up their own neighborhood.' "

But by early 1968, tensions in Seattle were high. Housing, employment, health care, treatment by banks and relations with police had become volatile issues for Seattle's black residents.

At the end of March, a dispute between black and white students at Franklin High School threatened to escalate.

Gossett, Aaron Dixon and Carl Miller, leaders in the Black Student Union at the UW, said they decided to go to Franklin, in hopes they might channel the students' anger in constructive directions.

On April 4, the three, along with three high-schoolers, were charged with unlawful assembly.

That night, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., unleashing violence in more than 100 cities. In Seattle, firebombs were hurled, windows broken and motorists pelted with rocks.

Soon after, Seattle's Black Panther Party was formed - the first in the nation outside Oakland - with Aaron Dixon as its "captain." Its aim was to provide jobs, housing, health care, self-respect, and a future for black Americans. Its motto: "By any means necessary."

On July 1, Dixon, Gossett and Miller were sentenced to six months in the King County jail. That night, a crowd of several hundred, mostly African Americans, rallied at Garfield High. Before the speakers were finished, the firebombs and rocks were flying toward cars coming down 23rd Avenue.

Although the violence in Seattle's Central Area that summer wasn't on the scale of the riots in Detroit, Los Angeles and other large cities, and was downplayed in the media as "civil disturbances," July ended in a hail of firebombing, rock-throwing and gunfire.

By the end of the month, 39 police officers had required medical attention. Many whites traveling through the area were injured, and more than 100 black youths and adults were arrested.

THE ACTIVIST

Kathy Jones had come to Garfield that first day in July to protest the sentencing of her friends.

"I knew their convictions. I felt that the system was wrong. We were asking for very basic rights, and here they go to jail."

That "the system was wrong" was a feeling Jones had had since she was 13, when she visited her mother's hometown in Indiana. At the movies with her cousin and some friends, she headed toward the main floor.

"You can't sit down there!" they shouted at her.

"Why not?" she asked, not understanding.

"Only the white people can sit there," they said.

In the next few years, Jones realized that while the drinking fountains in Seattle weren't labeled "colored" and "white" like they were in that little town, things weren't right.

"It was a sense. We knew that because we were African American, that things were not fair . . . that there was a double standard," she says. "We wanted to be the best we could be, but this society would not let us."

She joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, helped organize a black student union at Garfield, and eventually joined the Black Panthers.

Her mother beseeched their minister to talk some sense into her.

"All her children were going to school; they were clothed and fed," Jones recalls. "To her, we were living the American dream, and what the hell was I doing out on the streets?"

But Jones felt what she was doing made perfect sense.

"What we were asking for was so basic: the right to be just like anybody else."

Still, there was a moment that night in July when doubt flooded over her. She and her friends had read Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevera and black revolutionary writer Franz Fanon, they had debated issues and ideas late into the night, but here they were, in a crowd heaving rocks.

Were these people on the receiving end of those rocks - many of them motorists who were passing through the area - their enemies?

When the rocks hit someone she knew, a light-skinned black man driving down the street with a white woman, she remembers screaming. "He's black! He's black!"

"I remember being really upset, (thinking) `Look what we're doing, we can't even identify the enemy any more.' Then that revelation: It's not an issue of black and white."

Today, at 40, Jones works for city government as an advocate for domestic-violence victims. One of her most trusted colleagues is a white police officer. She has respect for the law.

Still, she believes the riots in 1968 served a purpose: they focused attention. Without them, "we would have been in a perpetual downhill slide," she says. "The rocks made them listen."

But in the end, the groundwork she and other activists thought they'd laid slipped away. "We thought we had made things a lot better . . . slowly, surely, they've come undone."

She has watched her son, now 22, become disillusioned.

"I remember telling my son from day one, `You can be anything you want to be. There will be nothing in your way - nothing.' "

At the time, she believed it. Now, she wonders if she was fair.

"In this society, if you're black, it's not true," she says.

At her home near Garfield, she says, she hears gunfire nearly every night.

"I don't jump up and look to see where it's coming from any more," she says. "That saddens me."

She still adheres to the Panther notion that nobody can do for the black community but the black community itself. If a new movement emerges, she's ready to join.

"Everything we fought for then, we need to be fighting for now. They were basic rights. I don't think of that as radical. I still have that fire burning in me that says I want it to be OK one day."

THE MARINE

What Virgil Walker remembers best about that July day is the anger that surfaced from within him.

There he was, a 21-year-old Marine just back from two years in Vietnam, on the exhilarating first day of a 7-day leave, happily heading toward home to see his girlfriend.

He was on foot, talking to friends he'd bumped into on the street, when the police approached.

"Move on," they told him.

"I just live over there," Walker responded, pointing to the next block, just beyond the barricades. "I'm going home."

"No you're not," the police said.

But Walker wasn't in the mood to take no for an answer. In a second, he hurled himself over the barricades. In another few seconds, he was arrested. And handcuffed.

He showed police his military ID; he told them his story. They weren't interested. He was black, he was there, he was arrested.

The police took him downtown, where they found he had an outstanding warrant on a traffic charge, which was later dismissed.

When he got out of jail, Walker's good mood was missing in action.

"That night, I was angry," he recalls. "My feeling was I fought for this country, saving their butts, and they treat me like that."

Back on the street, he took out his anger. He threw some firebombs. Did a little sniping. At a policeman, he says. Actually, at a police car. If he'd been aiming at the cop, he says, he would have hit him instead of the car.

His anger dissipated, he went on with his life, marrying and having his first child. He wasn't tempted to join in with the demonstrating or further rioting.

"That wasn't my cup of tea. I wasn't into violence. I wasn't into destroying people's stuff. I'm the type of person, I want people to treat me like I want to be treated. I never did believe in going to hurt people for no reason."

He credits his childhood for that. "We were brought up to love everybody," he recalls. His best friends then included white and Japanese children. He ate dinner at the Seattle home of martial-arts movie star Bruce Lee, he recalls proudly.

In the service, his best friend was white. "We were inseparable," says Walker. His buddies were white, Filipino, whatever.

But now he wonders if he remembers everything correctly, because in those last few years in the service, he was fighting a lot, mostly against white guys.

Busted down to private, he was discharged in 1969.

Like many young men who came back from Vietnam, he had a lot of anger, he remembers. He fought with his wife, and they divorced.

In the '70s and '80s, Walker went through a series of jobs, and a series of wives, too.

At one point in the early '80s, he had a good job, a home with three fireplaces, and a future. But he began selling drugs, lost his bus-driving job when he became "angry with passengers," and another marriage went on the rocks.

He began taking drugs and drinking hard, and in a few years, he was "being a bum."

In 1989, sleeping in doorways and working at minimum-wage jobs to subsist, he hit bottom in Bakersfield, Calif., and began the climb back up.

"I said, `I got to have a better life, I got to get it together.' " He kicked his habits, enrolled in truck-driving school and began driving 18-wheelers cross-country. Now he drives newspaper-delivery trucks in Seattle.

"I believe in hope," he says. "I believe a person can be what he wants to be - if you put your mind to it. I don't care if you're black, white or green. Some people say the white man owes me something. They don't owe me nothing. You got to get out there and make it yourself, even if you have to wash dishes."

He lists his children's occupations: One works at two jobs and is going to school, one is a nanny, another works for a law firm.

His youngest son? "He sells dope," says Walker, his big, open face clouding over.

He tries to talk to him, but it hasn't worked.

"I told him I'm there for him; I love him," says Walker. "I can't force my ideas on him, but I tell him my ideas.

"He's headed to jail."

THE WHITE SYMPATHIZERS

Tim Harvey and Hilaire Duefrene weren't afraid, even when they saw the milling groups of angry black teens at the rally.

After all, they reasoned, they knew some Black Panthers. Not personally, you understand, but as reporters for the underground paper, The Helix, the two young white men had covered Panther meetings, and had even interviewed those intimidating-looking guys in the leather jackets, dark sunglasses and towering "afro" hair.

With his full black beard and long ponytail, Harvey figured, surely the black people there would recognize him as a sympathizer. Armed with camera and tape recorder, they planned to record the moment for posterity.

But Harvey and Duefrene never made it to the rally. Before they'd gone but a few yards, a group of black youths surrounded them. After a little small talk - Hey, man, got a cigarette? How about some spare change? - the two white guys were down on the ground.

"They literally proceeded to beat the sh-- out of us," Harvey recalled. They tore his clothes, ripped his camera from his neck and smashed it, and kicked and pounded both men with fists, wooden clubs and a metal cane.

A police car cruised by, but sped away at the threat of the surging crowd.

Caught in the throes of group rage, a couple of youths grabbed lead pipes from a nearby yard. Before they could strike, a voice of authority cut through the tumult.

All eyes turned. Two black men, a few years older than the boys hitting and kicking the two prone figures, had taken control.

In a few minutes, the black youths went on their way, and the two men helped the bleeding white guys to their feet.

For Harvey, who has a scar and a permanently crushed sinus, the beating was an awakening on many levels.

First, to the possibility of physical danger. At 6 foot 4, he had never been physically afraid before. "I'd never given it a moment's thought."

More importantly, he realized that he just didn't understand black rage.

"We were real stupid to think that a couple of white boys could go down and understand or glide through that situation with some kind of magic shield around them," he says.

"It made me more realistic, not as innocent. I realized that the problem was a heck of a lot more complicated and deep-seated than I had really perceived it."

A few years later, walking down a street in Berkeley, he realized how the incident had changed him.

"Eight or nine young black kids began walking toward me, and I got real scared. I walked to the other side of the street," he recalled.

Now living in a small town in Maine, Harvey doesn't worry much about race relations. "That day gave me a great deal of respect for keeping my nose out of things I shouldn't stick my nose into."

THE RESCUER

Mike Ross went to the rally hoping to organize a courtroom protest in support of the three arrested at the Franklin sit-in.

Instead, he and his friend Carl Miller found themselves rescuing a couple of hapless white men in a scene more than a little reminiscent of the rescue of beaten truck driver Reginald Denny in Los Angeles 24 years later.

When he arrived early in the afternoon, the "Revolutionary Drummers" were pounding out an African rhythm on the lawn outside Garfield, and the crowd was steadily gathering strength.

It was hot, nearly 90 that day, and the summer of 1968 was turning sour.

"There was a mood there that was very angry," Ross recalls.

Ross had just come back from the south, where he was a civil-rights worker with Martin Luther King. That summer, he was working with youth through Model Cities, an anti-poverty program.

"Our feeling was if there was any kind of protest, or if people were going to get hurt, risk confrontations with the police, then it ought to be directed in a clear and cogent a direction as possible."

As the crowd grew more unruly, Ross and Miller decided to go find some friends to help get things under control. As they were returning, they saw the knot of people around the white guys.

"I said, `Oh God, what are those guys doing? They've got to be crazy!' "

He saw the black youths pulling out lead pipes from a nearby yard. "I thought, these guys are going to get killed!" He slammed on the brakes, jumped out and ran to the crowd.

"Stop!" Ross commanded. The youths turned to look at Ross and Miller. They knew the men, respected them. They stopped.

The youths beating the white reporters were big, lifting-weights big, remembers Ross, who is about 5 foot 8. So why did he stop to help?

"It was just one of those things," he says. Harvey and Duefrene weren't part of the problem, he says, "they were trying to be part of the solution."

Later that day, looking for a friend, Ross went into an apartment complex and ran into a police officer, who had a .357 magnum cocked and aimed between his eyes.

"Get the hell out of here," the cop shouted. Ross wasted no time.

For the rest of the night, he and other older, wiser heads walked around trying to calm the crowd.

"It was getting to the point that somebody was going to get killed. These guys were young, drinking, smoking weed, maybe speed, filled with false courage," he recalled.

Also, he figured, it was all happening in the wrong place.

"If people were going to start tearing up stuff, it ought to be focused where the problem is, not at 23rd and Cherry, but more likely at Fourth and James - or up the street at the Seafirst building."

All in all, the riot was "a terrible idea," Ross believes. Still, he says, it focused attention on some specific issues on which the black community was united, including police brutality, educational reform, jobs and housing.

And it changed the lives of a number of people, he says. "The city became serious about getting youth-employment programs," more black students were admitted to the UW, and more black employees were hired by the city.

In 1970, Ross ran successfully for a seat in the Legislature as a Republican. Everything that had happened that summer "really made me focus on what could be done in urban areas. I decided I could do things a different way."

After one term, he was "in and out of politics," working for state government, running unsuccessfully for the Seattle City Council. He worked for the federal government for a time, then for a business-development organization, and ended up with his own firm doing janitorial and construction work.

Now he's working for the state, taking job orders for people who need work. It's a temporary job, Ross says: "You have to eat."

THE COP

He was only 22 on that July night. Just a few months earlier, he had been hired as a Seattle police officer. You couldn't have found a prouder, happier person. Like his father before him, Alex Thole had become a cop.

It was getting on towards dusk. Police were getting calls of a large number of people gathering for a rally at Garfield.

Thole was dispatched to a police staging area at 18th and East Cherry. When things began to heat up, he and other officers were called to the rally site. Thole was in the third vehicle behind Mayor Dorm Braman's car.

Whap! A brick came crashing through the passenger side window. It careened off Thole's headrest and smashed into his head.

As authorities ordered the crowd to disperse, rocks and bottles flew through the air. Braman and the assistant chief narrowly escaped injury as rocks shattered their car windows.

Thole heard gunshots coming from the parking lot at the west end of Garfield High School. A police helicopter hovered overhead, shining its light into the lot, searching for a sniper.

Officers were ordered out of their cars to try to force the crowd off the streets and out of the area.

"I remember I was walking along and telling people to leave the area and go back to their homes, and this one guy pulled a 4-by-4 post that had one of those `No Parking Any Time' signs on it. He just pulled it out of the ground and started after me. I decided my little baton wasn't going to be enough, so I retreated. He then stepped back . . . "

Throughout the summer, the disturbances continued. Every night, it seemed, officers donned riot gear. Police work wasn't turning out to be what Thole thought it would be. The racial disturbances and later, the anti-war protests of the '70s, made him wonder if he had picked the right career.

"I was kind of like, you know, this is crazy. They don't pay you enough money to put your life on the line every day, without provocation. You're a target in a police car. The rules of fair play don't apply anymore."

He became suspicious and defensive. He stopped sitting in his police car at night to write up his reports. In restaurants, he'd sit with his back to the wall.

Nevertheless, Thole stuck with law-enforcement work, spending much of his career working with schoolchildren. In the late '80s, he became the first officer in the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program.

Thole, who is now 46, retired from the department last year and now owns and manages properties around the area.

Looking back on the racial turmoil of 1968, Thole says his views of African Americans in Seattle "were probably diminished" because of the rioting. "It took a while to build those back up."

By the mid-'70s, he had purchased some property in the Central Area that he and a partner fixed up and sold. He said he realized that most people in the neighborhood were nice and wanted police support as much as any other community.

But he still believes that "the radical element there of the black community is very racist" towards whites and antagonistic towards the police.

Had there not been any riots in the Central Area, Thole thinks the district would be more integrated today, with more new businesses, better and newer buildings, more prosperity.

"People wouldn't have been afraid to go into that area," says Thole. He says he talked to motorists after the first night of rioting who were so shaken that they said they would never go back into the Central Area again.

THE REVOLUTIONARY

Violence, says Larry Gossett, is "as American as apple pie."

What happened that night in July was justified, even necessary, says Gossett, whose sentencing for a sit-in at Franklin High School helped spur people to take part in the rally-turned-riot.

"The urban rebellion in Seattle drew attention to the racial division that existed in the most livable city in the U.S.," he says. All the work of local civil-rights leaders didn't capture the public's attention like the riots did.

And not much has changed, he says. The 1992 riots in Los Angeles, like the riots there in 1965, again brought attention to long-standing problems. "That's why you're here," he notes dryly to a reporter.

But there are differences.

In the '60s, Gossett says, he was filled with hope. There were issues, "10-point programs" for change. "Justice, equality, fair play for oppressed people" were his watchwords.

When he was arrested for the Franklin sit-in, he was 23, vice-president of the UW's Black Student Union. After the prosecutor told the jury that the streets would never be safe for decent folk if men like Gossett were allowed to go free, "those white folks found us guilty," Gossett recalls.

Although he and other black-power movement leaders were accused of being racist, Gossett says it has always been untrue. When he went to jail for the sit-in in April 1968, he and others stopped black inmates from beating up the white inmates.

The revolution would be for all oppressed people. And it would come soon, he believed then.

Now, he realizes he was wrong.

"It's going to take much longer than I thought it would," he says. "I have a more mature understanding of the depth and intransigence of the problem."

Gossett has moved from behind bars and bullhorns to behind a desk. As executive director of the Central Area Motivation Program, Gossett oversees grant applications and pulls together programs to help the community where he's lived since he was 11 years old.

Although he works within the system now, he says he is still a revolutionary. "I still feel that African Americans have to do anything necessary to gain our freedom, our sense of social justice."

And he is not without hope that it's still possible.

"If I felt it was hopeless, I would stop struggling," says Gossett, who works on holidays to get his paperwork done. "I see enough instances of caring and compassionate people coming together, working for change, to keep me going, keep me generated, regenerated."

His three children listen intently to rap music. For the young, Gossett says, there are now no leaders, only anger, hostility, violence - the feelings expressed in the music.

"You can hear the rage. They are giving voice to the frustration more than some of us who are traditionally seen as leaders of the black or white communities."

And when they hear the lyrics, "f--- it, burn the f---er down," they say "right on," Gossett says.

"What did Langston Hughes say about a raisin in the sun? You let it dry and dry but at some point it explodes. At some point we're going to have to reap the results of this exclusion. Sooner or later there will be eruptions that will make what happened in L.A. look like a Sunday fish fry. That's not to scare anyone. It's a fact that it will happen.

"I want my country to change so that my African-American brethren won't come to the conclusions that it won't change at a very young age," he says. "I don't want America to be burned down."

THE BLACK PANTHER LEADER

In April 1968, Aaron Dixon became Seattle's first leader of the local Black Panther Party. Dixon was 19 years old, a lanky 6-footer who turned many white folks even paler when he sauntered by in his leather jacket, dark glasses and long hair.

At one meeting with the Peace and Freedom Party in 1968, an old-time Wobbly told Dixon that he should understand that the Panthers' emphasis on violence sounded very reactionary.

"And you must understand that political power comes out of the barrel of a gun," Dixon retorted. "You can't have power unless you have something to back it up."

In late July, Dixon was arrested for the theft of a typewriter (and later found not guilty by an all-white jury). Over the next three days, despite Dixon's jailhouse message to the crowd to "cool it" over his arrest, riots rocked the Central Area.

In the end, Dixon believes, little was gained. Threatened by police power and lured by the promise of greater access, black people compromised, settling for crumbs.

"Our generation is the generation that has assimilated and that has more or less sold out," he says. For some, he says, "the only thing that matters is coming home and pushing in the CD player or getting in your Ford Bronco."

Some black people make more money than ever before, but children still are hungry, homeless and afraid.

These days, Dixon dresses in tan slacks and knit shirts, his hair an unremarkable length. He's married, and has four children, including two little girls, 3 and 6.

He's a case manager for young gang "wannabes" at a youth service agency in West Seattle.

"I relate very strongly to these kids," he says. "I see the same anger that we had 20 years ago."

More so than adults, these young people have a realistic view of what is really happening in society, Dixon says.

"They see that everything has failed them . . . The police, the schools, every major institution, yes, has failed them, has failed black people."

He understands their anger. "I'm angry every day," he says.

But he has mixed feelings about the recent riots in Los Angeles.

"I was glad to see that people still felt compelled that they could take to the streets," he says. On the other hand, he was saddened to see that the form of their revolt was a riot in which innocent people would be hurt. "It's sad because I know that it's not going to lead anywhere."

Likewise, he says, the '68 Seattle riots didn't change anything. "It made people feel powerful for a second."

He tries to talk to the kids about jobs, about their future.

"Sometimes I sit back and think, what am I telling them? It sounds so ridiculous. And they tell me, `I ain't going to no college, I ain't going to no school. I don't want to go to no school. They're not teaching us nothing. They don't care about us.'

"And they're right. What can I say? I try to tell them they have to think about trying to stay alive. They have to think about what they are going to be doing five, 10 years from now. They have to be smart and think about just surviving."

He talks about one 15-year-old boy. He's very, very intelligent, says Dixon, and "a tremendous writer." He's a gang member. His mother's on crack; his father's in prison.

"One day, I was talking to him about him selling drugs, because he was involved in selling drugs, and I was telling him that he needed to stop," Dixon recalls.

"He started crying and telling me that if the kids didn't take care of themselves that nobody else would take care of them."

Dixon believes him. "I know what his life is like."

Words fail him for a moment. His face grows solemn. And then Aaron Dixon, former Panther leader, wordlessly signals his despair.

He cries.