-My name is Representative Jamila Taylor
from the 30th district in South King County,
centered around Federal Way, Auburn, Pacific/Algona,
parts of unincorporated King County, and parts of Des Moines.
I am honored to be here tonight.
I am the civil rights and judiciary chair
in the Washington state legislature
and former vice chair of the Housing Committee.
Also serving in many other leadership capacities,
representing the great state of Washington,
and making sure that Washingtonians are part
of our future in a different way than what we've had in the past.
I am so honored to be here to introduce our keynote tonight.
Dr. James Gregory is a professor of history
and former Harry Bridges endowed chair of Labor Studies
here at the University of Washington.
Professor Gregory's prize-winning books
and many articles focus on American labor,
civil rights, and migration history,
as well as the Pacific Northwest.
His book, The Southern Diaspora;
How the Great Migrations of Black and White
Southerners Transformed America, published in 2005,
won the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award.
His book, American Exodus:
The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California,
published in 1989, also won two major book prizes.
Dr. Gregory has been researching the history of segregation
in Seattle and Washington State since 2005.
Yes, segregation, specifically racial segregation,
was part of the political and socio-economic
DNA of Washington State.
In addition to his research and teaching duties,
Dr. Gregory is the director
of the Racial Restrictive Covenants Project,
which is part of the Civil Rights and
Labor History Consortium here at the University of Washington.
The 14 projects bring together more than 100
video oral history interviews, several thousand photographs,
documents and digitized newspaper articles,
included are films, slideshows, lesson plans for teachers.
This project also features scores of historical essays
about important issues, events, and people,
many researched and written by undergraduate and graduate
students at the University of Washington.
In 2021,
the State allocated funds under the House Bill 1335
to establish the Racial Covenants Project,
which is part of this consortium.
It's a project endeavor between University of Washington
and Eastern Washington University.
And as part of that research, to date,
more than 50,000 racially restrictive covenants
have been identified in counties throughout Washington
by more than 1,000 volunteers.
As a follow-up to House Bill 1335,
I was the prime sponsor for House Bill 1474,
the Covenant Home Ownership Act,
which provides down payment assistance
to the Washington residents or the descendants
who would have been harmed by racially restrictive covenants.
This means Black folks, Latino folks, Asian Americans,
other immigrants, indigenous folks and Jewish people.
Let me repeat, also their descendants.
With the advocacy led by the Black Home Ownership Initiative,
a multiracial coalition of more than 100 organizations,
they vigorously advocated the legislature
to ensure this bill became a law.
The Covenant Home Ownership Act is the first
in the nation of its kind,
with many states looking to follow our lead.
Supporting and amplifying Dr. Gregory's work
and his efforts to uncover these uncomfortable truths
is among the many steps where we --
where we as a community can meet the moment.
History is now.
And our collective journey matters.
We can act with a shared responsibility to see the arc
of justice become reality,
to build a future that prioritizes shared prosperity
and a more inclusive economic system.
And I am here for it.
[ Applause ]
Tonight, we will learn the details of why this research
matters and that we must remain committed
to righting the wrongs of the past.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Gregory.
[ Applause ]
-Wow. Thank you. That was too much.
And let me express the gratitude in a different way.
Representative Taylor is in the midst of a legislative session
and has spent the last month going back and forth
between Federal Way and Olympia.
And agreed to come all the way up here, tonight, to be with us.
And that is such a gift.
[ Cheers and applause ]
And you're going to hear more from her.
I'm going to talk about history
and then we're going to talk about this amazing new law,
which is going into effect very soon.
And Representative Taylor is going to join me
to talk about that.
So first, a little history.
Or actually, no, let's not do history.
Let's talk about this.
So you've been looking at it, I think, I hope.
To get rid of that.
And this is an amazing image produced by Marissa Rowell.
You see her name there.
It appeared in an article
about the Racial Restrictive Covenants Project
that was published by the College of Arts and Sciences
in The Perspective magazine.
And then Marissa Rowell allowed us to use this on our website.
And you can see the URL if you want to follow up
with any of that.
But I want to take a close look here.
What's going on? Who are these people?
And what do they represent?
They seem to be a family from the it's a wonderful world era
of American history, the 1950s and 1960s.
A wonderful world of plentiful jobs,
homes for nearly everyone, as long as you looked like them.
An era when homes were subsidized by low interest,
low down payment loans from the federal government.
This was the golden age of expanded home ownership,
as long as you looked like them.
Now think about the blinders as they walk through this world
that's wonderful, only for people like them.
And wonderful
because they live
in a racially restricted residential community.
The blinders resonate for me in two ways.
First, because I once looked like that little boy
and was as ignorant
as the blinders suggest for this family.
Second, it reminds me of my early impressions of Seattle.
I began my career as a historian in California
and then moved to the University of Washington
almost exactly 30 years ago, it seems like yesterday.
And I fell in love with this place immediately,
almost immediately.
There was that sort of dark winter thing
that was hard on Californians.
I also had trouble with the smug
and ignorant parts of Seattle culture.
Too many people were blind to racial inequalities,
past and present.
They wanted to believe that White supremacy and segregation
were problems of the South, not Seattle.
Hoping to do something about this ignorance problem,
I co-founded
the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project,
an online resource for examining our history
of civil rights movements and the struggles for equality.
The goal was to shrink some of the blinders around here.
That's also one of the goals of this talk.
The other is to share observations about Seattle
that differentiate our city from many others.
The subtitle of this series, the whole series,
is Building and Belonging.
Josh Reid's wonderful talk was about Coast Salish peoples
and the urgent and creative ways
that they held onto their homes to continue to belong.
The other talks in various ways emphasized migration
and the building of a demographically diverse city.
John Finley introduced the theme
and explored the complications of changing citizenship laws.
Devin Naar showed us
how Sephardic Jews created here the second largest concentration
in the United States.
Elena Campbell explored the special link
between Russia and Seattle.
I'm changing the subject,
or actually kind of reversing it.
Who was not allowed to build and belong?
My talk is about exclusion,
about ways this region unwelcomed people.
And it focuses on housing,
because housing policies by government, state,
county and city,
were used for more than 130 years to keep people out.
People who did not look like me,
to make sure that they did not belong.
My talk is also intended to introduce a question
that's often quietly asked.
Why is Washington one of the Whitest states?
Why until recently was Seattle one of the Whitest cities?
In the last 30 years, the demographics have changed,
but the small number of African Americans is still striking.
At only 5% statewide.
We fall behind Nebraska, Iowa, Colorado,
Arizona and 33 other states.
Why?
As Representative Taylor mentioned,
I wrote a book some years back about the great migration
of African Americans out of the South.
And in that book,
I puzzled why did Black folks from the South
go to some cities, some areas and not others?
Migration scholars usually think only about incentives,
are there job opportunities,
that's what caused people to move.
But it's also important to consider obstacles.
In this talk,
I want to emphasize the mechanisms of exclusion,
especially housing.
Until recently, I, like most historians of racial inequality,
focused on the issue of segregation.
Here's one of a sequence of maps
that we published on the project website
to show Seattle's segregation and desegregation story.
The maps on the left show African American densities,
the one on the right, Asian Americans.
So here's 1950.
Both populations were tightly contained
in the Central District in what was then,
and for a while, called the L-shaped ghetto.
Here's a closer look at that L-shape.
So this is an area
that follows 23rd Avenue between Madison and Dearborn,
and then follows Jackson and Yesler
moving west towards Pioneer Square.
As Devin Naar mentioned,
Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews had also lived in that area
before World War II.
But by 1950, are moving out.
Here's 1960.
No change really for Black folks,
just more people in the containment area.
Japanese Americans are beginning to find homes on Beacon Hill.
Nineteen seventy.
Not much change.
Japanese, Chinese,
and Filipino Americans now live mostly on Beacon Hill.
And here's a closer look at the L-shaped ghetto
showing African Americans.
So in some of these census tracts,
more than 90% of all residents are Black.
Nineteen eighty.
Laws banning housing discrimination
are beginning to matter.
Black people are breaking containment and moving south.
Changes in immigration law
are now allowing new immigrants from Asia,
and those communities are also spreading south.
Nineteen ninety. Things are changing.
Immigration is bringing lots of people
from Asia and Latin America.
Asian origin people now outnumber African Americans, and
the meaning of that category, Asian American, is changing.
Japanese Americans are no longer the largest component,
as Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese,
and Asian Indians populations increase.
I haven't shown Latinos in previous maps
because the population was small.
Now in 1990, there are 44,000 Latinos in King County.
Now let's jump 30 years to 2020, our most recent counts.
And here we see dramatic changes of several kinds.
Microsoft and other tech companies
and their hiring practices are encouraging lots
of migration from China, India, and other Asian nations.
And the Asian American population
has quadrupled since 1990.
And people, as you can see, are living nearly everywhere.
Latino numbers have increased fivefold,
and that population is settling mostly
in South King County and South Seattle.
Here's what's happening to Black people.
The numbers have increased.
They've actually doubled,
but not at the same rate as other communities of color.
And spatially, the changes are different too.
The map over here shows this big move to the South,
Southeast, Seattle, South King County,
Representative Taylor's district down there.
But look what's happening in the Central District.
Gentrification is literally pushing people out of the CD.
The densities above in 1970,
some of those census tracts were 90% Black, and by 2020,
they're 90% not Black.
Some of this movement is voluntary.
A lot of it has to do with rising rents forcing people out.
So that's sort of the segregation desegregation story.
And these maps are very important and revealing,
but I've come to see that the focus on segregation
misses a bigger issue.
For generations, Black and Asian people were simply kept away.
Cities, counties,
and the state government enacted policies of racial exclusion.
What's the difference? Segregation exclusion.
Segregation systems mandate separate spaces
on the basis of race.
Exclusion grants no space or minimal space.
Exclusion policies aim to keep certain people out,
to preserve space for Whites only.
This map demonstrates the effects of exclusion as of 1970.
Look at the White spaces here.
Black folks were not allowed to live in North Seattle
or on the East Side in 1970.
If you can see the actual numbers here,
those aren't percents.
That's the total number of African Americans living
in the census tracts of about 4,000 to 5,000 people.
Some of these areas have zero or one or two African Americans.
Only six Black Americans resided in Bothell.
Handful in Kirkland and Bellevue.
And here, I've kind of pumped up the numbers
so that you can actually see them.
You've heard the term, sundown town?
Yeah? Hope so. These were places
where Black people were supposed to be gone by sunset.
They could work there
as domestic servants doing something,
but then they had to go.
Although we haven't found official declarations
to that effect,
it's clear that many Eastside and North County
areas operated as sundown zones
with the help of law enforcement.
And that seems to describe the whole county, Snohomish County.
Black and Asian people simply were not allowed
to live there as late as 1970.
Only 1,000 African Americans
and less than 1,000 Asian Americans
resided in the entire County. And the one census tract
where numbers were not tiny is Monroe Penitentiary.
Why were Black and Asian people not living in these areas?
Was it a matter of choice?
Was it because there were no jobs?
Absolutely not.
These areas practiced intense housing exclusion backed up
by threats and violence.
It was too difficult and too dangerous to rent
or buy in these all-White areas.
I'm going to demonstrate the mechanics of this form
of exclusion
and show how it interacts with our history
of migration and population growth.
Migration. That should be our middle name.
As John Finley explained,
Washington has been a population magnet since the 1850s
with boosters and businesses
constantly trying to attract newcomers and developers
racing to subdivide land and build housing.
Migration has been the Washington story for 170 years
and I think the numbers just passed 8 million
in the last month or so.
But not everyone has been welcomed,
and housing policy has been one of the most important ways
that the region has enforced exclusion.
Even when jobs were available,
it was difficult to come here and stay here
because of housing and property restrictions.
Josh Reid talked about land issues in detail
and I want to repeat a little in order to clarify
how land ownership works
and why today some people own so much landed property,
others some and many none.
In 1785, two years before the Constitution was adopted,
the brand-new United States introduced a system
of property rights that was unique at that time,
granting perpetual
and irreversible ownership to property distributed
by the federal government.
Most European nations at that time
made land ownership conditional,
subject to rulers who could revoke ownership.
Land titles under the land ordinance of 1785
conveyed unconditional and perpetual ownership,
meaning that those initially privileged could benefit from
and pass it on and sell and do whatever they wanted.
That was one aspect of the U.S. property system.
The other was the presumption that vast lands of the continent
could and should be taken from Indigenous peoples
to be redistributed by the federal government
to White settlers, settler colonialism.
Awarding full and permanent title,
turning open lands as they were understood
by Indigenous peoples, into privately owned land.
That was the system in place in 1851
when the Denny Party claimed huge tracts of land
around Elliott Bay.
And in 1855,
when Governor Isaac Stevens coerced the Puget Sound peoples
into giving up most of their lands.
And this map from 1876 is showing what lands were
and lost in those treaties.
The territorial land office then began to distribute it
to White settlers,
who as first owners established the chain of title of ownership.
Everyone in this room who owns a house or land
traces their claim of ownership, their right to that property,
back to these original land distributions.
In the decades that followed,
local and state
governments established additional rules governing
use and access,
and racial exclusion was the goal at various stages.
In 1865,
the Seattle Council passed an ordinance declaring it unlawful
for Indians to reside in town.
You can see the ordinance here.
Seattle was not yet a municipality,
and the ordinance was dropped when it became a city in 1869.
Probably because Henry Yesler
and the other mill owners argued
that their Coast Salish workers were vital to their business.
But the 1865 ordinance signified something more lasting.
It was the first in a long line of policies and practices
that governments in the region
would establish to exclude anyone who was not White.
Chinese people were the next victims.
Several thousand Chinese had come to the territory
in the 1870s to work on railroad construction
and in mining and timber camps.
In 1885,
White workers organized driving out campaigns
throughout the West.
Near Issaquah,
three Chinese were killed and six wounded in an attack.
Another attack drove Chinese workers out
of the Black Diamond and Newcastle coal towns.
The mayor of Tacoma then led a mob,
and you can see the poster here,
attacking that city's Chinese district.
Seattle was next. And three days of violence,
nearly the entire population of Chinese were forced to flee.
Five years later,
gunfire and mob violence were used against Black coal miners
at Franklin and Newcastle.
Here's an article from a Seattle newspaper spreading the fear
of The Black Train headed for King County.
These are examples of
how job opportunities could attract workers of color
while organized campaigns of White workers
made life untenable in Washington state.
Meanwhile, as shown on these maps,
Seattle was beginning the population boom
that John Finley detailed,
attracting more than 200,000 newcomers
in the two decades following 1890.
They came from many states and many European countries.
There's a list of those where people were born.
And you'll see on that list
that only 20% of the state's population
was actually born in Washington, and they're almost all children.
Virtually all adults had come from somewhere else,
and that somewhere else was either Europe
or the United States.
They're virtually all White.
Japanese immigrants were the exception in this time period,
and they faced the same kind of hostility
that had greeted Chinese immigrants.
But now the tools of exclusion were changing
as local and state governments created laws and instruments
to control access to housing and property.
This page from the Seattle Star
in 1919 endorses the campaign launched by Miller Freeman,
who declared, this is White man's country.
Freeman,
that's a name people in Bellevue will know
because of the Freeman real estate empire, which he started.
Freeman was particularly focused on Japanese families
who had secured land for farming.
Japanese farmers grew berries, vegetables,
and other crops in Bellevue, Renton, Kent Valley,
and Bainbridge Island.
They managed to lease or buy land despite the state's
alien land law,
a measure that had been added to the state constitution
in 1889 aimed at Chinese people.
The law banned ownership of land by aliens,
but here's the important quote.
Aliens other than those who in good faith
have declared their intention to become citizens
of the United States.
This was cleverly worded to allow European immigrants
to own land while barring Asian immigrants
because only White immigrants could apply for citizenship.
When Japanese families found loopholes
in the original version,
the legislature passed new alien land laws in 1921 and 1924.
By the end of the 1920s,
the number of farms in Japanese hands statewide had fallen 65%,
although some were able to work under contract
for the new White owners.
Whole communities were lost, especially on the east side
where Miller Freeman crowed, quote,
"The people of this country never invited you here.
You were not welcome.
You've created an abnormal situation in our midst
for which you are to blame."
Do you know when those laws were repealed?
-The '50s.
-The '50s? Nah.
So the JACL, Japanese American Citizens League,
after World War II began campaigns
to get rid of these racist laws.
And twice they managed to persuade lawmakers
to put measures on the ballot to repeal the law.
In 1960, that ballot measure failed.
In 1962, it failed.
It's not until 1966
that this state could come around to repealing
the alien land laws.
It wasn't easy for Asians or African Americans
to live in the city either.
Here we see Seattle's 1920 tiny non-White populations
and where they were forced to live.
An overcrowded area of boarding houses,
residential hotels, and apartments
that was much later bulldozed and repurposed.
So this inset map shows you approximately where,
if you see the Japanese population, the largest there,
this is what that area is now.
It was later bulldozed, freeways,
and industrial area now,
apart from what's left of Chinatown and Nihonmachi.
Chinese and Japanese people shared this area with Filipinos
and some of the city's Black population.
The Black population had grown slowly
and numbered less than 3,000 in 1920.
Some people had moved short distances from coal towns
that had been the focus of violence.
Others arrived from the Midwest.
This was not the Great Migration out of the South
that delivered hundreds of thousands of people
from the cotton belt
to the big cities of the Northeast and Midwest.
African Americans came to Washington in small numbers
and often didn't stay.
Job opportunities were the lure.
Some employers were interested in Black workers,
in part to undermine the powerful unions in the area,
unions that were only open to Whites.
That hostility was an obstacle, so was the problem of housing.
Unlike the Midwestern and Eastern cities
that attracted Black Southerners in this period in
and around World War I,
Seattle did not have an established Black neighborhood
where newcomers could find housing.
Instead, they competed for scarce rentals
in the Asian district
and in lodging houses in the Skid Road Pioneer Square area.
But there was one possibility for those with resources.
William Grose, seen here,
had purchased 12 acres from Henry Yesler in 1882;
12 acres that now surround the intersection
of Madison and 23rd.
Grose was one of the first Black residents of Washington
and a successful entrepreneur.
His land purchase would become important
to the subsequent growth of Black Seattle.
In the following decades,
his son sold lots to Black professionals and merchants
who built houses
and established a tiny Black middle class neighborhood.
That's the Grose house built in the 1890s.
I think it was destroyed 20, 30 years ago.
It's no longer there, as far as I can tell.
This story illustrates a key housing challenge
for the Black community.
Whites and Asians were unlikely to rent to Black folks.
Black entrepreneurs were going to have to buy
or build much of the housing the community would need.
And for a population without initial wealth,
that was a problem.
Starting in the 1920s, there were new challenges.
New governments supplied tools of exclusion.
Zoning ordinance for one thing.
In 1923, Seattle adopted its first zoning plan.
The idea was to keep pure residential neighborhoods
separated from industrial and mixed-use areas.
There was no mention of race in the 1923 plan,
but the new designation of single-family residential areas
would support exclusion in other ways.
Now I want to turn to the research
that we've done in the past three years
with the support of the legislature,
the HB 1335 that Representative Taylor mentioned.
It's been about two and a half years
and some of the people who worked with me
on this project are here.
We are charged with identifying the hundreds of neighborhoods
throughout western Washington and the Eastern Washington --
EWT is doing Eastern Washington.
The hundreds of neighborhoods
were racially restrictive covenants,
prevented people of color and sometimes Jews from buying.
But also from renting or even occupying housing.
Restrictive covenants are documents recorded
at the county recorder's office.
They're recorded by property owners
and they legally bind them and more important future owners,
not to sell, not to lease,
not to rent their property to specified racial
or religious groups.
There's an example, there are a couple there,
here's one you can read.
"No person or persons of Asiatic
or African blood or lineage or extraction
shall be permitted to occupy a portion of said property
or any building thereon except domestic servant or servants
who may be employed in good faith by White occupants
of said premises." To date,
our project has identified more than 50,000
restricted properties in the Puget Sound region
and the Eastern Washington folks are adding to that.
This includes 34,000, Sophia Dowling,
the project coordinator is here and she said,
"Actually I think we're about 37,000."
But anyway, at least 34,000 in King County,
4,000 in Snohomish County,
5,000 in Pierce County and the other counties,
several thousand apiece.
And you can see maps like this and Liz Peng who's here
and designs all these cool maps would be very happy
if you would do that. So here's another type of map
we produce that is zeroing in on the actual subdivisions.
Other maps will show properties and you can look up addresses.
But this kind of map is focusing on subdivisions
and providing information about who the developer is
and when it was developed and other things.
As you can see on the right, the language of restriction varies.
Some, many, maybe most, simply say Whites or Caucasians only.
But others itemize banned populations
and the language is offensive and confusing.
Deeds to property in the Broadmoor neighborhood
on the other side of Montlake can read, quote,
"No part of said property hereby conveyed shall ever be used
or occupied by any Hebrew or by any person of the Ethiopian,
Malay or Asiatic race."
Hebrew meant Jews, Ethiopian meant all Africans,
not just Ethiopians.
Malay meant Filipinos.
And here's one that's truly eye-opening.
The man who sold a small group of properties
in Clyde Hill restricted it to members of the Aryan race,
invoking Hitler's racial categories.
And what's worse, he added this restriction in 1946 and 1947.
Whoa. Hitler was dead.
Nazi crimes and the Holocaust were well known.
In fact, the Nuremberg trials and executions
had been worldwide news, 1947.
So who started this?
Covenants were largely the work of real estate professionals.
The National Association of Realtors
campaigned for deed restrictions starting in the 1920s.
In 1926, the Supreme Court, the US Supreme Court ruled
that covenants were legal and enforceable.
And after that decision,
it's off to the races by the real estate industry.
Here's Article 14 of the Association's Code of Ethics.
Realtors could lose membership and access to listings
if they helped a person of color move into a White neighborhood.
That remained in effect until 1950.
It wasn't until the 1970s
that the Association adopted a statement
against racial discrimination.
The term redlining is often used these days
to cover all sorts of segregation practices
or as a synonym for segregation.
But it actually refers to lending practices
by banks and mortgage companies.
The term redlining emerged in the 1930s
when the federal government's Home Owners Loan Corporation
and the Federal Housing Administration, the FHA,
were established.
The Roosevelt administration was trying
to address the housing crisis.
Millions of homes had been lost to foreclosure
in the Great Depression and banks
were not offering mortgages or loans.
HOLC produced maps
for lenders to mark neighborhoods considered safe
or hazardous for mortgage lending.
Racially mixed neighborhoods were always coded red,
hence the term redlining.
Meanwhile, the FHA invented the 30-year amortized mortgage
and proceeded over the next three decades
to expand homeownership.
But all that was sharply racialized.
FHA guidelines expressly advocated restrictive covenants.
So I thought I'd highlight some of the companies and individuals
who were responsible for restricting huge swaths
of the region,
starting with the Puget Mill Company,
also known as Pope and Talbot, also known as Walker Ames.
You're laughing.
Why are we laughing?
Some of us just attended a reception upstairs
in the Walker-Ames room.
And others of you at other times.
And maybe you've been invited
to the University of Washington President's Mansion,
otherwise known as the Walker-Ames Mansion.
So Edwin Ames ran Puget Mill Company
and before him Cyrus Walker.
And Puget Mill Company was responsible
for subdividing enormous tracts of land,
especially around Lake Washington
and then up into Snohomish County,
ever heard of Alderwood or Linwood.
That was Puget Sound Mill Company at one point.
They didn't restrict all of it,
but they restricted a lot of it, including Broadmoor here.
Some of you may know where that is, Madison Valley.
Yeah, there's the restriction for Broadmoor.
"No part of said property hereby conveyed shall ever be used
or occupied by any Hebrew or by any person of the Ethiopian,
Malay, or Asiatic race."
I think we had actually read that before.
So okay, how about the Colman Company?
So J.M. Colman Company was one
of the most venerable companies in Seattle.
They had built the Colman Docks, now the Ferry Terminal,
and many real estate projects.
In the 1920s, the company bought 90 acres north of Laurelhurst.
But the Great Depression stalled activity until the mid-1930s
when the company subdivided Windermere into 304 parcels,
restricting them to persons of the, quote,
"White and Gentile race."
Then something interesting happened.
Voters had recently elected a progressive city council,
and two of the new city council members took action
when the Colman Company tried to record a plat for Windermere.
A plat is a document showing streets and property lines.
Without it,
the city won't take responsibility
for maintaining the streets and sewers and the like.
And as you can see, the city council rejected the plat.
But Windermere, the Coleman Company,
went ahead with development, maintaining its restrictions.
In 1926 and '27,
William and Bertha Boeing purchased vast tracts of land
in Northwest Seattle and Shoreline,
planning to subdivide and develop them.
The first of them called Blue Ridge.
The economic crisis interrupted things until 1935,
with sales picking up in the 1940s.
Altogether, the Boeing sold almost a thousand homes
and parcels with the Whites-only restriction.
Here's another familiar name. The founder of the John L.
Scott Realty Company was an active restrictor,
urging property owners to add language to their deeds.
In 1960,
he also played a prominent role in trying
to keep the Henry family from moving
into the Uplands neighborhood near Seward Park.
A KUOW report, you see this, recently told the story.
Dr. Henry was a cardiologist
who bought property with the help of a White friend
and built a house in the Uplands.
When John L.
Scott learned
that a Black family might soon become neighbors,
he led a campaign to keep them out
and eventually personally offered to buy out the Henry's
financial investment.
The offer was rejected. I do want to update this.
The Scott's heirs later apologized for this
and other actions undertaken by the company.
The Great Migration finally reached Seattle
during World War II.
The term, I think,
I've already said,
refers to the migration of Black folks out of the South
that had been very consequential for cities
in the Midwest and Northeast, starting 25 years earlier.
Housing problems had deflected interest away from Seattle,
but as defense industries called for workers in this region
during the war, the story began to change.
But housing remained an issue.
Where would you live?
A tragic opportunity opened
when 7,000 Japanese American Seattle residents were shipped
off to concentration camps.
Black newcomers moved into their apartments.
The Great Migration continued for several decades,
bringing the Black population to 27,000 in 1960, 38,000 in 1970.
But these numbers would have been higher
had housing been available.
As you can see in this 1960 map,
everyone was crammed into the Central District.
Here's Dorothy Hollingsworth describing her disappointment
at finding that things in this area
were little different than her --
in her native, North Carolina.
Years later, after coming here,
she would be elected to the Seattle School Board.
Three months ago, her granddaughter,
Joy Hollingsworth, was elected to the Seattle City Council.
Let's see if I can get this to play.
-I expected that we would all be one here.
And when I saw this separatism, that kind of surprised me.
But I was surprised, but it didn't overwhelm me.
For instance,
I went over to Port Orchard one day with my husband
who was buying some material over there.
And it was hot.
And I went in and asked, says, "I'd like a Coke, please."
And so the manager of the little restaurant says,
"Well, I can sell it to you, but you can't drink it in here."
And that, to me, was a bit much.
So then I began to think, gee, you may be a long way from home,
but the practice isn't so different.
-And here's Judge Charles Johnson describing
the housing challenges.
-Actually shut down the schools as far
as African-Americans was concerned
and created our own school to point out the fact
that the schools here was segregated just
like they were in the South. And they were.
And, of course, housing patterns created a great deal of this
because all the Blacks were stayed in a confined area
in the Central District.
And we were people who actually had come here,
were doing well, engineers, school teachers,
and others couldn't buy a house outside of the Central Area.
And there was nice homes everywhere.
And they were having trouble getting into houses.
And we had, we used the subterfuges
to get people into the house.
They had White people buying houses,
selling them back to Blacks.
All of this was going on.
You didn't have to try and convince people
that there were problems.
They could see them.
They couldn't do what everybody else was doing here.
Those who, African-Americans here couldn't get a house
where they wanted to get a house.
They had trouble getting jobs like other people,
even though they were qualified for those jobs.
The children had to go to schools
in the segregated schools
because they were primarily segregated at that time.
And now if you found a school
that had what you consider better education
than the schools in the Central Area,
because the schools in the Central Area
did measure up with schools outside of the Central Area,
you couldn't have your child go there even
if you could take your child over there every day to go.
So you didn't have to get people a hard time getting people --
you didn't have a hard time getting people
to become involved because this was affecting their way of life
here on a daily basis.
-What role --
-So let's clarify the legal standing of racial restrictions.
Until 1948, they were fully enforceable in courts of law,
and a property owner who decided to sell to a person of color
could be held liable for damages and the sale voided.
In 1948,
the Supreme Court changed its mind and ruled
that state courts should not be responsible for enforcement.
The ruling did very little.
Restrictions remained fully legal
and new ones were added over the next 20 years.
And all along court cases had been rare.
Restrictions were enforced in other ways
by real estate professionals refusing to show properties,
as you heard here,
by hostile neighbors who made it really difficult,
as in the case of the Henry's,
to move into a White neighborhood.
In the 1950s and '60s,
civil rights activists conducted campaigns trying in various ways
to break the cycle of housing restrictions.
In 1964, they secured a ballot measure in Seattle
that would have established an open housing law,
something that had already been done in about 60 cities.
Seattle voters rejected it by a margin of 2 to 1.
And you can see here a newspaper ad produced
by the real estate interest urging a no vote
and claiming that the law would limit property rights.
Now the irony which these people didn't get
is that restrictive covenants already limited property rights,
preventing owners from selling to whomever they wanted.
Finally in 1968,
in the months after the assassination
of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
Congress passed the Fair Housing Act,
making discrimination illegal.
And Seattle passed a similar law.
I want to say a little more about acts of resistance
prior to the 1968 change in law.
Brave families all along had taken risks
to find housing outside the tight central district ghetto.
And sometimes they paid a steep price.
In 1941,
as job opportunities lured African Americans to the region
while housing scarcity made life difficult,
a teacher and civil rights activists,
Carl Brooks and his family,
managed to move into a modest home in Shoreline,
only to face a campaign of terror
that culminated in a bombing
that endangered the lives of their children.
This newspaper report is in a left wing weekly,
the New Dealer, it was called, is interesting for two reasons.
First, they note that none of the mainstream newspapers
have reported the incident.
The fact that this explicit act of racially motivated terror
was ignored by major media indicates
how pervasive the consensus was in institutions of power
that segregation should be enforced.
Second, the article reports
that the county sheriff had known about, and quote,
"Not disapproved of the intimidation campaign
up to the time of the bombing."
This is an indication that the sheriff's
office was involved in sundown town enforcements
in the unincorporated sections of King County.
Kent was another sundown area,
which a few families tried to open in 1964.
They were greeted with bombs and shotguns.
I hope these stories clarify that violent
White supremacist attacks were not limited to the South.
The murderous violence organized by the Klan and Mississippi
and other states in the early 1960s was more deadly,
but this was also scary and serious.
And it wasn't just Kent.
Here's a nearby example, very nearby.
A mixed-race couple, Ray and Marion West,
were active in civil rights campaigns.
In 1952,
they bought a boarding house just a few blocks
from here with the intention of renting rooms to Black students
who otherwise couldn't live near the university.
They endured years of harassment,
culminating in a cross burning in 1958.
Worried about their children's safety,
they gave up and moved to the Central District.
Here's Marion West.
-Thrown at us at times
and we got firecrackers thrown into the house
and even a cross burned in our yard at one time.
We called the authorities when that happened
and the police came out and got the cross,
which was a great big thing.
And it was burned in the night next to the room
where my children were sleeping.
We were on the other side of the house, so we didn't know it.
It was really scary afterwards when we found out about it.
-Did anybody step forward to take credit for it?
-No. -What was the police response?
-Nothing more than the fact that they took it.
-They didn't investigate? -I don't know.
If they did, they never came by our place to tell us anything.
-Okay,
so we've just been going through a lot of history here.
Enough of the history. Is this just history?
The laws changed in 1968.
Restrictive covenants are no longer legal.
Why should we care? Does this history matter?
Yes. Yes, emphatically yes.
And I want to show you some of the reasons why.
It has to do with home ownership.
Restrictions suppressed home ownership and wealth building
opportunities for Americans of color
who were locked out of most neighborhoods
and secondly had trouble obtaining loans
because of redlining, all through the post-war decades.
This is the era
when federal subsidies are helping
most White families become homeowners.
As restrictions eased in the decades
since the '70s, it was too late.
Rising prices then became an enormous obstacle
and that's why families of color are less likely to own homes
and their homes are worth less on average than White families
who've been accumulating real estate wealth for generations.
So here's some data. I know you like charts.
Everybody likes charts, right? I really like charts.
I do data. So here we go. Historians doing data.
These are home ownership rates by race each decade since 1970.
The blue line, blue area represents Black home ownership.
Red is White. Green is Latino. And lavender is Asian Americans.
And you can see here, well if you look at the far right,
you see how bad things are;
62% of White families in this county
are homeowners compared to only 28% of Black families, 28%.
That is so much lower than the national average, 44%,
which is already of course
much lower than White national average.
But so much lower.
And it's nearly the lowest in any city in the country.
I think Minneapolis is slightly lower.
Otherwise, even cities with very expensive housing,
Washington D.C., New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco,
do better than Seattle on this.
And you can see the other disturbing part, the trend line.
In 1970, 50% of African American households owned homes, now 28%.
It's declined decade after decade.
Why?
Well home equity and price
escalation have a lot to do with this.
So here are median prices or values by race in decade.
Again, blue is Black, red is White.
And you can see in every decade, the homes owned by Black,
Latino families in King County
are consistently worth less than those owned by Whites.
Only 75% in the most recent account.
So this fact,
adding to the problem that began of suppressing home ownership,
helps explain the declining home ownership rates
for Black families.
You have to look at that trend line here.
The exponential increase in the price of homes since 1970.
It's rocketed up.
In 2022, the median home value, this is across all races,
the median home value in King County was 35 times
what it had been in 1970.
Median home value of 790,000 versus 22,500,
50 years early, has a 3,500% increase.
This far exceeds inflation
and/or the rate of increase in family incomes.
The rate of increase in family incomes
across these five decades is about 10 to 1.
About 1,000%, as opposed to 3,500%.
So how does that work?
A family selling a full valued home
can take advantage of this rocketing market,
exchanging one house for another,
or dispersing the housing assets through inheritance.
But a family trying to buy for the first time
in the post covenant restriction decades,
and those selling undervalued homes,
needed much higher incomes to buy property.
The point is that in the last three decades,
buyers have needed wealth to get started.
Wealth in the form of inheritance or high paying jobs.
Highly paid business and professional class
migrants from California, New York,
here's the California one -- from California, New York
and across the Pacific,
have been able to join this pricey housing market.
While those with average incomes and without
family property wealth have lost out.
The enormous disadvantage
that Black families facing King County is made clear
when we consider income.
As this chart does. So here, Black in blue, red.
We're looking at different income categories.
And in every single one,
Black homeownership is less than White.
For families earning more than 150,000,
the differential is about, you know, 9%.
But look how the differential increases.
Twenty percent lower for some of these categories.
And when you get to modest incomes,
imagine trying to buy a house with a modest income.
Impossible.
But quite a few White families own homes,
even though their income is in the 50 to $75,000 range
or even under 50,000.
But if you're under 50,000,
how do you explain that 38% family wealth?
That's inheritance.
That's multi-generational home transfers
and with it, wealth transfer.
That's the only way people with modest incomes can own homes.
And African Americans have not had that family wealth
because they were shut out of the housing market
in the critical early phase.
Okay. How about some good news?
Last year, the legislature passed a pioneering law written
and sponsored by Representative Taylor,
along with Representative Frank Chopp
and State Senator John Lovick.
It's a first in the nation effort to provide
financial compensation to the victims of generations
of government-sponsored housing discrimination.
It takes effect in a few months
and it should do some really good things
for housing opportunities here.
Representative Taylor, would you come up here and help us?
Help me?
[ Applause ]
So I think that's on and I think we have to stand apart.
-Okay.
-But I have another slide I wanted to click first.
So this is Governor Inslee signing the bill
and to his immediate right, as you're seeing,
is the sponsor, the person who,
you know, made this all possible.
And so, well,
do you have any thoughts about what this law is going to do?
-Yeah.
I think what's important about this law
and what's unique about it is that we shape it
in the form of a tort claim.
So if you were a person
who was present in the state of Washington,
present, present, that means --
and you were subjected to those racially restrictive covenants
in 1968, you would be eligible for this program
if you meet the qualifications.
But what makes it reparative justice, reparative justice,
is that we are including their descendants.
So if I'm a Washingtonian
who can say I'm a descendant of William Grose,
even though I wasn't born until 1975,
I'd be eligible for this program.
In fact, my family didn't arrive until Washington State
until after 1968,
so I specifically am not eligible for the program.
So it's the first step in trying to figure out
how to address these harms that were state sponsored.
They were intentional
and they had generational impact on Washingtonians.
And trying to make sure that our colleagues understood, one,
there were Black folks in Washington State before 1968.
In fact, we were part of the initiation of the entire state.
We had an African-American
who was part of the first legislature in 1889.
And then also figuring out how to reach the communities
that were most impacted by this legislature.
Many people are excited about this effort,
but also say that we don't go far enough.
And that just means that we have more work
to do and other ways to do this reparative justice.
-And so, if I recall correctly,
the law specifically says
that the state of Washington caused the harm.
So it's a harm-based. It's not just --
-it is very specific.
And what's unique about the way we've drafted this,
we're looking at racially restrictive covenants.
We didn't have enslavement in Washington State.
So when people are thinking about reparations
and the folks who are African-descendant
of enslaved people,
we are going specifically to something
that we can identify a harm in Washington State.
Direct harm.
-And then, do I have this correct?
The Covenant Home Ownership Program will provide
mortgage assistance in the form of no interest
down payment loans to first-time home buyers
with incomes below the area median,
who were victims of property exclusion before 1968,
including their descendants.
-Including their descendants.
And one of the ways that we are looking at
how do you establish that?
We're looking at genealogical accepted standards.
So if you can show that your, you know,
grandfather worked for Boeing in 1948, that's proof.
If you can show birth certificate.
If you can show lease agreements --
not that many people have lease agreements
because, you know, rent.
Then there's ways that you can show
how your family is connected.
And it's anyone who would have been subjected
to those racially restrictive Covenants.
So it's not just Black folks,
even though Black folks were excluded in all
of the racially restrictive covenants.
But in similar areas,
you know, Latinos, indigenous people, Asians,
and other folks who were also discriminated against.
And it was very fascinating
to watch the multiracial coalition come together on this
with concerted effort.
And we were surprised to get the realtors to support this
because realtors do what realtors do.
And some of the vestiges of their policies
and their activism is alive
and well today in terms of very similar rhetoric
that you saw in the lecture. -Yeah.
But I was surprised during the hearings
when the representative of the Washington Realtors said, yeah.
He said, it's time, right? We need to make amends.
-Yes. -Yeah.
And how much money,
or tell us about the financial parts of this?
-So, this is funded by a document recording fee.
And in Washington state,
we already have one of the highest document recording fees
available in a real estate transaction.
So it goes from $150 to about $250
in a real estate transaction.
So Washington, you're paying a house,
buying a house for $400,000.
That's $250 of that transaction
is going towards the document recording fee.
And then $100 of that
is helping to address this particular concern.
-So it establishes an account which will then fund these.
And they're loans, right?
-They are loans
that will be forgivable by our intent in the future.
We haven't legislated for that,
but there are ways to forgive loans,
but also transfer the property to the next generation.
So we don't want to give this opportunity
and then snatch it away when someone is attempting
to let their children transfer the property to their children
and they would lose the benefit of the equity
that they would have received from the mortgage
down payment assistance.
-But if somebody takes the loan and then sells the house,
they have to pay back the loan?
-If they sell the house outside of the qualifications,
that part of the mortgage would probably be addressed.
But we haven't gotten to that point yet.
-Right.
And are there any guesses about how many loans
or how much money will be available?
-So we're working on a scheme
that would allow us to determine that based on region
and the size of the home
and the types of mortgage down payments
that could be available.
So for example, a home in Spokane, Washington,
$500,000 may need 10% down. That's $50,000.
We designed it so that this would be a program
that can stack on top of other down payment assistance programs
and ensuring that people have access to the market.
Again, you have to qualify for the mortgage.
And so, even with your modest income,
we want to make sure that you have access
to purchasing a home in the communities
that you really do want to live in,
but also in the community
that supports your desire
to build intergenerational wealth and stability.
-Right.
And I know that you and other attorneys
who are drafting this legislation
were doing so with one eye on the Supreme Court
that is abolishing anything that looks like affirmative action.
-Yeah.
That's why this is shaped more like a tort claim.
So if you can demonstrate, again, presence in the state
and you're part of the racially restricted --
protected individuals,
then you would be qualified for this particular program.
So we wanted to tie the reparative justice
to the harm that was caused.
If there was another opportunity for us to do that
in other areas like business development,
we would find some way in that particular way to address it.
But the fact that we see
how the compounding impacts of these restrictions
led to hostility of neighbors,
hostility of being able to be in the community
after a certain amount of time.
I was today's years old when I found out
that Kent was a sundown town today.
I learned today about Kent.
That is technically next to my district.
And these are things that are really critical
for us to understand and under --
and incorporating into how we make policies moving forward
so that we're not layering new policies
that actually continue to exacerbate the problems.
-Great.
I think we should invite Professor Bianca Dang,
who is tasked with asking us both questions.
Now there will be three of us on here.
[ Applause ]
And I'll go over here.
-First of all, I want to say thank you so much,
Representative Taylor.
Thank you so much, Professor Gregory, for this amazing talk.
Representative Taylor,
when you said that you're working on loan forgiveness
with this, that just made my heart lift.
And so thinking through the just creative ways
that this is a continuing process is so inspiring.
So I guess that opens my first question
while we wait for audience questions.
I really loved Representative Taylor
when you said this is thinking about history and thinking about
where we as a community can meet the moment, right?
And thinking about this as part of that.
And this made me think about one of our colleagues
in the real estate department, Gregg Colburn,
just published a book called Homelessness
is a Housing Crisis, thinking about kind of not just Seattle,
but Seattle is one of the case studies involved.
And so this made me think kind of I came back to this
when Professor Gregory,
you were talking about the history of redlining, right?
And this emerging from lending practices
that came from the Roosevelt administration's
response to the housing crisis.
And so for -- this is for both of you.
So thinking about
how do you see this contemporary crisis and Professor Gregory,
you kind of talked about this at the end,
but this contemporary crisis we're in with housing.
As emerging from the history
that we've learned today in the lecture,
and the racialized --
what are the racialized dimensions
of our current housing crisis
that kind of don't get as much air time,
but that are actually really integral for thinking about
not only the effects of these historical, you know,
state sponsored efforts,
but also processes of gentrification today.
So thinking about kind of how do you see this emerging from that?
-Thank you for reminding me why I stay awake all night long.
There's a lot to unpack there, I would say.
I mean, in terms of policy making,
we need to look at what kinds of new policies
actually can undo some of these harms.
For example,
you know, there's a disproportionate number
of African Americans and folks of color who are, you know,
racially segregated into certain industries
that have lower incomes.
And so they might be more likely to be renters.
And so the constant conversation about
how do we keep the rental prices at a stabilized level
so that it's just stability, just stability.
That way we can have communities that are more consistent.
In my particular community,
we have about 42% renters,
and you can imagine the churn of having to move every year
because your rent goes up 10% over 10% over 10%.
And one of the reasons
why people buy homes is that your mortgage is 30 year fixed
or at zero if you were able to inherit it.
So when you're a part of a community
that is not able to access that, you know,
generational wealth and you're constantly renting,
and even the policies like the HUD policy
that allows you to move into subsidized housing,
but how dare you have extra income
because you might lose your subsidy.
So you're in this hamster wheel of not being able to cycle out.
Don't even think about bringing extra people in your household
so you can combine your efforts,
not only combine your efforts and save them on resources,
but save the environment.
You know, think about how those policies
that are designed to help and create a safety net
also are like the iron maiden. -Yeah. Absolutely.
I mean, all things that I think about all the time.
So thank you.
-So let me add a historical dimension
that I think people don't always understand.
For the last 40 years
we've been taught by the real estate industry
especially that buying a home is an investment.
It's a way to make money. But for generations
and especially in the '30s with the Roosevelt administration,
racist though it was, the idea was you buy a home to live in.
It wasn't expected to increase in value.
It was just,
you know, it was there to be used, not invested in.
So this price appreciation that happens everywhere
is driven by an expectation, by a story.
This is the way to make money.
And yes, for those who play it well,
it's like investing in the stock market.
But that shift from a good that was for use to a good
that was for investment is part of this nightmare.
And it means there's not enough property for everyone.
There's homelessness and people being -- you know,
renters especially very vulnerable.
-And think about the ecosystem.
When you have seniors who can't move out of their home
and downsize into affordable living situations
so that the next generation can buy their first home.
It creates this stop gap
where folks are not able to get into the market
because the market is completely skewed at this point.
-Thank you, both.
And so now I have audience questions.
And so one of our high school students from Nathan Hale,
I'm going to start with the first question.
They are asking
if you could kind of give us a little bit more
of an explanation between the difference
between racial segregation and racial exclusion,
really thinking about kind of, you know,
the nuts and bolts of it.
-Well, so in cities across the country,
there is and has been, you know, practices of racial segregation.
Cities like Chicago and New York
have been historically segregated
and African Americans --
and much more segregated now than our area.
Because gentrification has broken that up.
But all along there were Black areas as well as White areas.
And so when newcomers arrived, there was some place
for them to squeeze into.
But a city like this
and some of these West Coast cities that practiced exclusion,
intentionally keeping people out.
And then these housing policies that left no space,
essentially, not divided by race, just no space.
That's different.
So especially in the West,
we see and it starts with excluding Asian origin people,
first Chinese immigrants and then --
but then it kind of rolls right into excluding Black people.
-Thank you. So another historical question.
How effective were civil rights groups
and their activism in fighting restrictive covenants
prior to 1968, prior to this federal kind of change?
Was there any movement
or was it really stuck in Seattle and King County?
-Oh, yeah.
So African American activists, you know,
the NAACP has had a chapter here since,
I think it was like 1913 or so, one of the first chapters.
NAACP and other Black community groups resisted, fought.
Various laws were passed. They tended to be very weak
and they weren't addressing housing in particular.
So activists,
including left wingers of various racial origins,
but especially the Black community,
the Filipino community was quite active.
In its own way,
the JACL, the Japanese American Citizens League,
worked on these things.
There were -- anybody know Mount Baker neighborhood nowadays?
So Mount Baker was subdivided
and restricted really early in the 20th century
and the subdivider didn't think to add race then
because there weren't very many people of color around.
But pretty quickly tried to keep African Americans out
and especially Japanese people
and sued people for selling properties.
But activists would keep trying to move in.
And in the 1930s,
the community club, Mount Baker Community association,
also tried to get the city to stop Japanese Americans
from using the park, the public park on Lake Washington.
And demanded
that the city park service keep Japanese people out.
But so the act of pressing for homes in areas
was a very brave thing to do.
Individuals did it, communities supported that.
You know, as those incidents I told you,
it was dangerous to be the only person trying
to move into one of those,
but people did it.
So all along there are great stories of, you know,
the efforts and then some of these efforts
were very well organized, especially in the '60s.
-So I'm going to ask an audience question
and kind of add mine on these.
I'd love to hear Representative Taylor's take on this.
So the historical one is how does Seattle --
how does Seattle's history of restrictive covenants
compare to that in other cities outside of Washington State?
But then I'd love to hear more about Representative Taylor
when you talked in the beginning about this being something
that other places are taking up.
So kind of thinking about not only the harms
that it kind of brought,
but also some of these reparative justice work
being done that is sparked by your work.
-I'm not a historian. I'm just the daughter of one.
-Well, you're looking at the pioneer here.
There are states that have seen this law
and they're thinking about it.
I think Nevada, the legislature just voted,
authorized the two universities to conduct the kind of study
that our legislature authorized three years ago.
They're not doing anything about it yet,
but you can see they're reading. They're following.
They know the story about HB 1474 is moving
and it's going to make a big difference.
-And as we were going through the process,
Massachusetts was looking at a similar effort
and they said, no, you go first.
So the states are really watching,
there are advocates who are in alignment with us.
I mean, one of the things
that was very quite interesting in this work
is it didn't take two --
about two seconds for someone to send a note into us saying,
this is reparations.
Yeah, it is.
But it's reparative justice,
which is really what we're trying to get at.
It is how do we repair the harms?
How do we move into a more inclusive economic future?
How do we ensure that we don't make these same mistakes over
and over and over again?
And I'll go back to the policymaking.
Just today we're in discussion,
if you will, about policies
that may benefit some homeowners in terms of weatherization,
adding solar panels,
things that could theoretically add value to your home.
If you have the cash value to or the cash on hand,
because there's a lot of folks who are very,
very cash poor in their homes to make those upgrades.
And then when you're ready to sell
or if you need to leverage for a second mortgage
or for whatever purpose,
your value is higher because you've made these upgrades.
A lot of Black families, this is one thing we have to look at,
maybe the next iteration of this project,
and this act would be how do we help existing homeowners
who were somehow able to survive these
racially restrictive covenants and purchase a home
but haven't been able to make the upgrades
because of all the systems that were in place
that kept them from improving the values of the home.
And we've already seen it where even in Seattle,
someone can, you know, put their house up for sale,
get it evaluated,
but if they have all the trinkets and, you know,
ideology and pictures and stuff of their Black family,
the evaluator with their self-conscious bias perhaps
and sometimes direct, you know, bias creates a lower home value.
So we've even looked at legislation
that would ensure that there's training for
and education for professionals working in the industry
so that we can reduce the amount of bias.
So it's not just about the harm that is happening
and the repair in that specific thing.
It's making sure that we have those other policies
that will support and sustain this effort, sustain the effort.
-Absolutely. Professor Gregory,
you mentioned that Black people were not allowed
to live in North Seattle,
but one of the maps showed Black people living
in almost every district even if it was very low numbers.
And so this audience member is asking how did that happen,
were they mostly domestic servants
or were they kind of people
who as you just mentioned were able to kind of go through a lot
of obstacles to get a home there.
-Yeah,
so the data we use doesn't give us quite the picture we want.
The chances are that many of those numbers refer to people
who have live-in jobs as domestic servants.
That would have been the safest way
to be living in one of those neighborhoods.
But there were, you know,
I gave you an example of people who managed and especially,
you know, by the 1950s, there were more and more pioneers,
they were called.
Literally, that was the term being used.
Pioneer could be the only Black family in that neighborhood,
but people were doing it. So little numbers like that
and also people who are working in homes.
-Okay.
And so the final question I have is,
I'm going to read the audience one
and then I have another like kind of tag on.
So are there any examples of legal cases brought
by White people against their White neighbors
who sold property to Black people
despite the restrictive covenants?
So thinking about like kind of,
that was a potential -- the violence was a potential,
and did it happen?
And then this makes me think the law is so important
in so many of these stories.
And also thinking about the current house bill, the law,
like you mentioned a number of times
that you're doing it as tort claim, right?
And so for our audience,
if you could explain why that makes that different
and why that kind of perhaps gives it more legal, I guess,
not coverage, but --
-A strategy, a legal strategy. -Yes, legal strategy.
There you go. Yes.
-You want me to start with that? -Yeah, you go.
-Well, the legal strategy is to connect the harm
specifically to the individual who is harmed.
And so one of the most significant challenges
with reparations is well, when did your family get here?
Or do you qualify?
Or, you know, you weren't in our state,
in Mississippi,
so therefore, you know, you shouldn't get any compensation.
There's just a whole host of things
that happen in the reparations conversation.
And there's a lot of discussions.
New York State just established its first
statewide reparations work group to address this issue.
I know Washington may be interested in establishing one,
I think the gubernatorial one.
Seattle has a work group that they have formed informally.
City of Evanston, Illinois.
There's a lot of interest
in actually going headlong into the reparations discussion.
How do you implement a program?
How do you -- is it a cash payment?
Is it a program or a structure? Who's eligible?
When we're thinking about a person who's, you know, Black,
for example,
you know,
what happens if your family immigrated here for reasons
that are around refugee status?
And yet you're still impacted by, quote, unquote,
"the war on drugs."
And so how do you repair the harm
in the criminal legal system when all those things happen?
And so every system is connected to another system,
connected to another system,
and finding a way to address the problem with specificity,
that allows us to actually do something.
And then of course there are people
who just simply want to write the check and walk away
and think that that's going to change structures.
And that doesn't necessarily, but I'm up for the conversation.
I'm up for the conversation and see how we build something.
-Right. Thank you.
-And I've forgotten what you asked me.
-Any legal cases of White neighbors
suing their neighbors if they sold them to a Black family?
-So there actually,
I think we have not found any enforcement lawsuits.
You know, that Mount Baker thing
where the developer was suing families,
there wasn't actually a restriction there.
And so the families who were being sued won.
It's a little different,
but it's kind of the reverse of what you're asking.
But it's one of those cases that really is very revealing.
So in 19-- many of the -- most of the cemeteries
restricted on the basis of race.
Washelli Cemetery up there in particular.
And in 1960,
a Black couple lost their son three years old
in a swimming pool accident.
And they tried to get a burial plot in Washelli.
And by then the state actually had an anti-discrimination law.
It wasn't specifically about restrictive governance,
but it said discrimination is against --
race discrimination is against the law.
So they then go, and Washelli sued them to block their effort
or they sued -- I forget who sued who.
But in any case, they simply want to bury their child.
And the cemetery says no because of the restrictive covenant.
It goes to the Supreme Court of Washington state
and the Supreme Court threw out the anti-discrimination law
that the legislature had passed.
And one of the judges said it's unconstitutional
because it interferes with the right to segregate.
That's 1960. -Yeah,
I mean our Supreme Court upheld
the racially restrictive covenants in 1961.
What I would say in terms of like thinking about
the Supreme Court of the United States,
they ruled against the universities
on affirmative action,
but now under question will be legacy admissions.
I mean, that affects University of Washington,
it affects all Harvard -- all these schools
that have historically been able to admit their students
through a connection to the school.
And if they've been racially discriminatory in the past,
that system,
that legacy admission is something
that may not be able to stand.
So they might have done something
that actually helps equity in ways
that maybe they didn't contemplate.
And so it's just interesting to see
where the law is going to go.
In particular,
you probably didn't see very many of those cases
because you have to have this concept called standing.
Are you the person who was harmed by it?
So bringing a case as a White person
against another White person,
how are you impacted by their transaction?
And so those are a little bit harder to navigate
in the court system.
So you want to have the person
who would have been discriminated against
in those particular cases.
So I think that, you know,
time is now to test out every theory and see
how far we can get.
You know, the civil rights movement was
not just about the activists who were on the picket lines.
There are folks who are in the courts fighting
in the legal system
and ensuring that the courts were upholding their part
of the bargain as well. -Yeah.
-Well, thank you both so much.
[ Applause ]