Diverse Signatory Made Easy

Diverse signatory

thank you for joining us for finding your roots washington i'm knut berger your host this evening this event is being recorded and will be available online for later viewing for those of you who've attended online events here in the past you'll notice that we're on a new platform we're excited about the change but you should know this is our first time flying this ship so bear with us if there are any hiccups as we go along okay on to the show tonight uh tonight's event complements the new season of finding your roots new episodes are tuesdays at 8pm on kcts kcts9 you can watch on your tv or your device at kcts.org kcts9.org since all of our channels have a live stream on the website tonight each of our speakers will give a five-minute talk on their area of expertise then we'll have a conversation with the full group and we'll incorporate audience questions submit yours in the chat and we'll get to as many as we can as we talk about the history of the puget sound region and its people over time it's important to recognize the original inhabitants and caretakers of the land most of us in attendance tonight live work and play on the traditional territories of the coast salish peoples we've shared a link in the chat to a cross-cut article that we hope will inspire you to advance your knowledge about the history of indigenous people in the region one of our audience members a muckleshoot tribe member asked us to remind everyone that quote indigenous tribes in the state live in contemporary times and still practice many ancient traditions thank you jackie for that reminder our speakers this evening are dr quintar taylor professor emeritus of history at the university of washington and founder of blackpass.org margaret o'mara historian and contributing new york times opinion writer warren king george oral historian for the muckleshoot tribe and josephine ensign uw professor of nursing focused on health policy so i'm going to start with a 30 30 000 foot view of the history of puget sound i'll be sharing historical photos as i talk if you've spent time in a forested area in the region you've probably seen a nurse log an old decaying log with new trees and plants growing from it it's a very pacific northwest image of the old giving way to the new but at the same time providing the energy for new growth to thrive at the same time there are many old growth trees that continue to thrive alongside new saplings what we see in our forests is a good metaphor for the region and how its people industry culture and identity change over time seattle grew out of this region the retreating glaciers left a magnificent landscape forests we just talked about deep waterways and a connection of puget sound to the pacific ocean there were hills that offered spectacular vistas of surrounding mountains salish peoples have been living and flourishing here since time immemorial chief seattle welcomed newcomer whites and had a vision for a community of cooperation that did not happen though the native peoples helped the settlers get settled when the euro-americans arrived to stay in 1851 and have played key roles in urban life ever since but the newbies wanted to build a big western style city they called it new york which says something about the roots of our ambition somewhat jokingly someone added the chinook jargon word word alki or alki meaning by and by it was later named briefly do womps and then seattle we became a big city in region not quite new york but something unique over time we've altered the natural physical landscape dramatically washing away hills cutting forests filling in tidelands building canals and islands draining lakes and making rivers run backwards we changed things in ways glaciers and time could not we weren't exactly eco-sensitive despite our self-image as a green place we're a region that has pulsed with booms and busts we thrived on eastside coal mines at places named newcastle or coal creek and a seemingly endless supply of timber that was cut to build victorian homes in san francisco despite this boom seattle itself burned to the ground in 1889 we built rebuilt it more durably and boomed with a kondike gold rush the last great case of gold fever in north america we mined the thousands of miners who passed through we sold them gear on their way to the yukon and took their money in saloons gambling dens and brothels on their return and we prospered it's been rocky we've experienced spurts and setbacks war depression racist exclusion two pandemics we sprawled as the landscape is allowed with the help of ferry boats and bridges and eventually freeways the cities in the region competed to be the main city the winner to be dubbed the city of destiny as tacoma dubbed itself we've built warships and jet aircraft we've hosted two international expositions meant to put us on the map and built a space needle to pin us on it we created third places so people could drink coffee and work and socialize in cafes around the world we helped put computers on every desk in laps and in hip pockets we establish strong ties with asia by virtue of trade and proximity we've become a more diverse city too despite efforts to limit that diversity we reinvented retail shopping for a digital age we became home to some of the richest people in the world and at the same time we saw homelessness reach new records no we're not new york something different some used to call this region pugetopolis a future mega city we're not quite there yet and we're not silicon valley but a new kind of forested high-tech region that's still evolving and still growing our schools don't do a particularly good job of teaching history even if you grew up here you likely don't know much about our history let alone enough about our history the dark parts are often left out changes also come fast i found a school book i put together on washington geography when i was in the fourth grade i illustrated almost every town in the state with a picture of a sawmill the cover featured by drawing of loggers felling trees i was taught our roots here were in timber we were and are clearly more complicated than that if you just arrived you likely have a million questions so too if you grew up here knowing where you come from helps you helps you understand who you are and why you're here and what the possibilities are how to make change what to preserve so tonight it's a chance to get some historical insights about our region's roots and to start off i now pass it over to warren king george to share some indigenous perspective warren good evening and thank you newt for that uh wonderful presentation your words have inspired lots of memories lots of thoughts about our subject matter and made me think about some of the wonderful things that i've experienced in this beautiful place we call washington state or puget sound or buckle shoes as they say in my language first of all i'd like to uh thank uh channel 9 kcts for this opportunity to share a few thoughts and see a few memories uh about about the importance of place as my elders would say the value of place and we can uh all of us it doesn't doesn't matter what your uh background is uh you're living here now and i think that's what we need to that's the perspective that we need to all take a view of um the value of place the importance of place i'd like to share with you my perspective about what i've experienced in this place puget sound sailor sea washington state auburn washington um born and raised in auburn born in 1965 so i've got to experience quite a few things the public education system got to experience hardships got to experience what it's like to to have lean times as my mother would say and so i'm going to take you through that just to just to give you a snapshot and so i'd like to start roughly 14 000 years ago uh so that's roughly what's the ice age when when the ice glaciers began to melt and and our ancestors began to establish themselves here and call this place home begin to utilize the natural resources utilize the generosity of mother nature and that there is the beginning of the relationship just as a child to its mother just as a child to its auntie we look to our mother for during those times when they get real lean we look to our mother when the times get real troublesome we look to our mother when our personal trail gets bumpy or muddy and we've had that relationship with our beloved mother nature for roughly 14 000 years and we've learned to to take what we need we learned to share her generosity you heard the knew to mention al-qaeda beach and the landing of the denny party well it was the generosity and the of the ancestors of this area that had open arms that had an open mind and open heart and felt it was important to help these people survive in our in our world and our land here so being visitors and being new neighbors they showed these people these new neighbors how to use the land utilize the resources and make yourself part of it grow roots if you would establish a root system just like we all have and i think that's a pretty good metaphor for for what we as native americans have experienced over the past 160 years 165 years or so you can see through the new systems of reservation that we all have to live on you know at one point and even even sometimes even today still the idea or the thought of reservation is derogatory in a sense but uh nonetheless we call it home this is a result of a decision made 164 and 165 years ago and i'm referring to the point elliot treaty and the medicine creek treaty which was a celebration i believe just yesterday there was lots of reasons to celebrate yesterday but another important date or another event that occurred on that very date was the medicine creek treaty which the mukhalshu tribe is signatory too along with the point elliott treaty which i believe is today the 21st so this relationship that we established with mother nature helped us move forward as this world as this state of washington developed so fast and it began to mature uh so fast and created all of these new conveniences that a lot of things were being taken for granted uh it was uh you know it was thought that these trees you know there's so many of them how can we use them all up these salmon how can we how can we overfish them how can we over harvest them how can uh how can these uh plants and these little creatures how can this water go bad there's so much of it well you know we what our elders would say you know you're going to need to take a glance back at history my teachers would say i'm not asking you to live like the old people not asking you to live like the ancestors i'm asking you to remember some of those lessons of life that our ancestors learned over and over and over and i'd like for you to keep that memory and hold that memory so that we can apply those lessons of life those lessons of love and those lessons of how to walk this world especially now with all these challenges ahead of us you know those old lessons are really going to be quite valuable to us adults you know we're we're never too old to relearn those those uh new values those new those old lessons of life and so it's these times where we ask our ancestors and we ask our beloved teachers to help us and guide us on our trail as we try to move forward in this new complicated world are we doing okay for time uh in closing uh my dear friends i wanna thank you for your time i wanna thank you for sharing your evening with me and allowing me to share a few the words from my teachers from my beloved teachers and i want to thank my teachers and thank the the people who allowed me to be here tonight the kcts time team thank you katherine burby uh this time i'd like to uh pass uh uh pass you folks along to my new friend uh dr quintar taylor hello thank you thank you warren um and thank you all all of you in the audience thank you for being here tonight uh what lauren said was very moving and i i want to also go back to the slides that were shown at the very beginning and i don't know if everyone who's on now saw those slides but those slides talked about uh people and how they got to the pacific northwest and it made me realize i'm one of the newbies i'm one of those migrants who came here relatively late i arrived in washington state in 1971 the teach at washington state university and of course i came to seattle in 1999 to the university of washington and and i think about how the city and and the deep this entire region has been made over and over and over again by people who are coming together from very very diverse backgrounds certainly diverse racial backgrounds um you know one gave us the high view to talk about he talked about how native peoples have been here for thousands of years what i wanted to emphasize and i want to remind people of is that those native people who have been here for a long time were literally at the founding of seattle in 1851 uh indeed when when the first official count of seattle took place census count of seattle took place in 1860 there were 182 white residents quote unquote listed and i think i always think about that number because among those white residents were black people but also what's interesting is the people who were not counted there were probably four to five times as many native americans who were living in or around seattle at that time and they were a vital part of the economy indeed most of the people who worked at yesler sawmill uh were native americans and so i think we need to remember that we we all have very diverse roots and those roots go back certainly in the history of seattle and i believe in the history of the entire state i of course focus on african-american history african-american history in the pacific northwest and so i've done some work on seattle and one of the things that i noticed uh in all my years of that research is that we are a place of irony and paradox that the kind of things that we think happen or should happen in reference to race especially for african-americans are not necessarily true or at least not necessarily true in the ways that we might imagine i'll give you a couple of examples of this um as i've already said uh some of the first white inhabitants quote unquote of seattle were actually black people um in the 1860s 1870s even into the 1880s seattle was still a frontier city and as a frontier city i'm struck by the remarkable amount of if you will social and racial integration in this city at that time indeed black people uh in the 1870s 1880s 1890s even into the first decade of the 20th century lived all over the city of seattle they lived in every area of the city i'm struck by the fact that african americans uh particularly the males have been able to vote in seattle ever since the 1860s and black women voted briefly uh in the 1880s and then permanently after uh after 1910 i say these things because it's remarkable when you consider what's happening to african americans at that moment across the country and indeed a lot of people a lot of those first settlers first black settlers who came came because they believed that seattle was a special place uh and and that's reflects on what i call the liberal paradox in the first years in the first years uh we were very very open to um to uh people of african ancestry when i say we i mean the entire community but somehow another something began to change by the 1920s we began to see a different type of seattle and a different type of washington emerge we saw unfortunately the rise of the ku klux klan yes i said it the rise of the klu klux klan we don't normally associate with the klan with the state of washington the city of seattle but the clan was strong and powerful in the 1920s here we also see the rise of segregation housing segregation as african americans became more and more situated in what would eventually be called the central district we also see unfortunately the rise of job discrimination in the 1890s or even in the first decade of the 20th century most black people or significant number of black people were actually business owners indeed a larger percentage of blacks were business owners in in the 1890s than they are today and those business owners had a clientele that was overwhelmingly white in other words their customers were white that's something that would end by the 1920s and and as i said before racism as reflected in discrimination would begin to sweep over uh the city of seattle somehow another our uniqueness our liberalism uh was coming in the challenge there were some incidents there were some episodes where you know there was i guess a moment of hope and i'll give you one very very quickly the barry lawson case barry lawson was a black waiter uh who was killed by three seattle police officers he was pushed down the stairs uh in a rooming house in what is now the international district in seattle what's remarkable about this story is not so much that he was killed because as we know from black lives matter a lot of this has happened all over the country in many instances tragically it continues to happen what was remarkable about this story was that the black community leadership organized and they were able to get the policemen arrested tried and convicted and those police officers went to jail in 1938 now ultimately the governor commuted their citizens but the fact of the matter is that that this was a small but very well organized community and that community spoke with one voice i'll fast forward to the 1940s and beyond in the 1940s as you know there was the the rise of the black population because of uh the second world war many many blacks were brought out because of the war the work that was available to them in the war then in the 1960s we have what many people still don't know or or don't remember very well a civil rights movement right here in seattle yes there were literally hundreds of demonstrations involving thousands of people who challenged that racial discrimination that we talked about earlier who challenged housing segregation uh and began to make seattle think differently about race or at least began the challenge the old idea that seattle was completely liberal and completely devoid of racism uh the post civil rights era has has continued uh and has continued to be ironic and problematic by the 1990s for instance we see the rise of black populations in the suburbs partly because african americans become more prosperous but also because of gentrification that is african-americans literally being moved out of the city of seattle by you know by landlords and by developers who want to see a different type of city and indeed part of that is reflected in the rise of the tech industry and what i want to do at this point is to segue to margaret o'mara uh my colleague at the university of washington who's going to talk about the tech industry and how it changed or how how it transformed the city of seattle margaret thank you so much quintard it's great sharing the stage with you and it's great being here with this fantastic audience tonight thank you all for having me so i'm here to talk about tech um but let me pull up my first slide and you're gonna get really confused why am i starting with this more than century-old image from the age of timber because what i want to talk about tonight is that and tell you that today's tech economy has very deep roots and there are things about this part of the world that have been around for quite a long time that explain why 21st century seattle has become one of the world's biggest hubs of tech because seattle and western washington have three things that every innovative creative entrepreneurial region throughout human history has had one is is things like this resources a natural bounty a natural bounty that in the case of this region was translated into capital into wealth extracted from the land a very very different use of the land in the sea than the native peoples had had used for millennia next slide please it also has institutions the second thing that is a common hallmark of every region of creation innovation novelty in human history in institutions like the uw founded 1851 and other institutions research institutions essentially places that function both as a sandbox for playing around with new ideas and also a places places of education places of training and next generation and then the third ingredient next slide please is people people like bill gates paul allen founders of microsoft now a lot of people and since i moved here to this region 17 18 years ago a lot of people have said well seattle just has a tech industry here because bill gates was born here no and then they'll say next slide please or uh that they that seattle has a tech industry because bill boeing is from here no but these people obviously and the companies they built have an extraordinary uh effect on why we have the industry we have here now but the reason they were allowed to build these companies and of course they didn't do it alone there are probably many people watching tonight who perhaps at one time in their careers worked for either microsoft or boeing or work at any organization that you understand it's always a team effort but it has to do with these deeper roots it has to do with a culture where people from all over the world come together and many it's a destination for many immigrants and migrants people who are building new lives building new collect connections new networks and interestingly western washington is a place that is connected always to centers of capital and power and culture for 150 years but it also is far away enough from those hubs of capital and power and culture then it creates a really distinctive culture of creation and entrepreneurship that includes but goes well beyond tech that includes all sorts of other industries and also creative production everything from music to art um and next slide please but in this pandemic here we have not only seen the importance of these very deep roots of two notably in the tech sector two very well established companies amazon and microsoft that are two of the most important tech companies in the world and that have grown and thrived in this year but we also are seeing the the uncomfortable truths that underlie why this region became a center of tech this region that as quintart points points out has a long history a century-long history of creating segregated places whether it be bungalow neighborhoods in seattle or suburbs on the east side that became very hospitable places for tech campuses and for the a tech workforce a tech workforce that also has been imported people from elsewhere who have come to this region uh not neces not always people giving as many opportunities to people here and we have had a year that has seen two very different pandemics a tech sector that has been flourishing and another and and and other parts of this region that have been struggling and so the challenge as we move from this intermission as the paramount theater has been so eloquently telling us for the better part of a year into the after times is what is this how are we going to take these roots reckon with these uncomfortable truths and move on to a new more inclusive economy and tech driven economy that brings more people in and with that i'd like to turn it over to another uw colleague josephine enzyme thank you and good evening everyone thanks for being here so i want to talk with you this evening about an area that that i am interested in and that's the intersection of health and homelessness in seattle and king county i guess as things go i'm a more recent transplant i moved here from the east coast in 1994 and have spent my life working as a nurse and also as a health policy researcher on homelessness and really started to try to figure out why seattle has one of our country's largest populations of homeless people and also that historically and continuing today that the washington state has a lot of mental illness really high rates of mental illness among our population and poor access to mental health treatment and behavioral health treatment for substance abuse disorders and and realizing that um from the very beginning of seattle and king county that these issues have disproportionately affected uh bypoc folks that's that's an important part of it when we think about the history of homelessness in seattle um i think a lot of us would would kind of bring up hooverville it's something that a lot of people do know about familiar photograph and this of course was a great depression and this hooverville there were multiple hoovervilles during the great depression throughout seattle and also throughout our country but this hooverville which was just south of yesler an area that was owned by the seattle port commission was arguably our country's largest and longest lasting shack town or shantytown hooverville it was in existence from 1931 to 1941 and at its height had 1500 residents and what this what is really amazing about this is it was for the most part self-governed also for the most part the residents were working poor they couldn't find places either because of redlining segregation or just because of lack of affordable housing so they were living there and this photograph is from 1933. the other thing i think is important to point out here is that seattle is literally the end of the line for a lot of people especially with a whole kind of western frontier of moving west to try and find work and um and so seattle is is is literally the end of the line next slide please but as i started to really do research and digging into it i realized that homelessness was really with us from the very beginning of our city and our region and discovered that our very first king county official homeless person homeless pauper was a 32 year old sailor from worcester county massachusetts probably washed up here because of a shipwreck his name was edward moore and the residents found him they were he was being taken care of by native americans in the belltown beach area of seattle and he was taken in by doc maynard and his second wife catherine who was seattle's first nurse and taken care of he had severe frostbite and right before this in may of that same year of 1854 the washington territorial legislature had enacted our first washington poor laws which were based on the original english poor laws very fascinating history about it and it made the counties in washington territory responsible for people who couldn't take care of themselves including homeless people i follow more of the history of what happened to him it's fairly fascinating he had a time of being in in in still come and that was before obviously washington state hospital was in existence and he was shipped back to um to massachusetts by the citizens of king county because they didn't know what to do with him and that was in may or so of 1859 and he died after that by hanging and the cause was insanity next slide the other part of it that that some people know about but i think is fairly fascinating i'll touch on just briefly is kind of the separation of church and state in the history of king county and how it emerged very very early on this was after the time of edward moore and king county opened a poor farm and a hospital in the georgetown area of seattle and in may of 1877 three sisters of charity of providence came and took over running the poor farm and the hospital for for king county and they ran it for about 10 years until king county commissioners and residents there was a fair amount of anti-catholic sentiment but there are other kinds of issues that happen and king county took it over and then of course that morphed in the 1930s into harborview hospital and so some of um the lessons that i have from kind of looking at the history of health and homelessness in king county again kind of going off what margaret's uh spoke about and others is the creativity and innovation of people in seattle to try you know to just like do something with with the resources that we do have and also a history um not always perfect but of really foregrounding people with a lived experience of homelessness and figuring out like what are effective programs and also the importance of focusing on trauma-informed care thank you well thank you to all of our speakers for fantastic presentations uh and now we have a chance to sort of dig in and answer some of the questions that the audience is asking um the first one here is for warren what was the relationship between the muckleshoot tribe chief seattle and the duwamish tribe so the relationship is is this uh chief seat one of his parents was from the duwamish lower green river area from that little village in kent what is now today called kent washington uh his his ancestry comes from that region uh on one of his i believe it was his father's side and his mother was from across the water and so he does he does have ties here to this to this river system to this watershed and there are several descendants here in our village at knuckle street that have also some direct lineage of blood ties to that to that village into that drama so a lot of family ties a lot of relation yeah correct um quintard we have a question here someone is interested if you know about the hilltop neighborhood in tacoma um they write i hear that was italian and greek at first and they accepted african americans into that community do you know anything about the the development of of community like hilltop yeah yeah hilltop in tacoma i i'm not sure that's the the history certainly that's not the history that i'm familiar with most of my historical sources say that the hilltop district much like the early part of beacon hill was uh developed by uh an african american a man named uh riley who came out from boston in 1870 he became ironically a land developer not necessarily a a uh occupation that we all revere today but he became a land developer and he developed the beacon hill neighborhood in seattle and indeed named many of the streets that are still in existence there he also developed to my understanding uh the hilltop area he laid out the the streets uh he sold the first plots to african americans and the hilltop area very quickly became kind of the black area as a matter of fact there were derogatory names for the area that i won't repeat here but uh uh yeah it was it was essentially founded by the efforts of an african-american land developer we have another question this is for josephine do we have an innate higher rate of mental illness as compared to other cities or do we have a larger challenge with it due to the lack of support services that's a great question i would say both and and this is also speaking for washington state as a whole i think we rank currently about 48th out of out of all states in terms of the prevalence of mental illness especially for adults and the lack of access to adequate mental health treatment and that includes not just inpatient perhaps like what edward moore could have could have benefited from but also aftercare and then also obviously trauma-informed care especially for our children and our young adults we do not have that across the board and then again especially for our our bipoc children and young adults so it's a combination it's something that washington state is very aware of it's been addressed somewhat by you know us being an early adopter with aca but we have a long ways to go and and also just to mention that we're we're um we're up there with idaho or again in alaska in terms of the prevalence of mental illness so that is a really interesting interesting statistic yeah and i just wanted to follow up on that a little bit um the the the population of say a typical what we call nickelsville uh you know a community of homeless people today and and hooverville can you just spell out a little bit what the differences are between those two populations um my understanding was hooverville was mostly men women were banned they were they were banned right you could kind of compare those two populations just to give us a little bit of a profile right well obviously i wasn't around during hooverville so going off of the historical record and digging into that and yeah women and children were were uh prohibited from uh living in in hooverville of course um some did and and that um it is interesting to kind of compare it in terms of nicholsville that that is run by the consumers um you know versus versus other kinds of um either tiny tiny home villages or um or other um more sanctioned or unsanctioned um uh tent encampments um you know i'd say you know there's yet we do know that mental illness is is closely related to poverty and to a lack of safe affordable housing so even getting somebody into safe affordable housing even without mental health treatment or medications they get better i mean not you know that's not all of it but we know that that's a huge part of it uh margaret i wonder if you know we talk about bill gates we talk about uh bezos uh there are certain people who become kind of icons of our our tech community uh and i i'm wondering if you could name i don't mean to put you on the spot but if you could name a person uh in in our history uh that maybe isn't obvious who had a huge influence on how we turned out as a as a tech city is there some kind of under under appreciated innovator uh that that we ought to think about uh i mean you mentioned uh bill boeing that yeah who comes to mind as a as a very creative yeah guy obsessed with planes i just wondered if there was somebody who was not necessarily long ago but somebody who's a little off the radar that we ought to all know about well this is probably someone we all know about but it's you're going to be surprised by this answer and i'm going to say warren magnussen and here's why because in the 1940s he successfully establishes that the the medical school for a five-state region will be located at the university of washington turns the university of washington from you know at the the state the public you know flagship university too into a world-ranked research institution led by biomedicine but that also changes and enlarges the university profile along with other you know other things this is also the beginning of the cold war and that the money that flows to the the west coast in particular and flows also into the university of washington builds up sciences and engineering more broadly but creating that that capacity that that institution that is both a producer of people and a producer of ideas and a research hub you know having a big vital research university and our computer science program for example or school of computer science and engineering is now you know one of the top ranked programs in the world um incidentally and so you it creates the synergy that's that's really important and so this choice you know maggie probably wasn't thinking about the future jeff pesos but the i think the role of government funding as you know i've i write and think about that a lot is a really important part of the story yeah well and maggie also uh got us century 21 funding and uh the science club yes yes yeah yeah that's that's a really really good point uh quintart here's here's a question that uh one of our listeners uh has and i have um what happened to if you have a theory about this what happened to change seattle from this more accepting frontier town to a city that supported the kkk yeah i think about the the career of horus kayton the publisher prominent black citizen and the arc of his career he he wrote an editorial in his newspaper condemning lynching and subscribers fled there was a reaction as his arc of his career started to go down after that people didn't want to hear about it what is that moment where that shift occurs well let's let's play with the the the idea of uh katie um for people who don't have the background uh horse caden was a newspaper editor uh newspaper owner before that he was reporter uh he was born in mississippi to a uh well to a slave holder and his slave and he eventually makes his way out to seattle and i think he arrives in 1894 uh he goes to work for the seattle i think the seattle times either the seattle times of the seattle pi i'm sorry i don't remember which one but one of the two major newspapers and he works his way up and eventually he creates what is known as the seattle republican which for one brief moment was actually the second largest newspaper in seattle in circulation and he struck upon this very interesting formula uh he would have it was a four-page paper and he would have on the outside uh information on the republican party and of course as you know at the turn of the 20th century beginning of the 20th century the republican party dominated uh politics in washington uh but inside he carried news about the small african-american community and somehow know that he made this work at least until uh the moment and i think it was 1909 when he was so horrified by a lynching that took place in his home state mississippi that he decided to discuss the lynching on the front page of the paper and the subscribers fled literally fled hearts caden and his family went from being in this uh i won't call it a mansion but the substantial house on capitol hill to staying in a rooming house uh it was you know the obvious reversal of fortune uh caden had been by far the wealthiest and most prominent african-american in the pacific northwest in the first decade of the 20th century uh and one of the one of the ideas that he promoted was this notion that seattle and washington were open progressive places and they were places where african americans could secede he eventually backed away from that idea uh by 1913 1914 and became one of the founders of the seattle naacp and the very fact that horace cayden would join a civil rights organization become one of the founders of the civil rights organization is reflective of the change that was taking place now to answer your question to get back to your question i think a lot of things going on number one when you're in the frontier environment um as margaret knows no matter what the frontier is it's a tech frontier or or if you will joseph being a homeless frontier people know each other people support each other seattle was a very very small and tight-knit community and black people somehow know that we're allowed to fit into that community as seattle grew and you guys know the population dynamics as well as anyone uh it grew from essentially about 3 000 people in 1880 to 80 000 people by i think 1900 and over 100 000 people well over 100 000 people by 1910 and so the world rushes in and when that world rushes in that world wants to create a seattle that looks very much like the places they left behind and unfortunately that includes the rise of segregation the rise of racial discrimination seattle the frontier city is no more now it's seattle the modern city and of course unfortunately the modern city brings with it at least in the early 20th century brings with it a racial structure that excludes african americans so so yeah i talk about the fact that you know almost all of the businesses in seattle in 1890 the black businesses actually had a white clientele i've mentioned that before in my presentation by 1920 that's unheard of and indeed to a large extent it's unheard of even to this day and so i think part of it was that seattle began to change because of the influx of people from elsewhere the other part of it and i don't want to go too long on this i know we're running out of time but the other part of it is that all of america changed that at the turn of the century at the beginning of the 20th century there was a rise of thunder rising what i would call fundamental institutional racism to swept across the entire country we'd like to think about the reconstruction era in the south and all the killings that were going on in alabama and mississippi and those are terrible uh examples of race and racism but i think what's even more insidious is the systematic racism that emerges around 1900 i call it a kind of intellectual racism and that intellectual racism unfortunately margaret actually touched on it because that intellectual racism assumes that black folks can't be part of the tech industry and as a result uh black folks to a large extent is pretty well excluded from that industry even to this day uh and so so there's a change that happens and that change happens even within what appears to be a liberal environment seattle continues to be at least its outward face to the world it continues to be a very very liberal place it's a place where unions are strong it's a place where there's progressive legislation uh and to some extent it's a place where there's this idea that immigrant groups can fit in and they can rise uh to power unfortunately that's not going to be the case for uh for african americans and you know it is a nod to warrant we already see that happening with native americans and we started happening with asian americans asian americans changes after world war ii but in in many respects there was probably more racism directed toward asian americans in the 1920s and the 1930s in seattle well actually let's go back to the 1880s racism asian americans in the 1880s all the way up to the 1930s of world war ii uh than directed at black people but essentially seattle becomes more and more like the rest of america and the rest of america was structured on the idea unfortunately of white supremacy and i'd add that that i think seattle's sense certainly white seattle's sense of itself as a place of opportunity in a place that's was and is different from the rest has gotten in the way of really recognizing how much it is like other parts of the united states and imports those biases and those that structural exclusion over time consistently yeah we kind of tripped over our own smugness the uh warren here's the question for you um i'm quoting we want to respect and honor the land and people who were here before how do that without tokenizing i i think you know this question embodies a kind of caution i think some people feel about their lack of knowledge of uh native communities and and uh uncertainty maybe uh how to how to become more knowledgeable uh what the best sources are but how would you answer that question about that approach so here's a here's some advice newt i i have a good friend at the burke museum his name is uh peter lape peter lapis is a wonderful man uh very good at his job but you know he one time uh had a project involving uh traditional food and and i explained to him that he wanted to know what it what it was that we what i felt about the food and i explained to you well what better way to get to know your neighbor than to sit down at a barbecue or on the patio or in the backyard or on the fire and share a meal what what better way to get to know a neighbor which i consider you heard me reference in my presentation about we don't like to use the term but uh uh but pasta is the word we use in our language uh it's the non-native or non-native neighbors is the word we use posted white people is what we is the word we use and and you know so if i don't like derogatory terms then i'm not gonna you know i don't wanna i'm assuming other people don't want to hear derogatory terms so i would recommend that your listeners and your viewers try sitting down and having a meal uh and opening up a book uh creating a dialogue with uh your neighbors and sitting down and talking about identity like about who you want where you come establishing that relationship over food via food so i think that maybe that's a simple uh approval to take to understanding who you are and who you really are is to put your hand out and say hey i'm your neighbor my name is warren and i wonder if you have a few minutes to talk about about yourself and about who you are and where you come from and you know it's sometimes it's as simple as that new um my wife and i had experienced that just a month ago two a month and a half ago two days into our new house and we met our new neighbor and he said his name is ramon and he has a wife and an older son and we talked amongst ourselves and our friend guys who were actually coming helen and i got to know this man do a simple gesture to a simple you know understanding having an open mind and an open heart well that is a great note to end on uh i want to thank each of you for sharing your knowledge and perspective this evening and all of you watching watching or listening at home i'd also like to thank stephanie johnson toliver one of the members of our community advisory board and president of the black heritage society of washington for her support in planning this event check your email or our kcts 9 social media accounts tomorrow for a link to a special page where we've shared a small collection of historical images including some of the images shown during the event and where we'll be adding a few more answers to audience questions that we didn't have time to get to tonight watch the new season of finding your roots on kcts 9 on tuesdays at 8pm thank you all thank you and have a great evening thank you very much great to be here thanks so much