Black Spokane: The Civil Rights Struggle in the Inland Northwest (Race and Culture in the American West Series, 8) - Hardcover

Mack, Dwayne A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0806144890 ISBN 13: 9780806144894

Verlag: UNIV OF OKLAHOMA PR, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

In 1981, decades before mainstream America elected Barack Obama, James Chase became the first African American mayor of Spokane, Washington, with the overwhelming support of a majority-white electorate. Chase&;s win failed to capture the attention of historians&;as had the century-long evolution of the black community in Spokane. In Black Spokane: The Civil Rights Struggle in the Inland Northwest, Dwayne A. Mack corrects this oversight&;and recovers a crucial chapter in the history of race relations and civil rights in America.

As early as the 1880s, Spokane was a destination for black settlers escaping the racial oppression in the South&;settlers who over the following decades built an infrastructure of churches, businesses, and social organizations to serve the black community. Drawing on oral histories, interviews, newspapers, and a rich array of other primary sources, Mack sets the stage for the years following World War II in the Inland Northwest, when an influx of black veterans would bring about a new era of racial issues. His book traces the earliest challenges faced by the NAACP and a small but sympathetic white population as Spokane became a significant part of the national civil rights struggle. International superstars such as Louis &;Satchmo&; Armstrong and Hazel Scott figure in this story, along with charismatic local preachers, entrepreneurs, and lawyers who stepped forward as civic leaders. 

These individuals&; contributions, and the black community&;s encounters with racism, offer a view of the complexity of race relations in a city and a region not recognized historically as centers of racial strife. But in matters of race&;from the first migration of black settlers to Spokane, through the politics of the Cold War and the civil rights movement, to the successes of the 1970s and &;80s&;Mack shows that Spokane has a story to tell, one that this book at long last incorporates into the larger history of twentieth-century America.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dwayne A. Mack is Carter G. Woodson Chair in African American History and Professor of History at Berea College, author of numerous articles on African American history, and co-editor of Beginning a Career in Academia: A Guide for Graduate Students of Color.

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Black Spokane

The Civil Rights Struggle in the Inland Northwest

By Dwayne A. Mack

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 2014 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8061-4489-4

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1. Paving the Way: Spokane's Black Pioneers and the Settlement of Washington State, 
2. The Impact of the Second Great Migration on Spokane, 
3. Responding to Racial Discrimination in the Inland Northwest, 
4. The Elusive Double Victory: Race Relations during the Postwar Period, 
5. The Momentum Swings: The Struggle for Racial Equality during the 1950s, 
6. Challenging Racial Barriers in the 1960s, 
7. Political Currents in Post–Civil Rights Era Spokane: Black Empowerment, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Paving the Way

Spokane's Black Pioneers and the Settlement of Washington State

During slavery blacks were treated inhumanely; even most free blacks were refused citizenship and disenfranchised. Some managed to escape the horror of slavery and their repressive conditions by traveling westward along the Oregon Trail. In the mid-1800s a small number of blacks moved into the Washington Territory. Circumventing the prevailing racist conditions, some of these early Washington pioneers, through self-determination and hard work, became influential business and civic leaders within their respective communities. More importantly, these individuals laid a strong social and economic undergirding that facilitated late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century black migration into the state and ultimately the Spokane area.

Among the early African American pioneers in the Pacific Northwest was successful farmer and cattle trader George Washington Bush. In 1844 Bush left Missouri with his family and several other families and started an eight-month wagon trek across the two thousand miles of the Oregon Trail. They migrated north of the Columbia River into what eventually became the state of Washington. A "whites only" clause in the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 prevented Bush from owning the land he settled on. However, five years later, Bush and other community members successfully petitioned the Washington Territorial Legislature to allot Bush a 640-acre homestead. His land formed the area called Bush Prairie in what would become Thurston County, Washington.

Another black Pacific Northwest pioneer, George Washington, was born in 1817 in Frederick County, Virginia, to an enslaved father and a white mother. During his childhood Washington was sold to J. G. Cochran and his wife, Anna, who relocated their household (along with Washington) to Missouri. In 1850 Washington and his owners left Missouri in a wagon train. Their four-month journey ended in the Oregon Territory, where they stayed for two years. In 1852 the Cochrans freed Washington. To escape racial discrimination in the area, Washington then traveled with his family north to Lewis County, where in 1875 he founded the town of Centerville, later known as Centralia, on a 640-acre homestead. The town got its name from its central location between the Columbia River and Puget Sound.

Settlement of Spokane

The city of Spokane in eastern Washington, originally known as Spokane Falls, was settled first by the Spokane Indians ("people of the sun"). Pioneers were attracted to the scenic beauty of the territory located at the northern part of the Columbian Plateau. Surrounding the territory was a landscape of fertile lands, wooded foothills, bunch-grass, and mountains. Spokane Falls offered an untapped water power supply, and its diverse environment of woodlands, agricultural land, and minerals encouraged early European migration to the area.

The area's attractiveness and accessibility encouraged beaver fur traders from areas such as British Columbia to migrate there. Initially, white settlers conducted fur trading with the territory's Indian inhabitants. During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the Pacific Fur Company, the Northwest Company, and the Hudson's Bay Company operated their fur trading businesses on the future site of Spokane. The area's first American settlers, J. J. Downing, S. R. Scranton, and R. M. Benjamin, arrived in 1871 and opened a sawmill at the southern base of Spokane Falls. On February 13, 1878, territory officials platted Spokane Falls, and on November 29, 1881, following the arrival of the Northern Pacific Railway, the territorial legislature incorporated the town of Spokane Falls. With the opening of Fort Spokane in 1880, an active railway system, and a gold and silver mining boom in nearby Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in 1883, Spokane Falls attracted thousands more white American settlers. Successful white settlement, however, occurred at the expense of the area's Indian population, which dwindled through warfare with soldiers. Those who survived were relegated to nearby reservations.

A severe fire destroyed most of the town in 1889, and in 1891, after the community was reconstructed, it was renamed Spokane. Spokane grew rapidly in the last decade of the nineteenth century. By 1900 its population of about 37,000 people made it the second largest city in Washington, behind Seattle at 80,671, and the largest inland city north of Salt Lake City and west of Minneapolis. Most of early twentieth-century Spokane was built close to the banks of the Spokane River, with a large flour mill and several hotels providing employment for some of its population.

With woodlands to the north, fertile wheat fields to the south in the Palouse, cattle-grazing lands to the west, and productive silver and gold mines to the east in northern Idaho and western Montana, Spokane rapidly became the trading and shipping center for the "Inland Empire," which included eastern Washington, northern Idaho, northeastern Oregon, western Montana, and southern British Columbia.

The First Black Settler

The passage of civil rights legislation in the state of Washington in 1890 offered African American settlers some social freedom. Washington's first legislature passed a progressive public accommodations law, prohibiting discrimination based on race, and political leaders, unlike their counterparts in neighboring states, refused to pass laws that sanctioned segregated schools and banned interracial marriages or black suffrage. The southern post–Civil War economy also encouraged migration into Washington; competition for jobs was fierce among both whites and blacks, which in turn intensified racial tension and animosity against African Americans. The South's racially oppressive black codes, as well as the forthcoming Jim Crow laws and domestic terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, prevented most African Americans from achieving economic stability in that region. The Washington Territory's plentiful uninhabited space allowed blacks to purchase farmland land inexpensively, escaping the economic oppression of sharecropping in the South.

The first settlers of Spokane included both white and black pioneers. African Americans were mostly scattered throughout the city limits and resided in rental properties, existing homes they purchased, or houses they built. Some of these blacks were educated and skilled and soon emerged as successful entrepreneurs. They joined religious and civic leaders who arrived in Spokane, even before Washington was admitted as a state in 1889. Among these original settlers was a thirty-three-year-old African American Civil War veteran...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF OKLAHOMA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0806144890
• ISBN 13: 9780806144894
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 191
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland