Soul of community all but lost
As Seattle gentrifies, black people no longer feel welcome in the very area they once established
NOT SO long ago, few whites wanted to live in Seattle’s diverse Central District, so it housed the people who had no choice. Synagogues point to the neighbourhood’s long-gone Jewish past, an immigrant community that was joined by Japanese-Americans. Their internment in World War II left the way clear for a wave of African Americans, who settled in big numbers and turned the area into the heart of Seattle’s black community.
Now things are changing once again and the district’s long-term black residents don’t much like it.
After a hearty breakfast of bacon, eggs, pancakes, sausage and potatoes, Michael Brown reminisced about local life 50 years ago, recalling the tense nature of relations between the city’s police and its African-American residents.
“Every time the police came, it would draw groups of people,” he said.
Brown, then just 9, remembered police landing en masse one day, how he was instructed to run at full speed to the nearby office of the Black Panther Party, a political organisation founded in 1966 to monitor US police forces and challenge any brutality meted out to blacks.
Today, that old Panther office is an Ethiopian travel agency, a lone immigrant business on an otherwise establishment block of wine shops, cafes, and boutiques.
In April, the Black Panther Party’s Seattle chapter celebrated its 50th anniversary with a free breakfast like the kind it offered children in the 1960s and 1970s, but in a city that has changed dramatically since the Panthers’ heyday.
Founded in the aftermath of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, the Seattle chapter was the first to be established outside of California, where the African-American activist group started out in Oakland.
The Panthers – in trademark berets and leather jackets – established themselves in majority black neighbourhoods and were known for militant politics, preaching self-determination and armed self-defence in the face of police brutality and widespread discrimination.
The Seattle Panthers also provided essential social services to an under-served community, offering free breakfasts – later turned into a federal programme – grocery deliveries for the elderly and a free health clinic that still operates today.
Yet much else has gone in the intervening half century. Many of the old-timers who convened for the anniversary celebrations said they no longer recognised their own neighbourhood after a decade of intense population growth.
Freda Burns, a retiree who volunteers at the city’s African-American history museum, moved to Seattle as a child in 1950, a time when non-whites in the US were restricted by real estate covenants and mortgage loan policies to certain neighbourhoods, a practice known as “red lining”. Seattle’s red-lined neighbourhood was the Central District, an enclave of single-family homes east of downtown and home to the first blackowned bank west of the Mississippi River.
When the Panthers kept watch, its black population topped 70%, creating a strong sense of community.
“Growing up as a child, I always thought there were a lot of black people in Seattle,” Burns said, even though in the 1950s, census data shows that the city was 94% white.
In today’s Central District, less than one in five residents is black, according to census figures. Brown attributes the drop to rapid redevelopment in one of the fastest growing US cities, fuelled by developers who buy older bungalows from black families and replace them with multiple townhouses that sell at or above the neighbourhood’s average home price of $800 000.
“We’re not losing people one for one,” Brown said. “One black family moves out and they build four to six houses.”
Those who can afford the new houses, meanwhile, are more likely to be white and work in the booming hi-tech sector.
Nor is this trend just hitting Seattle, perched high in the Pacific Northwest.
Brown pointed to similar waves of white gentrification and black displacement on the East Coast, transforming Harlem in New York City and the seat of government in Washington, D C
Seizing on the Panthers’ legacy, some locals now hope to get political and turn the tide. K Wyking Garrett is a third-generation resident of the district who acutely diagnoses the city’s current paradox.
“Seattle is booming but black Seattle is busting,” he said.
So Garrett started Africatown, a community land trust that has acquired land for redevelopment into affordable homes, marketed to blacks who cannot afford the district’s hefty rents and home prices.
Africatown received a $1 million (R13m) grant from the City of Seattle on July 5 to support its redevelopment of a strip mall in the heart of the district into housing and stores for black-owned businesses.
“Our values call for a Seattle that all communities can call home,” said Seattle planning director Sam Assefa. “Our aim is to improve racial equity and knock down institutional barriers.”
The effort comes as long-time residents feel disoriented.
Brown described how a recent visit to the neighbourhood with his brother provoked an anxiety attack.
“I have landmarks but the physical environment isn’t the same anymore,” he said. “It’s tragic because when you lose your community, you lose your sense of being.”