Seattle In The Old Days: No `Jim Crow' Laws, But Blacks Were Held Back Just The Same

THIRTY YEARS AGO, the Seattle area had almost as many residents of Asian descent as it had black people. But the civil-rights movement focused on black-white equality because of the numbers and visibility of blacks nationwide. That focus held in Seattle, where blacks were in many ways affected by the same kinds of discrimination written into law in the South.

Maxine Pitter Haynes was on the verge of achieving her dreams.

A sophomore at the University of Washington, she was ready to begin classes in her major, nursing. Haynes had dreamed of becoming a nurse ever since she'd watched one care for her uncle during a fatal illness. She loved the uniform, the nurturing, the responsibility.

She passed every hurdle for acceptance into the School of Nursing, except one.

"We can't take a colored girl in nursing," Haynes was told by the dean. As the only black in the program, she would have had to share a dorm room with a white woman. And that was strictly forbidden.

It was 1939 in Seattle, and although the city had none of the formal "Jim Crow" segregation laws common in the South, the result was often the same.

Being black and finding a job often meant menial work and a lower standard of living. For some black people, discrimination crushed any hope of working at all.

"You could not mop a floor," said Esther Hall Mumford, who has written several books documenting the history of blacks in Seattle. "If you walk in they'd say, `We've already got a janitor.' So you didn't even leave with an application. You had to leave the city."

Until the mid-1940s, Asians were the largest nonwhite group in Seattle (as they are again today in the metropolitan area).

Then came World War II. Factories and military service drew new people of all races from across the country. By 1950, Seattle's black population jumped to 16,000, a five-fold increase.

Good opportunities were granted to exceptional blacks in Seattle. They established churches, published newspapers, operated restaurants, owned barbershops. But blacks, even those with college educations, were routinely shut out of all-white unions and most were forced to accept jobs with little chance for advancement - as cooks, waiters, maids, bellhops and railroad porters.

"There was an acceptance of certain positions as occupied by minorities," said author Murray Morgan, who's written more than 20 books on Seattle history. "But whenever somebody got ambition for another job, problems came in over the competition, and a rise in racial feelings accompanied it. They fed off each other."

Al Smith worked in the engineering department cleaning city streets. Once he sat as the passenger in a water truck, pressing a button that sprayed the street. When a supervisor saw him, he ordered Smith off the truck.

"He didn't want blacks using anything but a shovel," Smith recalled. "The worst feeling was I didn't know how to fight it. No one stood with you because they'd have been fired, and everyone needed a job."

Besides restrictions on jobs, there were boundaries for where black people lived.

Drafted into the military, Joseph Warner came to Seattle, a place he had heard was not segregated. After spending three weekends in Seattle, he said to his buddy, "You know, this is crazy. I haven't seen a colored woman in this town."

The reason, Warner says, is that he went straight from the docks to the downtown YMCA and didn't venture far.

"If we'd gone down to Jackson Street, we'd have seen everything," he says. "There was segregation here, plenty of it."

Most blacks lived in the four square miles of the Central Area. It became a small town within a town, providing comforting relief from discrimination.

Outside the boundaries, few social options existed. Though color lines were less strict than in the South, black people knew where they were unwelcome.

Only a half-dozen or so restaurants served them. Theaters were known to restrict their seating to upper balconies. Clothing stores provided slow service, and some had a policy of not allowing blacks to try on hats, though they could buy them.

Inequities were challenged over and over in the courts. Under state law, a restaurant could be fined $50 to $300 for not serving a black person, but some judgments were as low as $1, Mumford recalls.

Marie Roston, a native Seattleite, recalls a restaurant that opened in the 1940s. It allowed a black couple to eat there, but the check brought to their table also carried a note: "We don't want you to come back."

So blacks found ways of enjoying themselves in their part of town. For many, the church was their road to recreation as well as religion.

The three main churches - Mount Zion Baptist, First AME and Grace Presbyterian - joined every year for a Sunday-school picnic at Woodland Park. People hosted dinner parties, picnicked in the park, bopped in the jazz clubs along Jackson Street, swayed in the dance clubs, or played bridge. There were grand social dances, a tennis club, a pool hall and sporting events with the Ubangi Blackhawks playing football or the Seattle Royal Giants playing baseball.

"In order to have fun, you went all over," Roston said. "Wherever you went, it lasted all day and all night. You had more families getting together, and Sunday night supper clubs and stuff like that. I think you were closer then. We look back to those days, and say, `Didn't we have fun?' "

Blacks continued migrating to Seattle through the late '40s, mainly from the South.

For whites, blacks became harder to ignore. So did racial tensions.

In 1944, a group of prominent, wealthy whites in Seattle launched a chapter of the Civic Unity Committee, a national attempt to improve race relations. They tried appeals to whites through reason and quiet diplomacy.

During its first decade, the committee used its skills to smooth over minor disputes. By the late 1950s, the committee, with others, was pressing for open housing. Restrictive covenants, though illegal, still kept many blacks from moving into new neighborhoods.

An open-housing law finally was placed on the ballot in 1964 - and turned down by voters by a 2-to-1 margin. The committee was "surprised and disillusioned," according to Howard Droker, who wrote a dissertation on the group.

The committee shut down that year as the Civil Rights Act was passed in Congress.

By then, Maxine Pitter Haynes had graduated from nursing school in New York City and worked at hospitals there, in Seattle and in Los Angeles. She earned a master's degree from UCLA before returning to Seattle. In 1971, she experienced a grand irony: She became a professor in the UW's School of Nursing, which had turned her away as a student.

The Civil Rights Act created greater opportunities for some, like Haynes, who was near the end of her career.

But 30 years later, many black citizens still struggle for employment above the menial level. In Seattle and King County, the unemployment rate among blacks is three times higher than for whites.