The Hustle (4 page)

In the early 1960s, after a few years in public housing, Willie McClain's family moved into a home in the Central Area. At the time, the neighborhood was brimming with new arrivals from the South—between just 1960 and 1967, the number of African Americans living in the Central Area shot up from 20,800 to 32,400. Seemingly overnight, the city developed a “ghetto.” In 1950, the median income of blacks in Seattle was 73 percent that of whites; by 1967, the median income for blacks living in the Central Area was 54 percent that of Seattle's white population. Blight spread as banks and insurance companies redlined the neighborhood, refusing to insure or provide loans to property owners there. Black enrollment at some neighborhood schools topped 90 percent, while black unemployment in Seattle ran at up to triple that of the city's overall rate during the 1960s.

Gradually, the local media began to venture into the Central Area to see what exactly was going on there. In 1965,
Seattle
magazine ran an article titled “The World That Whites Don't Know,” warning that the neighborhood was “seething with unrest and bitterness” over job and housing discrimination, and police brutality. The article profiled David Garner, a young migrant from Louisiana who had newly arrived with his family. He'd found work as a janitor at a building downtown, starting his shift in the evening after the office workers had left and finishing before they arrived the next day, all but invisible to white Seattle. “I feel like a visitor from Mars,” Garner said. The author, a white man, wrote, “Somehow, the white masses in Seattle have developed a tradition—or a talent—for looking right through black skin, as if they thought that Negroes were a form of non-people.”

Willie McClain—who was known to his friends by his nickname, “June Bug”—found the Central Area to be a safe haven, but also a boundary. His main contact with mainstream Seattle as a kid came through an older man Willie and his friends knew only as “Coach.” He was a white man who came to watch them play baseball and then picked them up on weekends and drove them in his station wagon on excursions to the beach, the movies, and an all-you-can-eat restaurant in a wealthy white suburb. McClain compares Coach's role in their lives to the one the organizer of our team, Randy Finley, played in those of my black teammates. “He never did anything inappropriate,” McClain says. “He just seemed to have an interest in exposing us to things outside the Central Area.” If they left without Coach, the reception was different. When they rode their bikes to the all-you-can-eat restaurant by themselves while in middle school, the police told them to head back to Seattle. McClain remembers that white shopkeepers would wipe the counters after black customers touched them and spray air freshener as they were leaving.

The civil rights movement saw its greatest successes in the middle of the sixties. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination and segregation in public places, employment, schools, and housing. The next year the Voting Rights Act gave the federal government the power to end disenfranchisement in the South.

Martin Luther King Jr. believed it was just the start of a process of redressing the damage inflicted by racial subjugation. The “second phase” of the civil rights movement, he insisted, would move past racial discrimination and take on poverty and inequality, a message more often than not now overlooked in the yearly tributes around his holiday that almost always focus on his “I have a dream” speech. “White Americans would have liked to believe that in the past ten years a mechanism had somehow been created that needed only orderly and smooth tending for the painless accomplishment of change,” he wrote. “Yet this is precisely what has not been achieved.”

In Seattle, the industrial base simply did not absorb the new black migrants from the South, even as the city underwent a Boeing-led economic boom in the mid-1960s. At the height, in 1967, employment at the airplane manufacturer ballooned to 150,000 workers, of whom 5,400 (3.6 percent) were black. Three years later, after layoffs had begun, only 1,500 black employees remained at Boeing, 1.4 percent of the workforce. Even in the best of times, unemployment rates for blacks in Seattle remained well above those of whites, even for unskilled jobs. Many construction unions, for example, blocked black membership until well into the 1970s; they started to integrate only after African-American protesters began to shut down construction sites.

A new generation of activists, intellectual descendants of the slain Malcolm X, was losing its patience with nonviolence and negotiation. By 1967 there had already been several long, hot summers, when urban violence—“riots,” “rebellions,” or “uprisings,” depending on who's talking—had sparked in Harlem, Detroit, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. That April, a young King protégé named Stokely Carmichael came to speak at the Central Area's Garfield High School. A year earlier, Carmichael had coined the term “Black Power” to describe his more radical approach to civil rights, which included cultural pride, economic independence, separation from mainstream America, and—if necessary—violence.

Garfield High School, the alma mater of musicians Quincy Jones and Jimi Hendrix, had become the center of the black community—more than half of its students in 1967 were African American. If you wanted to take a message to black people in Seattle, the school's auditorium was the place to do it.

Carmichael lit up the crowd of four thousand. Tall, skinny, and clean-cut in a black suit, white shirt, loosened tie, and a button that read
KEEP THE FAITH, BABY
, the twenty-five-year-old gave an incendiary seventy-minute speech, his voice oscillating between a roar and a whisper. “We are the victims and white people are the executioners, and they have kept us down by force and by violence, and that if we are violent, it is just that we have learned well from our teachers,” he said. “They have bombed our churches, they have shot us in the streets, they have lynched us, they have cattle-prodded us, they have thrown lye over us, they have dragged our children out in the night. We have been the recipients of violence for over four hundred years. We've just learned well how to use it today.… So don't you get caught up in no discussion about violence. We just making it crystal clear to the honky today that if he try to shoot us, we gonna kill him 'fore God gets the news. Period!”

Martin Luther King Jr. had written sympathetically about Black Power, saying that he understood the movement was sparked by frustration with the lack of progress toward full equality. But King criticized Black Power advocates for stoking anger while failing to offer hope or any realistic political program for change; King argued that it was impossible for blacks, at a bit more than 10 percent of the population, to separate themselves culturally and economically from the rest of the country. Still, Carmichael's words resonated with African Americans who had not been able to capitalize on the breakthroughs of the civil rights movement. As King acknowledged, “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't have enough money to buy a hamburger?”

Seattle's civil rights leadership had been drawn from the middle class and was primarily concerned with issues of open housing, integration, and access to jobs; the Black Power movement drew on the anger and disenchantment of poorer, unskilled blacks. It was a division as old as the one between the “middle class” blacks who lived in the community established by William Grose around East Madison Street and the working classes who had settled to the south, in the Jackson Street area. The difference in the 1960s was that rapid migration had tilted the numbers even farther away from the middle class. The two factions in Seattle—as with African-American groups across the country—had been able to maintain common cause when united around issues such as outright discrimination. Once some basic political concessions were won, the coalition could not hold.

Carmichael's speech stoked feelings of black nationalism in an eighteen-year-old Central Area resident named Aaron Dixon. “Things began to change then,” says Dixon, whose parents had moved out from Chicago for better opportunities. “For a lot of young black people, we for the first time began to feel our anger, and that we had a right to be angry at white people, even white people we had been friends with.” In early 1968, Dixon founded the Seattle Black Panthers with his brother Elmer and a few others. It was the second chapter in the nation after the original in Oakland, which was then calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government.

The Seattle Panthers organized actions such as a sit-in at a high school after two black girls were sent home and told to “straighten” their Afros. They demanded that the school offer African-American history classes and hire a black principal or vice principal. Larry Gossett, a black student leader at the University of Washington who led the high school protest with Aaron Dixon, says, “Seattle just didn't understand. They said, ‘Sit-ins happen in the South where they're not nice to their coloreds. Up in Seattle, we're nice. We don't have those problems. No need for anybody to want Black Power in Seattle.' That's how the white power structure saw our city.”

Willie McClain, fourteen at the start of 1968, was wide-shouldered, muscular, and on his way to becoming captain of the basketball team at Garfield. He looked to the Panthers as role models—they seemed like strong men who could express themselves and get what they wanted. “Black Power hit like a wave,” he says. “It began to give young men a sense of belonging, of power, authority, and strength within numbers.” He was also developing what he later—going one better on Du Bois's famous formulation—called a “triple personality.” There was an “academic guy” who showed promise in school. There was an “athlete in the upper echelon talentwise, a budding football and basketball star.” And there was “a nasty little bugger who wanted to do violence and harm to everybody.”

On April 4 that year, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on a Memphis motel balcony, sparking anguish and unrest in cities around the country. A full-scale riot was averted in Seattle, but that summer—which saw Bobby Kennedy's assassination, the continued escalation of the Vietnam War, and riots on the streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention—the situation in the Central Area grew increasingly tense.

In a report written in the spring of 1968, the Seattle Urban League warned about the mounting effects of cramped and dilapidated housing in the Central Area, black unemployment, poverty, and frustration over lack of opportunity for education. The inability to move out of the Central Area—only 4 percent of blacks in Seattle lived in integrated neighborhoods—was leading to a feeling of being trapped, and the situation was deteriorating. “The rise of new militant leaders, many constructive, some destructive, may take us forward or lead us into a holocaust,” the authors cautioned. “There is increasing hostility to an oppressive society—to the police particularly.… Open distrust, contempt and hatred towards Caucasians is no longer contained.”

On the first day of July, Larry Gossett, Aaron Dixon, and another protester who had led the high school sit-in were convicted of “unlawful assembly” and sentenced to six months in jail. That night, several hundred African Americans gathered at Garfield High School to protest.

Willie McClain was hanging out with his friends in front of the school, which faces Twenty-third Avenue, one of the city's main arteries. As he remembers it, a white guy in a convertible pulled up to a stoplight. Words were exchanged. Someone threw a rock. At that point, McClain didn't need any prodding. “I was there with the rioting, I was there with the pillaging, I was there with the late-night destruction,” he says. It heated up faster than McClain could believe. “It started with what I call mischievous youth—boys who were fifteen and sixteen years old—who were out throwing rocks, not gas bottles, just doing what I call elementary rioting, but it got real serious to the point where the police were starting to shoot at people,” he says.

Kathy Jones, a seventeen-year-old African American who was on the streets near Garfield that night, told the
Seattle Times
decades later that when the riots started, she thought, “We've been trying peacefully for three years to get you to listen to us.… Maybe there's another way. Maybe then you'll listen.” Willie McClain remembers thinking about the indignities he'd suffered as a black in Seattle and feeling a rush of adrenaline as the destruction started: “All these different things that have always been there pop up and you have a rage that comes over you and says,
This is what you can do about it
.”

The outpouring of anger continued for two nights, with passing cars getting pelted with rocks and bricks. The police used helicopters and tear gas. Fifteen people were sent to the hospital. Street violence flared periodically for the rest of the summer. The cops basically put the Central Area on lockdown.

In August 1968, the Reverend Samuel McKinney, leader of the Central Area's influential Mount Zion Baptist Church, called for a “black united front” that would join Seattle's African Americans across economic classes to work for common cause. “The basis of unity is not fear or coercion, but that the commonality of our blackness demands that we work together or hang separately,” he said. A few months later, a civic commission tasked with looking into the causes of the summer's “disorders” offered, “Only when we begin to solve the overriding problems of race and poverty which exist in our community will we begin to achieve racial harmony.”

But it was too late for the civil rights movement to regain accord. Even as the Black Panthers seized the national headlines in 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency while employing the “Southern strategy,” purposefully playing to white fears of economic change and disorder, whether of blacks taking their jobs or hippies baking their brains on acid.