Archive for the ‘Racism’ Category
America’s False Ideology of White Supremacy
Oct 30, 2008 By Seth Sandronsky
Seth Sandronsky’s ZSpace Page / ZSpace
Recall the woman who told Sen. John McCain at a recent Minnesota rally that his opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, is an Arab and therefore not to be trusted? McCain “defended” Obama by contrasting Arabs and Americans as separate groups of people in a kind of hierarchy of trust.
That exchange speaks volumes on the ideology of white supremacy. It has been and continues to be a mirage of unity between Caucasian lower and upper classes. That has been so in varying degrees since America’s colonial days of black and Native people’s dehumanization and subjugation. The same ideology drove Chinese, Filipino and Mexican people’s exclusion from the U.S. mainstream. Also in this outcast mix, seen initially as non-whites, were Irish, Jewish, and southeastern European immigrants to the U.S.
Cut to today. For white supremacy to help sustain the widening income and wealth gap in the U.S., elected leaders can and do conjure an “Other,” a darker and dangerous sub-human to build up and put down for reasons of public safety and security. McCain’s Minnesota rally illustrates domestic and foreign threads of this ideology.
I turn here to Diana Ralph of Canada. She has an important chapter on “Islamophobia” in The Hidden History of 9-11-2001. Ralph shows how anti-Muslim bigotry, a demonization of the “Other,” works for the U.S. political class in mobilizing a grass-roots anger and fear after the East Coast attacks of Sept. 11. One result has been a sort of silent consent for the torture of prisoners of the war on terror, mainly non-white Muslims.
On that note of armed repression, Islamaphobia dovetails with the U.S.’s “peculiar institution” of white supremacy. That ideology is the wellspring for much of the Obama character assassination rhetoric of McCain and especially Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, his vice-presidential pick. An unclear number of their backers ape this vision, sadly.
I suggest that the tactic of baiting Obama as a racial Other comes in part as a response to the crumbling illusion of market competition’s benefits trickling down to the American people. Further, this approach seeks to defuse the short-lived rebellion from the populace of all backgrounds against Washington’s bailout of big creditors. The threat of a racially inclusive uprising from below of small debtors beset by a rising rate of home foreclosures, plus under- and unemployment, is real to upper class power. What horror!
Accordingly, McCain and Palin offer some white wage earners and pensioners a re-play of what African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois called the “color line,” the main contradiction of U.S. democracy. From this ideology of skin-color inferiority and supremacy emerges the straw man of Obama as a reputed Arab and all-around danger to America.
Transcending the class and race contradictions of U.S. democracy, Du Bois noted, could yield to the American people a truly popular politics. That is the future, a very difficult thing to discuss, indeed. Yet discuss and act on it we must, in the present moment. This process, I maintain, would create a logic of more class and skin color equality and unity where too little exists now.
Such a reformation of U.S. society has high hurdles to clear. One is the economics and politics of locking down the throwaway people who employers no longer need to produce wealth. Crucially, this trend of caging and politically weakening the nation’s low-income blacks and Latinos foreshadowed the Bush II administration’s creation of Muslim “enemy combatants.” Together, the uses of these incarcerated populations serve the agenda of economics and politics as usual at home and abroad.
Now is the time for more rational discussion of the reasons for and results of white supremacy in domestic and foreign affairs. Laboring women and men of America have much to gain here. This holds true no matter which candidate, McCain or Obama, becomes the next resident on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Seth Sandronsky lives and writes in Sacramento ssandronsky@yahoo.com
Did the Secret Service set up Barack Obama for assassination?
Elections & Voting
Did the Secret Service set up Barack Obama for assassination?
By Larry Chin
Online Journal Associate Editor
Feb 25, 2008, 00:55
According to the Dallas Star-Telegram, the Secret Service gave an order to stop screening for weapons for a full hour before the February 20 Barack Obama rally in Dallas. Metal detectors were turned off, and bags were not checked, as hundreds were allowed to file into Reunion Arena. This bizarre activity “ordered by federal officials,” was immediately reported by an alarmed Dallas Police Department, which knew that it was a “lapse in security.”
The Secret Service (which has been assigned to Obama since August 2007) has denied the allegations, declaring post-facto that the event was secure. However, the Secret Service has provided no detailed explanation about this blatant security stand-down. It is not known who gave the orders. The Obama camp itself has issued no statement.
While this story has been vastly underreported by major corporate media, independent liberal media, particularly Democratic Party and Obama faithful, have expressed astonishment and outrage. President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination in Dallas, Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 (which came on the eve of his California presidential primary victory) were also facilitated by Secret Service “lapses.”
While there is no doubt that Barack Obama, bankrolled and sponsored by political elites, appears to be closing in on the Democratic Party nomination, and is an enthusiastic imperial war facilitator, this does not eliminate the real danger he faces from political adversaries.
It goes without saying that Obama is viewed as a bitter enemy (at the very least a symbolic one) by the Bush-Cheney-McCain-neocon gang. Obama not only faces threats from fanatical right-wing and racist elements, but the desperately power-hungry rivals within the more conservative neoliberal wing of the Democratic faction, led by the Clintons. The incendiary Karl Rove-esque attacks launched against Obama by the Clinton apparatus have become increasingly bitter, personal, and below-the-belt in recent weeks.
Obama is also competing with Hillary Clinton for the support of John Edwards. Edwards, the calculating emissary of Bilderberg Group interests, who was, according to Daniel Estulin, author of The True Story of the Bilderberg Group, handpicked by Henry Kissinger to be John Kerry’s vice presidential partner in 2004, may be positioning himself for the same powerful seat this year. Kissinger (who is lurking in McCain’s camp for 2008) and other leading elites already have control of the entire process, from both sides.
Obama’s supporters, and congressional allies such as Senator Dick Durbin, have been concerned for Obama’s safety for months.
It must be noted that the Clintons’ longtime criminal connections, which both tie to, and parallel, those of the Bush family/faction are well-documented (but roundly ignored) fact. The Clintons and Bushes have been full partners across official and unofficial power agendas, co-rulers of the United States, for over two decades. The body count that can be attributed to these two cooperative factions is long and gruesome.
The Clintons’ love of presidential election-season intimidation and dirty tricks are well-known. During the 1992 race for the Democratic Party nomination, Jerry Brown repeatedly accused the Clintons of resorting to tricks worthy of Nixon. As noted by Michael C. Ruppert in Crossing the Rubicon, Ross Perot withdrew from the 1992 presidential contest, pressured into assuring a Clinton victory, after Perot and has family received death threats. (Ruppert, who worked for the Perot campaign, witnessed this firsthand.)
Any prominent political figure who dares vary an inch from the imperial geopolitical script faces threats; first to their reputations and careers, and then their lives. In the “godfather government” that is the United States, this is the rule. This same criminal stranglehold prevents “change” — even the slightest variance from establishment consensus. And even high-level representatives who operate well within the consensus must still defend themselves from “colleagues.”
No government can be trusted. Nor can government officials and elites trust each other.
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Millions without a Voice — Amy Goodman on Felony Disenfranchisement
Millions Without a Voice
By Amy Goodman
As I raced into our TV studio for our Super Tuesday morning-after show, I was excited. Across the country, initial reports indicated there was unprecedented voter participation, at least in the Democratic primaries, several times higher than in previous elections. For years I have covered countries like Haiti, where people risk death to vote, while the U.S. has one of the lowest participation rates in the industrialized world. Could it be this year would be different?
Then I bumped into a friend and asked if he had voted. “I can’t vote,” he said, “because I did time in prison.” I asked him if he would have voted. “Sure I would have. Because then I’m not just talking junk, I’m doing something about it.”
Felony disenfranchisement is the practice by state governments of barring people convicted of a felony from voting, even after they have served their time. In Virginia and Kentucky, people convicted of any felony can never vote again (this would include “Scooter” Libby, even though he never went to jail, unless he is pardoned). Eight other states have permanent felony disenfranchisement laws, with some conditions that allow people to rejoin the voter rolls: Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee and Wyoming.
Disenfranchisement—people being denied their right to vote—takes many forms, and has a major impact on electoral politics. In Ohio in 2004, stories abounded of inoperative voting machines, too few ballots or too few voting machines. Then there was Florida in 2000. Many continue to believe that the election was thrown to George W. Bush by Ralph Nader, who got about 97,000 votes in Florida. Ten times that number of Floridians are prevented from voting at all. Why? Currently, more than 1.1 million Floridians have been convicted of a felony and thus aren’t allowed to vote. We can’t know for sure how they would have voted, but as scholar, lawyer and activist Angela Davis said recently in a speech honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Mobile, Ala., “If we had not had the felony disenfranchisement that we have, there would be no way that George Bush would be in the White House.”
Since felony disenfranchisement disproportionately affects African-American and Latino men in the U.S., and since these groups overwhelmingly vote Democratic, the laws bolster the position of the Republican Party. The statistics are shocking. Ryan King, policy analyst with The Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C., summarized the latest:
About 5.3 million U.S. citizens are ineligible to vote due to felony disenfranchisement; 2 million of them are African-American. Of these, 1.4 million are African-American men, which translates into an incredible 13 percent of that population, a rate seven times higher than in the overall population. Forty-eight states have some version of felony disenfranchisement on the books. All bar voting from prison, then go on to bar participation while on parole or probation. Two states, Maine and Vermont, allow prisoners to vote from behind the walls, as does Canada and a number of other countries.
The politicians and pundits are all abuzz with the massive turnouts in the primaries and caucuses. There are increasing percentages of women participating, and initial reports point to more young people. The youth vote is particularly important, as young people have less invested in the status quo and can look with fresh eyes at long-standing injustices that disenfranchise so many. In this context, one of The Sentencing Project’s predictions bears repeating here: “Given current rates of incarceration, 3 in 10 of the next generation of black men can expect to be disenfranchised at some point in their lifetime. In states that disenfranchise ex-offenders, as many as 40 percent of black men may permanently lose their right to vote.”
The Sentencing Project’s King said: “We are constantly pushing for legislative change around the country. But public education is absolutely key. There are so many different laws that people simply don’t know when their right to vote has been restored. That includes the personnel who work in state governments giving out the wrong information.”
I called my friend to tell him he was misinformed. He hadn’t been on probation or parole for years. “You can vote,” I told him. “You just have to register.” I could hear him smile through the phone.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America.
© 2008 Amy Goodman
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080206_felony_disenfranchisement/
“The Karen Boone Incident”
Do people in Spokane still remember what, according to Spokesman-Review writer Doug Floyd’s 1997 article in the American Journalism Review, “continues to be referred to in Spokane as ‘the Karen Boone incident’ “?
Do people remember the concerns about mistreatment of minority groups and racial profiling in Spokane expressed loudly by Spokane communities of color in 1997 and 2001 and 2003 and as recently as the summer 2007, mistreatment and profiling experienced, felt and discussed on a daily basis up until today?
Does anyone recall in 2001 former Spokesman-Review editor Ken Sands writing: “In Spokane, racial profiling by police is accepted as fact in the small minority population, and greeted with much skepticism by the vast white majority”?
Do you think that the experience of racism described over and over by minority members of this community and the sentiments unleashed in 1997 against courageous community members like Karen Boone simply disappear overnight?
What about the Spokane law enforcement recently referring to a fast gas owner as a “gypsy” and a “Hindu”?
What about Spokane Police illegally strip searching a black man?
What about the police killings of boys and men from diverse Spokane communities — Eagle Michael, Jerome Alford, Otto Zehm, and others?
Is Spokane a racist town?
Can you imagine what would have been the outcome of the incident of Spokane Police Officer Jay Olsen shooting Shonto Pete in the head if Pete had been killed by Olsen rather than having survived as he did having been shot in the back of the head?
I will tell you what the outcome would have been. They would have sobered Olsen up, put him back in his uniform, strapped him into his squad car, and said, “Get back in there white boy, we need ya”.
Does a decade make any difference? How do we know? What is the report from the man and woman and boy and girl in the street? In the classroom? In the welfare office? In the opera house? In the cathedral? In the mall? In the hospital?
Do we know? Do we care? Do we think it matters?
Or would we rather it just all go away?
A Sacrifice for Civic Journalism
American Journalism Review (July/August 1997)
By G. Douglas Floyd
G. Douglas Floyd is an interactive editor at the Spokesman-Review.
Karen Boone agreed to write a column, not pull the pin on a hand grenade. Call it her sacrifice for civic journalism.
A 37-year-old African American in the 92 percent white city of Spokane, Washington, Boone was convinced to voice her opinions about her community’s diversity (or lack thereof) in the local paper, the Spokesman- Review. In a February 26 (1997) column she related a poignant tale of her participation in a community leadership group, an experience that led to her painful realization that even she had become desensitized to the feelings of ethnic invisibility faced by minorities in Spokane.
The paper’s editors felt her story was a perfect fit for the S-R’s “Your Turn” column, a feature created during a February 1994 overhaul of the editorial pages with the intention of providing a forum for Spokane citizens who felt they were being overlooked in the paper’s coverage (see “Climbing Down from the Ivory Tower,” May 1995). Boone was reluctant to contribute at first, fearing her privacy would be at stake. But eventually she decided she owed it to herself and to other minorities in the community who felt, as she did, that the local paper did not accurately represent them.
In her column, Boone described the “psychological loneliness and isolation” she experienced as a teenager growing up in Spokane, and her “diligent attempt” to adapt culturally to life in the city. “I must ultimately find a way to maintain my ethnic authenticity while seeking to find my way of life in Spokane,” Boone wrote.
The end result of Boone’s effort to enlighten Spokane’s mainstream shocked Boone and her editors alike. Her 400 words in the S-R ignited intense community debate about Spokane’s racial attitudes that continues to ripple.
The backlash took the form of an incendiary letter Boone received the day after her column ran. “You niggers really piss me off. Bitch & complain is all you worthless assholes are good for,” it began, going on to suggest Boone go “back to Africa & swing with the baboons.”
Concerned but not frantic, Boone called the paper to tell of what her column had wrought. She faxed in a letter to the editor in response to the hate mail. A local human rights group called Unity in Action got word of what continues to be referred to in Spokane as “the Karen Boone incident,” and challenged the paper to publish not only Boone’s response but the hate letter itself.
On March 11, the Spokesman-Review published both letters, along with an editorial denouncing the hateful act and telling readers how to get involved in local human and civil rights activities.
“Our responsibility was to continue what we’d started,” says S-R Editor Chris Peck. “We were trying to get real voices in the paper talking about what it’s like to be a person of color living in Spokane, and the events that unfolded added another chapter to that story.”
And another and another, it seemed to Boone. As she tried to get beyond the incident and focus her energy on her new job as head of Spokane’s Institute for Neighborhood Leadership, people kept coming to her with their personal stories of wrangling with racial issues. Blacks revealed to her their daily experiences with prejudice. Whites unburdened their long-repressed consciences.
As Spokane citizens mobilized in support of Boone, keeping her story alive by flooding the S-R with letters and calls on her behalf, members of Unity in Action organized a public rally in a downtown park and enlisted Boone as a speaker.
“We wanted to let people know we’re not going to take it,” says Robert Lloyd, one of the rally organizers and publisher of the African American Voice, an alternative paper.
Boone still feels overwhelmed with stress, and her teenage children, one of whom opened the hate letter thinking it was addressed to her, struggle with anxiety.
But the incident galvanized the community, and provided a fitting backdrop for a much-needed public discussion about racism. Lloyd, a 23-year resident of the city, says the Spokesman-Review handled the incident well. The only criticism he’s heard, he says, is the one Boone herself has expressed to the paper: Somebody should have warned her what would happen.
“I probably would have done it anyway,” she now says, “but I would have liked to have been better prepared for what happened.”
Peck says preparing guest writers for unpleasant replies is one of the reasons the paper has “interactive” editors — to serve as allies and mentors and to connect with readers. Another reason is to build bridges to sectors of the community, including minority populations that don’t feel the newspaper reflects their
interests.
Lloyd says the Spokesman-Review has made headway, but not yet enough to be widely embraced by the city’s black community. “The S-R is like a guy whose wife caught him with somebody else,” he says. “It’s going to take a long time to win trust.”
Spokane Law Enforcement harassment of Romani-Americans
1986 — (quote) The Spokane Police Department’s Gypsy File, a document half an inch thick, has determined that crime constitutes our very culture: “scams, theft and confrontations with law enforcement officials is a way of life with Gypsies” (dated 1986, on page 9). (end quote) http://www.radoc.net:8088/RADOC-31-PROFILING.htm
[Recently, as they harassed a Hispanic woman in the Spokane Valley, Spokane Vally Police and Spokane Sheriff's Deputies referred to an Asian-American fast gas owner on Broadway in the Spokane Valley as a "Gypsy" and a "Hindu". Police racism in the Spokane area is an undeniable fact, verifiable simply by speaking with members of minority communities in the area].
Zero Diversity in Spokane’s Major Law Firms
The Washington State Bar Association publication Law and Politics (June/July 2003) ran an article entitled “Gaining and Retaining Diversity: How well do law firms keep their promise of a diverse environment?” by Paul Freeman.
The article and graphic were based on a survey of Washington State law firms conducted by the Washington State Latina/o Bar Association, the Loren Miller Bar Association, and the Asian Bar Association of Washington.
Several law firms did not respond, among them Spokane based firms Lukins & Annis, P.S. (35 attorneys); Witherspoon, Kelley, Davenport, and Toole, P.S (50 attorneys); and Paine, Hamblen, Coffin, Brooke & Miller, LLC (55 attorneys).
It is not difficult to see why these firms would not have responded to the survey.
A look 5 years later at the websites for these large Spokane-based law firms shows that they have no attorneys of non-European ethnicity whatsoever. (On the WKDT and PHCBM websites you will have to click on the names of the individual attorneys.)
And this despite the presence of a well-known Jesuit law school — Gonzaga — in Spokane.
This non-diverse reality is reflected throughout the Spokane professional, political, educational, and arts communities. While more than one in ten residents of Spokane is of a diverse ethnic background, that reality is not seen in the offices of government, medicine, law, business, education, social work, religion, or virtually anything else in this community.
The consequences in the application of justice are seen in on the streets and in the court room as recently seen in a well-publicized Spokane court case revealing blatantly racist statements by Spokane jurors regarding an attorney of Asian heritage.
The consequences in the emergency room and in doctors’ offices are experienced on a daily basis by patients who do not receive language appropriate services required under the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and other provisions of law. In Spokane these failures to comply with the law happen on a daily and flagrant basis. As a result, adverse outcomes and deaths have occurred), conditions have been misdiagnosed, and much humiliation and abuse has been suffered (as in the death of 9-year-old Rocio Rodriguez, for example.)
The consequences in the class room are that non-English speaking students do not receive notice of extracurricular and enrichment activities and access to musical instruments in their parents’ languages and thus talented and worthy children are excluded from participation. Beyond that, the larger community and society is denied the fruits of their talents and abilities.
Given that most, if not all, of these matters of access, equity, and justice must be adjudicated in the final instance through the legal system, the lack of diversity in the Spokane legal profession, from law school, to law practice, to public service law agencies, to court room has long-lasting repercussions on the lives of people in Spokane and raises fundamental questions of access to justice which should be matters of major concern for everyone involved in civil rights in Spokane and the betterment of our minority communities.
The time for change in Spokane is long since past. Why has change not come?
Could the answer be “entrenched racism”?
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Spokane County Bar Association diversity page
Racial Slurs Result in Spokane Re-trial
“…people are never forthright with their prejudices … rarely, if ever, will people disclose that”. – Spokane County Superior Court Judge Robert D. Austin
Jurors’ name-calling prompts new trial
By Karen Dorn Steele
The Spokesman-Review
A Spokane County Superior Court judge has ordered a new trial in a medical malpractice case where a Spokane attorney of Japanese descent was repeatedly referred to as “Mr. Kamikaze” and other racially charged names during jury deliberations.
Judge Robert D. Austin said he was surprised when he received attorney Mark D. Kamitomo’s motion for a new trial in mid-December, based in part on the racial comments.
“We’d hoped we’d moved beyond this, and we apparently have not.
It’s upsetting,” a visibly emotional Austin said during a court hearing Friday. Austin said he could not be confident the jury verdict that went against Kamitomo’s client and cleared a local doctor of negligence was not a result of juror misconduct.
“We have uncontested affidavits that these remarks were made. It’s an expression of prejudice to Mr. Kamitomo’s ethnicity,” Austin said.
The trial verdict was read on Dec. 7 – the 66th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
According to Jack Marchant and Mark Costigan, two jurors who approached Kamitomo after the verdict, five other jurors – three women and two men – mocked Kamitomo during their closed-door proceedings. They called him names including “Mr. Kamikaze,” “Mr. Miyashi” and “Mr. Miyagi,” a character in the movie “The Karate Kid.”
One juror also said that because the verdict was going to be read on Pearl Harbor day, the remarks made about Kamitomo were “almost appropriate,” according to Costigan’s affidavit.
In a second affidavit filed Jan. 14, Marchant, a Washington State University professor in Spokane, says affidavits weren’t obtained from two jurors, Patricia Menke and Zorana Beerbohm, who used Asian nicknames to refer to Kamitomo.
“To the best of my recollection, these two individuals and Brenda Canfield, who has admitted to referring to Mr. Kamitomo in her Affidavit as ‘Mr. Miyashi,’ were the three female jurors,” Marchant said in his affidavit. Juror Steven Walther referred to Kamitomo as “Mr. Havacoma,” showing a “lack of objectivity,” Marchant said.
Dr. Nathan P. Stime was the Spokane doctor cleared of malpractice charges by the jury’s “no negligence” finding. His attorney, Brian Rekofke, obtained affidavits from seven jurors as part of his motion opposing a new trial.
Those jurors didn’t deny the names were used, but they said they were used not as racial insults but because they had trouble pronouncing the names of both Rekofke and Kamitomo.
That’s implausible, Austin said, noting that no juror affidavits reported any “bastardization” of Rekofke’s “Middle European” name.
“Frankly, I can’t conceive of people seriously undertaking their responsibility and using those kinds of nicknames when it’s one-sided,” Austin said.
Rekofke asked Austin to bring the jurors into court and question them about their comments.
“The jurors are very upset they are being called a racist jury. They’d like to be heard,” Rekofke said.
Austin rejected that request. “What if they say, ‘I’m not a racist’? What does that do for me?” Austin asked.
He noted that in the history of discrimination cases in the United States, “people are never forthright with their prejudices … rarely, if ever, will people disclose that.”
When the new trial of Darlene and Bill Turner v. Stime is scheduled, Austin said, he’ll need to determine a way to directly address the issue of Kamitomo’s ethnicity during voir dire, the process of selecting a jury.
“At a new trial, we’re going to have a difficult time talking to jurors about Mr. Kamitomo’s ethnicity. But it will be discussed,” he said.
After the hearing, Kamitomo said he was happy with Austin’s ruling. “The judge paid attention and did the right thing,” he said.
Kamitomo grew up in southern Alberta and graduated from Gonzaga Law School in 1989. He also practices in Honolulu.
His father, Doug Kamitomo, was 8 when his family was seized in Vancouver, B.C., and relocated to a Canadian internment camp after the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor.
Through Spokane’s Eyes: Moments in Black History — S-R interviews in WSU collection
[The following information comes from the website of the Washington State University Library's Civil Rights Oral History Collection. The website contains links to two hours worth of audio-taped interviews on the racism and race relations in Spokane, Washington.]
The Collection:
In February of 2001, the Spokesman-Review produced a month long series of articles on black history titled “Through Spokane’s Eyes Moments in Black History,” focusing in particular on the civil rights movement of the 1960s. As part of that series, Rebecca Nappi conducted a series of interviews with individuals with ties to both the civil rights movement and to Spokane. The guide to this collection may now be found in the Manuscripts section of MASC under the number Cage 683.
The Oral Histories:
Jerrelene Williamson relates her sense of the civil rights movement in Spokane to events in Alabama. Emelda and Manuel Brown talk about their experiences with racial prejudice while raising a family in Spokane, Washington in the 1960s. Clarence Freeman discusses his reaction to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the reaction of the community of Spokane. He also talks briefly about a childhood experience with prejudice in Spokane. Sam Minnix describes the scene during a civil rights demonstration at the Spokane County Courthouse on Friday March 26, 1965. Verda Lofton relates her impression of the same March 26, 1965 Spokane protest. Flip Schulke describes about his experiences photographing race related stories in the south. He mentions photographing the admission of the first black student, James Meredith, into the University of Mississippi. The influence the assassination on Martin Luther King had on the protests and marches is also described. He finishes by discussing the differences between the youth of the 60s and the youth of today, and the legacy of the protest movements. Alvin Pitmon talks about his experiences with prejudice in Arkansas during the forced integration of schools in the 1960s. He discusses his feelings towards Dr. Martin Luther King and the influence Dr. King had on him. Nancy Nelson sings two civil rights spirituals: My Lord, What a Morning and Let Us Break Bread Together.
Jane Elliott, renowned educator, to speak in Spokane on Feb. 14 – 15, 2008
[Note: Several years ago, while working as a diversity recruiter for the state of Washington, I had the opportunity to hear Jane Elliott speak in Seattle. Her "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise was stunning when she did it nearly 40 years ago. Her reflections on race -- including her view that white women have ridden their "minority" status to greater stature in U.S. society without looking back to offer a hand up to their minority brothers and sisters -- are powerful, compelling, and important. -- Blog author]
Jane Elliott Developed Famous ‘Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes’ Exercise
Jane Elliott, internationally renowned teacher, diversity trainer and recipient of the National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence in Education, will speak in Spokane three times in Spokane on February 14 and February 15, 2008.
* Thursday, Feb. 14, 8:30 -11:30 a.m., at Spokane Community College’s Lair Auditorium
* Friday, Feb. 15, 9 a.m.- noon, at Gonzaga University’s Cataldo Hall, Globe Room
* Friday, Feb. 15, 7 p.m., in the Lair Auditorium of Spokane Community College
Elliott will expose prejudice and bigotry as representative of an irrational class system based upon purely arbitrary factors. Those who think this does not apply to them may be in for a rude awakening.
In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. nearly 40 years ago, Elliott devised the controversial and startling, “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise. This powerful exercise, which is now famous, labels participants as inferior or superior based solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of being a minority.
For more information contact Ann Price via e-mail or at (509) 323-3667.
SFCC, March 5, 2007 — Beyond “Diversity”: Challenging Racism in an Age of Backlash
Beyond “Diversity”: Challenging Racism in an Age of Backlash
Spokane Falls Community College, March 5, 2007 11:30 t0 12:45 PM SUB Room AB
Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and activists in the U.S. He will explore how being white creates privilege and the many daily and systemic advantages that come from being a member of the dominant racial group. He’ll also look at the substantial consequences paid by society for the maintenance of such privileges, both the costs to people of color (who by definition cannot generally partake in white privilege) and the costs to whites. Wise will also address the way in which “divide and conquer” tactics have prevented working class whites from joining with people of color to eliminate the inequities that weaken them both.
Wise has spoken to over 300,000 people in 48 states, and on over 350 college campuses, including Harvard, Stanford, and the Law Schools at Yale and Columbia. Wise has provided anti-racism training to teachers nationwide, and conducted trainings with physicians and medical industry professionals on how to combat racial inequities in health care. He has trained corporate, government, and law enforcement officials on methods for dismantling racism in their institutions, and has served as a consultant for plaintiff’s attorneys in federal discrimination cases in New York and Washington State.In Summer 2005, Wise served as adjunct faculty member of the School of Social Work at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he taught a Master’s level class on Racism in the U.S. In September 2001, Wise served as adjunct faculty at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he trained journalists to eliminate racial bias in reporting.
From 1999-2003, Wise was an advisor to the Fisk University Race Relations Institute, and in the early ’90s was Associate Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism: the largest of the many groups organized for the purpose of defeating neo-Nazi political candidate, David Duke.
Wise is the author of two books – White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press) and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge). He has contributed essays to a dozen books and anthologies including White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism and Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations. Wise is also featured in White Men Challenging Racism: Thirty-Five Personal Stories (Duke University Press).
Wise received the 2001 British Diversity Award for best feature essay on race issues, and his writings have are taught at hundreds of colleges and have appeared in dozens of popular, professional and scholarly journals. Wise serves as the Race and Ethnicity Editor for LIP Magazine, and articles about his work have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle. He has been a featured guest on hundreds of radio and television programs, worldwide. He appears regularly on the ESPN program “Quite Frankly, with Stephen A. Smith” to discuss racial issues in the world of sports.
Wise has a B.A. in Political Science from Tulane University, where his anti-apartheid work received international attention and the thanks of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He received training in methods for dismantling racism from the People’s Institute for Survial and Beyond, in New Orleans. He and his wife Kristy are the proud parents of two daughters.
Spokane Republican Party invited racist extremist to town as “patriot”
Members of the so-called Minuteman Project masquerade as many things. Primarily they wrap themselves in the U.S. flag and use the fascist rhetoric of homeland security.
However, they are armed — both with weapons and with words of hate.
At the least they are vigilante groups. At worst, they are death squads. In either case, the Minutemen contribute to the dehumanization of migrants and are part of a militarization of the Mexico-U.S. border.
An excellent description of the Minuteman Project and their use of violence, intimidation, and humiliation can be found in this statement from the Society for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (SIRR) . The Southern Poverty Law Center has also done reporting on the Minutemen and their racist links.
On March 31, 2007, the founder of the Minuteman Project, Jim Gilchrist, came to Spokane at the invitation of the Spokane Republican Party. That is the party of George Nethercutt, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Ron Paul, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Jim Huckabee.
And not suprisingly, as reported in the Spokesman-Review story by S-R reporter Kevin Graman:
(quote) Unlike Gilchrist’s engagements elsewhere, there were no protesters to be seen in Spokane. In October, he had to be escorted by police out of a Columbia University auditorium when protesters rushed the stage. (end quote)
No doubt Gilchrist felt right at home in Spokane, a town where a racist is considered a “patriot”.
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Local GOP hosted Minuteman founder
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The founder of the Minuteman Project was introduced to the Republican Party of Spokane County on Saturday night as “a patriot who stepped forward when America was in need.”
Jim Gilchrist, who first made a name for himself by patrolling the Mexico-Arizona border in 2005, speaks to a visceral fear in America. He conjures images of foreign invaders burdening U.S. resources, driving down wages and changing the political landscape.
“It’s OK to say ‘illegal alien,’ ” Gilchrist told nearly 400 people gathered for the annual Lincoln Day dinner at the Red Lion Inn at the Park. “It’s OK to say ‘rapist,’ ‘robber’ and ‘murder,’ and it’s OK to say ‘illegal alien’ – not ‘undocumented worker.’ “
In his half-hour speech, he tried to create an image of America by 2030 in which Spanish will replace English as the dominant language, and Mexican history will replace American history in the schools. And he pointed a finger at those he says are trying to let this happen.
Employers are eager to pay workers less than half of what we now earn, he said, and churches are anxious for foreign hands to fill their collection baskets on Sunday.
Gilchrist went so far as to characterize the Washington fruit industry as willing to turn a profit by supporting a “21st-century slave trade” where workers are expendable and employers pay no payroll taxes, health insurance or worker’s compensation insurance.
His statement that he’d “rather pay 5 cents more for an apple than 50 cents more in taxes” was roundly applauded.
Unlike Gilchrist’s engagements elsewhere, there were no protesters to be seen in Spokane. In October, he had to be escorted by police out of a Columbia University auditorium when protesters rushed the stage.
“This is one of the first times my venue has not been pulled because of threats and riots,” he said.
When asked how Gilchrist, who represents an organization that President Bush has labeled “vigilante,” came to be invited to speak at this year’s Lincoln Day dinner, Curt Fackler, chairman of the Spokane County Republicans, said immigration is the No. 1 issue right now.
“He was willing to come, and the price was right,” Fackler said.
Though Fackler said he had received some criticism for his party’s choice of speakers, many members support Gilchrist’s views on immigration.
“It’s big up here,” Fackler said. “I heard there were 8,000 babies born in the state last year from illegals. Who knows how many are up here.”
Though Eastern Washington Republicans understand the need for agricultural workers, Fackler said, “We are mixed on how and when they should become citizens.”
Gilchrist, of Aliso, Calif., founded the Minuteman Project in 2004 with Chris Simcox, who has since split with Gilchrist to form the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.
The Southern Poverty Law Center lists both groups among 144 “extremist nativist” groups that have sprung up in the last three years to protest what they consider to be lax U.S. immigration policy.
“These groups generally do not merely target immigration policies, but target and harass immigrants,” said Mark Potok, staff director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.
In 2006, Gilchrist ran unsuccessfully for California’s 48th U.S. congressional seat as a candidate of the American Independent Party, the party founded by George Wallace of Alabama in 1967. On Saturday, he said he had rejoined the Republican Party last year.
Gilchrist is currently embroiled in a legal battle for control of the organization he founded after the Minuteman Project board of directors fired him amid allegations of embezzlement, mismanagement and fraud.
Board members Deborah Courtney and Marvin Stewart said Gilchrist had diverted Minuteman donations to his congressional campaign, a charge Gilchrist denies.
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See also “The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama” (NY Times, February 17, 2008)
YouTube video of Virginia Republican US Senator George Allen’s infamous “Macaca” comment
It remains the status quo in Spokane
“It’s as if Spokane doesn’t want to rock the boat. When you hit Eastern Washington, it remains status quo.”
(V. Ann Smith, president of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as quoted by Kevin Graman* of the Spokesman-Review in his Martin Luther King Day article “MLK missing from the map — Unlike 800 other cities, Spokane and CdA haven’t honored King”.)
In early 2007, at an ACLU-sponsored forum on Police Accountability, Smith astounded some in attendance by stating that the Spokane Police Department used to engage in racial profiling but no longer did. Subsequently, after the deaths of three people — two them minorities — by bullets from Spokane Police Officers between February and May 2007, Smith found herself in early July 2007 calling for an emergency meeting between the police and the NAACP. The outcome of that meeting — if it even occurred — was never made public, to my knowledge. However, in about that time frame, Smith became a member of the the controversial Police Advisory Committee.
[* Kevin Graman, a staff writer for the Spokesman-Review, is one of Spokane's most dedicated writers on matters of social justice, racial equality, and diversity. Among other stories, he previously covered the incident at Brewster High School in which police and school officials involuntarily detained Hispanic students and forced them to sign an anti-gang pledge, as well as the civil rights lawsuit settlement and consent decree on behalf of the students and their families.]
Segregation in Spokane
COLUMBIA: Winter 2000-01; Vol. 14, No. 4
Segregation in Spokane
Longtime Black Residents Recount the Injustices and the Victories
By Jim Kershner
The word “segregation” conjures up vivid images from old civics class lessons: whites-only drinking fountains in Alabama; white mobs jeering at black school children in Mississippi; Ku Klux Klan rallies in Georgia. Up here in the more tolerant Northwest, it’s easy to be smug about the bigoted South. Easy, that is, after conveniently blanking out a few of this region’s own historical images: the “No Colored Patronage Solicited” signs in Spokane restaurants; the whites-only swimming pool at Natatorium Park; the “Nigger, Read This Sign and Run” sign at the edge of Wallace, Idaho.
In fact, the northern states had their own brand of racial segregation, not always legally codified but often just as blatant. In Spokane, as African-American residents were constantly aware, a particularly northern brand of segregation thrived through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s and even into the 1960s. It made for a relatively peaceful era of race relations, but at a price. It depended on white people and black people “staying in their place,” as more than one black resident has put it.
“Staying in their place” meant that black people were restricted to a relatively few restaurants, shops, hotels and jobs in Spokane, sometimes by policy, more often by social pressure. How intense was that social pressure? Listen to Jerrelene Williamson, now 68, tell about her experience breaking into the previously all-white occupation of grocery checker at a Spokane Safeway around 1965:
“This man came in, I guess he was middle-aged, and he said, ‘I wish I had a baby that looked like you.’ I was trying to do my work, and so far everybody had been kind of decent, so I wasn’t thinking he meant anything. And he said, ‘Yeah, I wish I had a baby like you. I’d take it out and drown it.’
“You know something? Even today, talking about that kind of bothers me,” said Williamson, getting up to search for a Kleenex. Today segregation exists mostly as history. Certainly there are more uplifting chapters of local history, but it’s a history worth recounting today. For one thing, it has been mostly an untold story-many residents may not have been aware of its extent, or even of its existence. For another, if this story is going to be told at all, it needs to be told now. Those old enough to tell the story won’t be around forever.
The history of segregation in Spokane goes back at least into the 1890s, when the Great Northern Railroad tried to bring in some black workers to live in Hillyard. According to local historian John Fahey, these workers were met at the train by white workers who would not allow them to disembark. However, a number of pioneering black families soon arrived. In the 1900 census Spokane had 376 black residents, somewhere around 1 percent of the population.
The percentage has remained right around 1 percent ever since-it was 1.9 percent, or 3,416 people in the city limits, in the 1990 census-which may help explain some of this region’s contradictory racial history. On one hand, racial relations were more peaceful than in the South or the Midwest, where the black population was larger and, to some whites, more threatening. Not a single black person was lynched in Washington from 1889 to 1939, according to records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
On the other hand, the black population was so small that for many decades it carried little economic or political clout, so the pressure to integrate was slight. Restaurateurs and storekeepers in places like Spokane had little economic incentive to welcome black customers, especially if doing so would drive off white customers. The result: black residents in Spokane had to know which places would welcome them and which would not. “Negro people, as we were called then, were always aware of that,” said Williamson. “Even as a child.”
Segregation of a most egregious kind played a part in the defining moment in the life of Carl Maxey, who died in 1997 at age 73, one of Spokane’s most prominent lawyers. It took place in 1936, when he was 11 years old and living as an orphan in the Spokane Children’s Home. The minutes of the Spokane Children’s Home board meeting for October 8, 1936, tell the story:
It was moved and seconded that the two colored boys, Carl Maxey and Milton Burnes, be returned to the County, having been in the Home for years. Motion carried. It was moved and seconded that the Board go on record as voting to have no more colored children in the Home from this time forward. Motion carried-unanimous.
“They threw us out,” said Maxey. “It sure as hell says that. And it was for something that had nothing whatsoever to do with us. So if you’d like to know where some of my fire comes from, it comes from a memory that includes this event.”
Maxey went on to become Spokane’s first black lawyer and, as far as he can tell, the first black professional of any kind, besides teachers. Through the 1950s and 1960s and even the 1970s, he played a huge part in ending a system of legal and de facto segregation in Spokane and the inland Northwest.
Following is a portrait of segregated Spokane, as told through contemporary newspaper accounts, historical studies, and the words of people who lived through it.
Amusement Parks
Natatorium Park was Spokane’s premier amusement park and garden spot, as well as the place to see and be seen in the first half of the 20th century. It was also the first institution in the city to be sued for discrimination.
In November 1900 Emmett Holmes, a prominent member of Spokane’s black community, tried to take his family to dinner at a Natatorium Park restaurant. The restaurant refused to serve him, and Holmes responded by filing a $5,000 lawsuit against Washington Water Power (WWP), which owned the park. Holmes lost.
The legal precedent was ambiguous. The WWP lawyer claimed that Holmes was turned away because the place was overcrowded. He said Holmes simply failed to prove otherwise. At the same time, the judge refused a WWP motion to instruct the jury that it was “reasonable” for a business to require “colored persons to occupy a different place from that occupied by white persons.”
The Spokesman-Review reported that the jurors “appeared to treat the entire matter like a joke, and were overheard bandying back and forth jokes and remarks suggested by the restaurant bill of fare.” The message sent to the community was clearly summed up in an indignant headline in the Spokane Daily Chronicle the next day: “HOLMES IS BEATEN – Natatorium Had Right to Refuse to Sell Him Food – JUST BECAUSE HE’S COLORED.”
Natatorium Park continued to have a complicated (if unwritten) policy toward black customers, even through World War II. “We used to go out there all the time and dance,” said Alfonse Hill, 74, a black resident who moved to Spokane in 1934. “But The Plunge, the swimming part, I heard that was segregated.” He heard right. In Spokane, as in other northern cities, the color line was drawn in the water.
Maxey said The Plunge was “totally off-limits.” So was the YWCA pool in the 1920s and 1930s, although the YMCA pool was open to all. As for Natatorium Park’s dance hall, black customers had to follow the unwritten rules. “The deal was this,” said Maxey. “If you were black and a black band was playing, you could go. As a kid in high school I, like everybody else, would go out there to watch Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, many of the great bands and musicians.” But not when it was a white band. “I’ve been thrown out of Nat Park more times than…,” said Maxey, finishing the sentence with only a laugh.
Restaurants
Here’s what happened at Spokane’s lunch counters when the all-black cast of Billy Rose’s Carmen Jones played the Fox Theater in Spokane in 1945:
“These Negro thespians, many well-educated with fine musical backgrounds…, were denied cafes or completely ignored, so that after sitting endlessly at a table or counter had to betake themselves away foodless, and they didn’t seek the better restaurants, but those on Main Avenue,” wrote an outraged Spokesman-Review columnist. “One young man played the Saturday night performance without any dinner because he was refused entrance to every restaurant he entered.”
In fact, such segregation had been entrenched for decades. One of the first acts of Spokane’s Colored Businessmen’s Improvement Club in 1911 was to protest the signs that were sometimes posted in restaurants and storefronts: “No Colored Patronage Solicited.” A black minister, the Reverend Emmett Reed of Calvary Baptist Church, made a point of going around to all of those restaurants and asking them to take the signs down.
“Now maybe some did and some didn’t,” said Williamson. “But later they got smarter and the signs said, ‘We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.’” Even without signs, the black community knew which restaurants were welcoming and which were not. “Growing up, we went to the Fern, the Coney Island and the Desert Hotel Oasis Room,” said Williamson. “The Chinese places downtown, you could go to.”
But not all of them. Elmo Dalbert, 81, a black Spokane resident, remembers the day in 1935 or 1936 when the proprietors of a Chinese restaurant told him they didn’t want his business anymore. His only option was to find somewhere else to eat. “What can you say to that?” he said.
Here’s one thing you could say: See you in court. That’s what Maxey began to say in the 1950s and 1960s. “I can name three or four restaurants I brought action against, but I really don’t need to,” said Maxey. “They’ve changed their habits since then. But believe me, we started to open them up with litigation.”
Meanwhile, there were a few-a very few-black-owned restaurants in town. One of them was Virgil’s Chicken Dinner Shack, and the other was the Willow Inn. At least in these places the black community never had to worry about seeing a “No Colored Patronage Solicited” sign.
Restaurants weren’t the only places with signs. Sometimes entire towns had them. Maxey remembers going to Wallace to play a high school football game and seeing a sign on the outskirts of town that said, “Nigger, Read This Sign and Run.” Maxey had to spend the night in the sheriff’s house for his own protection.
Hotels
One of the cherished memories of many Spokanites growing up in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s is of meeting for lunch at the elegant Davenport Hotel. At least, it’s a cherished memory for white residents.
“We didn’t meet at the Davenport to have lunch,” said Williamson, a Spokane resident since 1934. “Not until the later years, when the Davenport was ready to close. Then we would go in, but we always felt uncomfortable, because we knew we weren’t wanted in there before.”
The Ridpath Hotel was only slightly more hospitable. Through much of the era black people weren’t welcome as guests, but at least they could work there. In those days it was not unusual for elegant hotels, even in big cities in the North, to refuse black patronage. Read the biographies of Louis Armstrong or Sammy Davis Jr., for instance, and you’ll see that their tours often seemed to be one long search for hotel accommodations.
But there were several Spokane hotels that were welcoming. “The Spokane Hotel never discriminated,” said Maxey. “Another one that deserves special accolades was the Desert Hotel, a first-class hotel.” And most of the railroad porters coming through town stayed at one of the Japanese hotels downtown, all of which were welcoming. After all, the Japanese felt the sting of segregation, too, in many of the same places that discriminated against black people. In the 1940s and 1950s the Davenport and the Ridpath became more tolerant. For instance, Marian Anderson, the great black opera singer, stayed at the Davenport in 1953.
But old customs die hard. When a group of Marycliff High School girls went to see Anderson, the management told the one black girl in the group that she couldn’t go into the lobby-she had to take the freight elevator. “So these girls all decide, oh, we’ll all go on the freight elevator,” said Williamson. “So they did, which, at the time, was pretty neat.”
Theaters
Here’s a bright spot in the story of Spokane segregation.
“There was no problem in movie theaters, no Jim Crow spot upstairs,” said Elmo Dalbert. At least, there wasn’t after 1919, when a black man named S. S. Moore sued the Pantages Theatre, a vaudeville and movie house in Spokane, for forcing him to sit in the balcony. A Spokane Superior Court jury awarded Moore $200 in damages and, more importantly, sent a message. “All of us were for damages from the start,” a juror was quoted in the Spokane Daily Chronicle.“All declared that even if a man were black he had the right to sit where he wanted to.”
The Chronicle said the judgment “is of widespread importance, for it means that negroes can not be segregated from whites in any place of public amusement in the state of Washington.” The message didn’t always penetrate into other institutions, but it opened up theaters for good.
Schools
Spokane never had segregated schools. What’s more, since Spokane’s black population was more scattered than in many cities, black students were spread out through many schools. When Ruth Richardson attended North Central High School in the 1930s, she was student body president, a member of the tennis and drama clubs, and she graduated fourth in her class, according to her oral history printed in the 1989 book, All Through the Night: The History of Spokane Black Americans, by Joseph Franklin.
But there were no black teachers in Spokane until 1936, when Helen Dundee, a distinguished young graduate of Lewis and Clark High School and Washington State College, was hired. She taught one year at North Central and then moved away. There was not to be another black teacher until 1951, when the district, encouraged by a threatened Maxey lawsuit, hired Eugene Breckenridge. Breckenridge later became head of the Washington Education Association.
Nightlife
Evening entertainment was restricted, to say the least. Elmo Dalbert summarized the situation like this, “As for most of the night spots in town, you didn’t go to those places, because you didn’t feel welcome. You’re not looking for trouble.”
The black community went to Virgil’s Chicken Shack and the Willow Inn, two black-owned establishments. But a third establishment, the Club Harlem (originally called the Pirate’s Den), is practically a metaphor for Spokane’s complicated racial situation. The Club Harlem (or Harlem Club) was black-owned, black-operated, and all of the entertainers were black. As for the audience, it was all-white except on Sunday nights, and sometimes Mondays.
“The whole idea of the Harlem Club was to get the white crowd out there, because that’s where the money was,” said Alfonse Hill, who played the saxophone in many Spokane night spots. It was patterned after places like the Cotton Club in Harlem, where a white audience could enjoy black jazz and entertainment. “Swells and everything in Spokane went to the Harlem Club,” said Williamson. “They (the owners) had a big family and they would dance and sing.”
Social Clubs
An Asian-American woman quoted in the Spokesman-Review in 1968 summed up the reason that social clubs were on the front line of the desegregation fight in Spokane. “This is a club town,” she said. “And most all bar members of minority groups.”
It was a club town, and private clubs and lodges such as the Elks, the Eagles, the Moose, the Athletic Roundtable and the Spokane Club provided a great deal of the city’s social life. According to Maxey, the majority of clubs in town were segregated. As late as 1971 a local Eagles lodge had the words “Caucasian only” printed on the application form, although the manager was quoted in the Chronicle as saying that was only because the forms were “printed in the past” and they hadn’t run out of them yet.
The only black lodge in town was the Prince Hall Masons, also known as the Black Masons. It was not in the Masonic Temple-it had its own building-and it was separate from the other Masonic lodges. Also, the black community of Spokane had many of its own social and cultural clubs, including the Wednesday Art Club, the Phyllis Wheatley Club, the Ashanti Club, the Crest Club and the Dunbar Literary Club, all dedicated to promoting culture and the arts.
“See how nice they were dressed?” said Williamson, looking at a picture of the Dunbar Literary Club, a poetry club. “We weren’t the little raggytags they show on the movies Hollywood puts out. We were not raggytaggy people.”
The Spokane Club had no black members, but it was one of the biggest employers of black people in town. “Just about every black that came here, they worked there,” said Williamson. “They did the maid service, the bartending, they did all of those things, but they did not belong there.” Even the USO clubs were segregated during World War II. Spokane had a white USO and a black USO.
Maxey’s lawsuits in the 1960s and 1970s helped end much of the segregation in clubs. He argued in 1967 that private clubs had the right to “discriminate any way they please,” but not if they applied for a public right-the right to sell liquor.
Jobs
In 1957 James M. Sims, the president of the Spokane branch of the NAACP, took stock of the job opportunities for black residents-and was not impressed. “There are no regularly full-time employed Negro sales personnel or administrative or clerical personnel in Spokane, with the exception of the YWCA, the teachers in the county and city school systems, and the county welfare office,” Sims told the Chronicle.
There are no regularly employed Negro mechanics in any major auto agency, no chefs in any major restaurant or hotel, no employees with any of the airlines, no repairmen, meter readers, collectors and so on. There are no tellers or clerical employees in the banks or savings and loan agencies. There is not a single regularly employed elevator operator in the Spokane area.
What was left? Menial maintenance or laborer positions, noted Sims. According to census records, other common occupations were in domestic service and other service jobs, such as porter, waiter and bartender.
Early in Spokane’s history, skilled black stonemasons helped build the city’s tunnels and foundations. “They were stonemasons from Durham, North Carolina,” said Williamson. “They would never be able to learn to be stonemasons here because nobody would have taught them.”
Many skilled positions and union jobs were closed to black workers in the first half of the century. Black people were barred from certain jobs, mainly for the obvious economic reasons-taking higher-paying jobs away from white workers, for one-but sometimes the reasons were more convoluted. Williamson said a friend of hers who worked for WWP once said he could never be a meter reader because “it would not look good for a colored man to go into a white man’s home when his wife was there alone.” And a black mail sorter told Williamson that his boss once said, “As long as I am postmaster, a colored man will never deliver the mail on Spokane streets.”
He was wrong. After World War II, attitudes began to change in these fields and many others. “The first black man to deliver mail on Spokane streets was Maurice McFarlin, a veteran of World War II,” said Williamson. “The war was over, and there were veterans back, and I believe that was one of the reasons he got to be a mailman, because he was a veteran.”
Black professionals, however, were slower to arrive, slower even than in the more segregated South, where separate black institutions required a black professional class. Spokane had no black doctors, no black dentists, a black teacher only briefly and, until Maxey received his law degree in 1950, no black lawyers. Black patients went to white doctors and dentists in town who were known to be welcoming, and word got around quickly in the black community. Sometimes, however, the doctors were more tolerant than some of their white patients. Williamson tells this story about what happened after she had gone to a new dentist in the 1950s: “Two days later, a girl from the office called and said, ‘You can’t come here,’” said Williamson. “I said, ‘Why?’ and she said, ‘Because there was a lady in the waiting room, and she raised a whole bunch of heck about you being there.’”
To this day, Spokane has never had a black dentist.
Housing
By 1961 segregation had lost its hold on many aspects of Spokane life. But not in jobs and not in housing. Frank Hopkins, owner of the Ebony Cafe, told the Spokesman-Review in 1961 what happened when he bought a house on the north side, outside of an established black area. Just as he was about to move in someone broke out 28 windows in one night. “I just had to let it go,” he said.
That same year the Reverend J. C. Brooks of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Spokane told the Spokesman-Review that a black person looking for a house would be steered to the “area for Negroes,” which he said was bounded by Division on the west, Altamont on the east, Ninth on the south, and Sprague on the north. Today it is called the East Central neighborhood. This kind of “red-lining,” as it was known, was especially ironic in Spokane.
“The funny thing is, the original 300 (the black pioneers), they lived all over Spokane,” said Maxey. “The dominant number lived in the East Side area, but, by far, it couldn’t be said that there was just one area. The original pioneers were spread all over, which was very much different from other cities.” The pioneer families were accepted in their neighborhoods, by most accounts. But when it came to new families, that was a different story.
“It was a gentleman’s agreement type of thing,” said Alfonse Hill. “There were a lot of places the realtors wouldn’t take you. You could go to the East Side. But as far as the (upper) South Hill? Forget it.”
Maxey debated James S. Black, president of the Washington Association of Realtors, four times on the issue of housing segregation in the 1950s. “We had tremendous arguments,” said Maxey. At issue was red-lining, which was sometimes subtle and sometimes not. One passage in a 1940s-era Spokane Valley real estate code of ethics read, “A realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood…any race or nationality or any persons whose presence will be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.”
“Restrictive covenants didn’t go out until 1946 in a Supreme Court ruling,” said Maxey. “And that gave us a foothold to blast their legal foundations out from under them.”
In fact, Maxey believes that World War II was the turning point in the struggle against segregation. “Change was never explosive in Spokane,” he said. “It happened with the war more than anything else.”
For one thing, there were many black soldiers in uniform in Spokane, including hundreds stationed at Geiger Field in Spokane and Farragut Naval Base in northern Idaho, and “they didn’t dare try to enforce it (segregation),” said Maxey. Also, the country had just fought a war over the ideals of democracy and equality. The Spokesman-Review columnist, in his story about the treatment of the Carmen Rose cast, put it like this: “And now, in the flush of victory, democratic freedom supposedly won, a group of well-behaved Negroes comes to Spokane and is unable to eat, let alone be quartered.”
By the 1950s the NAACP had become a potent force and “we could actually fight back a bit,” said Maxey. Not just fight back, but as Maxey said, touch people’s humanity. A sense of fair play built steadily through the late 1940s and 1950s and then culminated in the great civil rights movement of the 1960s. The scenes of police dogs and fire hoses and little girls escorted to school were deeply shocking to many Northerners.
“People began to look at what they were capable of being, and they didn’t want to be associated with that,” said Williamson. “So it began to change. But now, with all the things you read about in the paper-is it going back the other way? But it will never go back. We’ve become too strong for it ever to go back to where we’ll just sit around and have our feelings hurt. It’ll never go back there.”
Racism in Spokane — a 21st century reality
Racism in Spokane?
Not a topic that will make you very popular among those you know in Spokane, especially if they are white.
Twice today it was suggested to me by whites I know that if people (a category which clearly was intended to include me) are unhappy with the situation of race in Spokane or the white dominance of Spokane or the exclusion of non-whites in Spokane, then I or anyone else with similar concerns can move to Seattle or anywhere else that we chose and where – it was implied – we will see more people of color on a routine basis.
Other interesting reactions to the topic of “racism in Spokane” can be seen in the anonymous postings on the blogs of the Spokesman-Review and even in the Spokesman’s publication/blog for area high school students.
Instead of leaving Spokane, I decided to begin this blog – Spokane Racism.
We will explore not only the perception and reality of racism in Spokane but also the reaction to the suggestion that Spokane is racist as well as the reaction to the evidence that Spokane is racist.
We will look at Spokane’s beginnings through the violent and unlawful taking of the lands of the native peoples and nations that lived, and fished, and roamed, and played, and celebrated, and raised families on this land and along this river.
In addition, we will look at the use and abuse of language and imagery of race, as well as the enshrinement of the areas racist past.
We will look at the history of explicitly racist organizations in the Spokane area from the Church of Jesus Christ Christian/Aryan Nations and Washington State Militia to Phinneas Brotherhood and White Order of Thule.
And we will look at the realities of community and organizational exclusion in Spokane from our media and our local governments to our police forces, our schools, and our cultural life.
I invite those with comments on the topic to send them to SpokaneRacism@google.com
