The Lasting Legacy of White Supremacy in Western Washington
When you picture a Ku Klux Klan rally, you probably aren’t thinking of the blue bubbles that are downtown Seattle or downtown Bellingham. The imagery of a burning cross buried into a hill doesn’t quite resonate with the Pacific Northwest’s granola, hipster vibe. If you were to have to name civil rights leader that died in the late 1960s, most would think of Dr. King, others maybe Fred Hampton- but never Edwin Pratt. Race riots and white lynch mobs are things that happened in Alabama and Mississippi, and not in our upper left corner, right? We’ve mainly known that it’s only Southern trees that bear strange fruit, and our historical narratives barely even tell us that much. With this essay I would like to examine the forgotten footnotes of our local histories, while also attempting to understand why it is these events and stories receive almost zero attention in our state’s curriculums.
The topic I’d like to start with is one that was quite prominent at the time, making me that much more curious as to why many Washingtonians under the age of, say 65, have no idea it ever occurred. In high school history class, you’ll learn about boycotts and sit ins across a segregated, Jim Crow South- but only the real history educators will also present the fish ins that happened throughout a segregated Washington, for over two decades. Now, this isn’t a segregation we are used to hearing where it’s Black vs. white (although one visit to South Seattle will let you know just how divided Black and white neighborhoods here are-pending the ongoing gentrification), but instead it’s the Euro-American settlers and the Natives.
1855 was an especially bad year for Indigenous people in the so-called Washington Territory. Isaac Stevens, the Territorial Governor, was in a rush to secure land for the thousands of settlers that were headed this way on the Oregon Trail, being that the 1850 Land Claim Donation Act granted citizens (whites only, at this time) up to 650 acres for free- all they had to do was make it out West alive. Eleven treaties were made in a 12-month span that ceded over 40,000,000 acres of land to the US government. Although the treaty meetings between tribes and the settlers were full of nasty coercion methods such as nooses hanging from the ceiling, and full deliberations in foreign languages with no translator- each treaty contained the same promise to the tribes that they would have the right to hunt and fish in their “usual and accustomed places” on and off the reservation. Fast forward a hundred years, and guess what? Salmon runs are dwindling fast due to commercial fishing, environmental degradation, and sportfishing. Salmon had been a staple to survival for Native people all over so-called Washington for over 10,000 years, and they were seeing their numbers consistently nosedive over the decades since Euro-American settlement in the area.
To make matter worse however, the game wardens from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife would consistently arrest Native fishermen and confiscate their catch of the day, along with all their gear and nets. This cascaded in the 1960s as Nisqually fisherman Billy Frank Jr. along with other treaty rights activists, started staging fish ins on rivers from the Columbia to the Nooksack, and every one in between. Thousands were arrested, beaten, and jailed simply for subsisting as they have for centuries, but also to hopefully send a message to the non-Native communities that were not paying attention before. Zoltan Grossman from UW wrote an excellent piece on the “Fish Wars” as they came to be known, and one excerpt states, “These efforts were met with ‘an intense and often violent backlash among non-Native fishers and WDFW officials, who cut nets, pushed boats into rivers, and stole fish from tribal nets and traps’; and ‘Native fishers often came under sniper fire or were threatened with firearms’” [1]. Being that treaties are a nation-to-nation agreement upheld by our Constitution, and Constitutional agreements hold the title of “supreme law of the land”, the State government had no authority to ever arrest even one Native fisherman, little less beat and brutalize thousands. It got so bad that in 1970, the United States (after being endlessly pressured by Native activists and fishermen) filed a lawsuit against the State of Washington.
US v Washington made it to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, where Judge George Boldt gave the decision to side with the tribes and made 50% of the harvestable salmon catch reserved to Native fishermen as a result. A small win for treaty rights, the Boldt Decision gave some material results to a never-ending fight for sovereignty, but in the end has not done nearly enough as salmon runs continue to decrease with each year- and not one year since have tribes received the full 50% that was promised.
Next up, continuing the settler legacy of completely fucking over any and everything the Native people had, we come to the Alki fires of 1893. Most locals know about the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, where hot glue boiled over and eventually turned 90% of the city to ash (this is when settlers realized that maybe building every single structure out of wood was a bad idea and turned to brick for the rebuild)- but not too many know about the string of arson that followed just 4 years later. From the time the Denny Party brought a few hundred settlers to the Duwamish territory in 1854, until the turn of the 20th century, industry and mass settlement continually displaced the Shisone, Lakes, and Duwamish people and at first they primarily ended up living in shanty towns in what’s now SODO, as well as in traditional longhouses in what is today West Seattle. Even though they had all they needed to thrive, settlers always need to expand and conquer. As a result, in March 1893, every single longhouse on Alki Point was burned to the ground, leaving families destitute trying to pick up the pieces. Muckleshoot tribal member Gilbert KingGeorge recalls hearing stories about these times that have stuck with him to today.
“My mother told me of the days when this area was being claimed, and playmates homes were destroyed for relocation purposes. I always remember because she was so puzzled by what happened by what happened to her friends’ homes. She got up the next day, there was a pile of ashes there. Whole families were removed…what are the mental impacts of a mother and father, grandparents, who literally have to pick up their family and have to move?” [2]
This is a portion of an interview done by Dr. Coll Thrush of UBC in his book “Native Seattle”, where he goes onto say, “The Great Fire of 1889 had spurred growth in West Seattle, which in turn encouraged the fiery ouster of Indigenous people living in places slated for ‘improvement’” [3]. Where Natives saw land as something that could not be bought or sold and definitely not controlled by a human- settlers saw a chance to dominate nature, clear any humans, plants, and animals from the land, and in their place bring a venture capitalist in to have more industry built. Settler colonialism erases to replace and is not too picky about what it erases, either. Anything standing in the way of the white, Christian man’s capitalist progress needed to be eliminated one way or another- and it was.
In secondary history classes, Washington State history courses only teach about one of these fires, purposefully excluding anything that could be understood as white supremacy. Seemingly, it is better off if the kids today don’t learn that the settler state has maintained itself through aggression and violence since the first set of white feet landed on Turtle Island. If an uncensored, accurate telling of history was fed to every youth, a revolutionary consciousness would develop that endangers the ruling class and everything they’ve controlled over the last few centuries for this US Empire. This is possible but must happen en masse, nationwide. Students should know that the US Empire is not the beacon of democracy that we make ourselves out to be, but rather a nation founded on imperialism, whose histories show they massacred and pillaged at will to get what they thought was owed to them.
Isolated incidents in history like these have long lasting impacts and are always a part of a system that is constantly changing forms to continue its oppression. It must keep changing forms like this (via re-formist politics) to keep up with consistent capitalist production. For example, in the mid to late 1800s when the Pacific Northwest was being settled, for economic production to happen the very first thing needed is land. First for mills and canneries, and then later factories and heavy industry, continuing into metropolis we know today. So naturally, they clear the land, and the people who live on the land. Burning homes, eviction at gunpoint, denying access to traditional food sources, etc. Today though, our society runs on oil, and to distribute it as cheaply and efficiently as they can, pipelines (that are also cheaply made and often cause deadly spills) are put right under Native land and waterways. In the 2010s and now in the 2020s, there are fights all over the US and Canada between oil tycoons and Native land and water defenders. They want to put pipelines that will be carrying millions of gallons of oil through Native water sources and then send the National Guard and the Pig Squad, armed and armored to the teeth, to violently squash resistance when the people refuse. This is why history matters, and this is why a material analysis is needed over revisionism and idealism.
A forced exodus and violent purging of Asian immigrants swept through the entire West in the 1880s-1920s, but curriculum will maybe mention the race riots in San Francisco and Los Angeles. But of course, Seattle, Everett, and Bellingham had riots of their own, where mobs of white workers who were mad about these unwanted migrants taking their jobs descended upon the communities and workplaces of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian immigrants, and threatened death to anyone who stayed in town. In 1889 there was one in Seattle, mostly aimed at Chinese laborers. In 1907 there were multiple ranging from Bellingham to Everett. Then the legislation came, 1889 the Chinese Exclusion Act is passed. This was followed a few decades later by President Calvin Coolidge signing the Immigration Act of 1924 — which included the Asian Exclusion Act — into law on May 26, 1924. The law’s expressed aim was to restrict the immigration to the US of people from non-white nations in order “to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity”[4]. 10 years after that, the Tydings Mc-Duffie Act was passed by FDR to successfully bar Filipino immigration as well. These laws from the settler government very well reflected the attitudes of the settlers, and effectively enabled their anti-Asian sentiments with legislation. To say anti-Asian sentiments was not enough for a lot of settlers though, most were white supremacists who were so radicalized by their racism that they took it upon themselves to ‘fix’ the ‘problems’ in their cities and towns. “Drive out the Hindus!” was the rallying cry on Holly St., downtown Bellingham, on September 4th, 1907 (further confirmation that white settlers were dumb as bricks, the people that came and took their logging jobs were all Sikh). A group of 500 white men and women took to the streets demanding that these undesirables left immediately, which then led to over 200 Sikhs put in jail for the night for “protection”. The next morning the cops let them go but had the same message as the mob- leave Bellingham and do not come back. If only this mob directed their anger at the capitalists who brought these immigrants to Bellingham to exploit their labor for a cheaper price, then they would’ve at least been directing their racism at the source of the problem. In their efforts to form a white utopia however, it was easiest to get rid of the undesirables for good.
Today Bellingham is 85% white, and the only minorities you’ll see are probably on a college campus or a jobsite. This white super-majority has been the case for the last 140 years, hovering around the 85–90%[5] mark ever since. In the years following the riot, from the 1910 to 1920, Bellingham’s population doubled from roughly 11,000 to 23,000 [6]. This population boom was the largest that Bellingham had seen and remains its largest increase in the span of a decade since. Almost all were white settlers and their families coming out West. The white supremacist purging of the ‘Asiatics’ made for an ideal settlement opportunity for these white men and their families, where they could raise their families without fear of the ‘uncivilized’ people of color. Bellingham was the perfect place for white supremacy to thrive, ultimately leading to the Ku Klux Klan forming their “strongest chapter in Washington”[7] there in the early 1920s.
Taking it back a few decades, before the official formation of Bellingham’s Ku Klux Klan, the most vile and disgusting showing of white hatred was on full display in Whatcom County- the lynch mob. In February of 1884, settler shopkeeper named James Bell was killed, and his home subsequently burned. The very next day, 14 year old Stó:lō (Nooksack) teenager named Louie Sam was framed without evidence, and was detained just north of the Canadian border by request of the U.S. sheriff. Pending what would’ve been a sham of a trial motivated by local racists and heightening tensions between Natives and settlers, he was kidnapped (without any real resistance by the police holding him) in the night by white lynch mob. On the morning of February 28th, 1884, Louie Sam was removed from his final resting place, which was a cedar tree just 200 paces north of the border- hands, feet, and mouth still bound. The mob justice was celebrated by the white communities nearby, with a local paper called the Whatcom Reveille adding, “The speedy and righteous justice meted out for Jack [Louie] Sam last week by Judge Lynch and his determined followers may have a salutary effect… Sam should have been hung long ago on general principles” [8]. No one from the mob (that was suspected to be about 50–75 members strong) was detained, little less convicted of any crimes. All is well however, in 2006 swift and damning justice was served as the Washington State House of Representatives approved a landmark resolution “expressing their deepest sympathies” for Louie Sam and his descendants [9].
The KKK’s presence in Washington was not a small footnote of our history but was really a major organization in each city or township from Tacoma to Bellingham. Public demonstrations and parades happened down all the main streets of western Washington’s settlements, and cross burnings were a regular occurrence on Sehome Hill, specifically, in Bellingham[10], as well as on hillsides amongst the Everett and Seattle chapters. These peoples’ grandchildren and great grandchildren are who continue this legacy of hate into today, and although cities like Seattle and Bellingham are known to be very liberal, the Ku Klux Klan has never really died there.
Black codes kept most Black Americans out of the settling frenzies in the west, especially in Oregon and Washington. Since the earliest years of the Oregon Territory in the 1820s these Black codes were implemented and remained effective until the mid-20thcentury, with the only exception mainly being out-of-state scabs brought in to break mining strikes (which only incited more hard feelings and violence between white settlers and Black people). Today in western Washington, Black communities are largely segregated into lower income neighborhoods in South Seattle and Tacoma, and even these areas didn’t see any substantial Black population until the 1960s. We can see this hatred manifest not only within the white mobs of the townsfolk settlers, but from the highest ranks of the settler government as well. The head of the provisional government’s legislative branch in the Oregon Territory named Peter Burnett (became first ever governor of California shortly after) stated his feelings towards Black settlement of the new frontier, “The object is to keep clear of that most troublesome class of population [Blacks]. We are in a new world, under the most favorable circumstances and we wish to avoid most of those evils that have so much afflicted the United States and other countries’’ [11]. These “most favorable circumstances” from out west were A.) lots of land that had recently been rid of its ‘Indian problem’, and B.) only white people were legally permitted to claim land and then own it privately. The settler hegemony that was developed in Washington by the early 20th century did not want anything or anyone to burden them and their white communities, and intimidation as well as violence were found to be the most successful outlets for achieving and sustaining this hegemony.
One more thing that I believe is worth noting while I briefly discuss Black history in Washington starts with a man named Edwin Pratt. Pratt was the director of the Seattle Urban League from 1962–1969 and was one of the leading activists in desegregating the Seattle School District in the 60s. Sadly, his “triangle plan” for rotating students to different districts was shot down by the City Council, and Seattle schools remained segregated. He was a loud and outspoken voice for civil rights in a very white area at the time and ended up paying with his life. He was assassinated on his front porch during a drive-by shooting one December morning in 1969, and his murder went unsolved ever since. To this day, the Seattle Police Department refuses to release any evidence from his file, and it is speculated that either the FBI, or the SPD themselves, hired a street gang to put a hit on Edwin. This wouldn’t be the first time whatsoever that the FBI, local police, or a mix of both came together to put down Black activists and revolutionaries, but maybe now you can ask yourself why Edwin Pratt’s name has been conveniently forgotten amongst those that have not been.
Washingtonians love to pat themselves on the back while they look down upon the Deep South and the rest of the country and seethe about how “backwards” and “uneducated” some areas are. But all the while, the deliberately constructed historical narratives that we have been fed about our peaceful, quiet upper left corner are just as full of shit as any other revisionist history in the US today. Western Washington especially has a nasty superiority complex as Washington’s beacon of liberalism and acceptance versus eastern Washington, yet some of the most heinous crimes in our history have happened over on the west side of the state. We can’t progress in any way that will help the people of Washington until we come to terms that these people needing the most help today need it for a reason, that being their relatives that came before them were living in a white supremacist hellscape.
[1] . Zoltan Grossman, Unlikely Alliances, p.40, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017)
[2] Native Seattle, Coll Thrush, p.84
[3] Ibid.,
[4] Roedis, et al, 2008
[5] https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=race%201910&tid=ACSDT1Y2019.B02001&hidePreview=true
[6] Ibid.,
[7] https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/kkk_bellingham.htm
[9] https://wp.wwu.edu/timeline/1884-lynching-of-louie-sam/
[10] https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/kkk_bellingham.htm#ftn_12
[11] https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/exclusion_laws/#.YPj5RS1h200
