A City Learns its Civil Rights History
while a University Learns New Ways to Engage Students
By James N. Gregory, professor of history and
director of the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History
Project, and Trevor Griffey, doctoral candidate in history
and project coordinator of the Seattle Civil Rights
and Labor History Project—both at the University
of Washington
Three years ago we initiated a project that has both
transformed the way we teach and educated our city about
its forgotten history. What began as a research-based
experiment in teaching the history of the local civil
rights movement has evolved into the Seattle Civil Rights
and Labor History Project, an innovative Web archive
based at the University of Washington. The project offers
a model for giving undergraduate students research experience
and publishing opportunities, for exploiting the digital
revolution and bringing historical research to broad
publics and K-12 classrooms, and for connecting universities
to the communities they serve.
Seattle’s Forgotten Past
| Historical Research for Contemporary Justice
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| Here are a few
of the highlights of the Seattle Civil Rights
and Labor History Project:
- Eight UW members of MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil
Chicano de Aztlán) created a unit called
“The Chicano/a Movement in Washington
State History Project.” Students interviewed
over a dozen movement veterans, collected and
digitized hundreds of rare newspaper articles,
documents, and photos, and used these materials
to write a detailed historical narrative. The
result is one of the only online sources for
learning about the history of the Chicano movement
outside of California and the Southwest.
- One team of students spent months researching
restrictive covenants. Seattle, like most cities,
was residentially segregated throughout most
of its history. But unlike other cities, Seattle
had deed restrictions that created a multiracial
ghetto shared by African Americans, Chinese
Americans, Japanese Americans, Filipino Americans,
and Jews. By combing through old property records,
our researchers collected more than 400 restrictive
covenants, enabling us to map the patterns of
exclusion in a database.
- Through our partnership with former leaders
of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther
Party, we have created a comprehensive collection
of online materials about the chapter. A dozen
interviews with leaders and rank-and-file members
form the core of the collection, which includes
rare photographs, digitized newspaper articles,
and newspapers published by the Seattle chapter.
—James N. Gregory and Trevor
Griffey
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Cities in the Northwestern United States have unique
civil rights histories that are often unfamiliar to
their residents. In Seattle, organized struggles for
racial justice began with Native peoples and Chinese
immigrants in the mid-1800s and have expanded to include
the community’s many racial and ethnic groups.
In the 1940s, Seattle’s civil rights activists
began to challenge segregation, winning a battle to
force Boeing to hire minority workers, picketing stores
and restaurants that refused to serve Asian and black
customers, and convincing the legislature to pass a
fair employment law. A new wave of activism in the 1960s
exposed continuing patterns of segregation and secured
major breakthroughs.
Seattle’s current social climate reflects those
generations of civil rights battles. The city and surrounding
county remain 70 percent white, with Asian Americans
constituting 14 percent, Latinos 7 percent, African
Americans 6 percent, and American Indians 1 percent
of the population. But Seattle is less segregated than
many metropolitan areas, and its minority communities
have achieved some political victories. Although serious
inequalities linked to race still plague the city, Seattle’s
reputation for liberal social politics reflects the
continuing alliances pioneered by Seattle’s civil
rights movements.
Our project’s multimedia Web site brings this
complicated history to life with several short films,
dozens of original historical essays, more than eighty
video oral histories, and more than 1,000 digitized
photographs, documents, and newspaper articles. Students
working in history and American ethnic studies courses
have been largely responsible for this content. Their
efforts have created the most complete set of online
resources about civil rights movements in any city outside
the south.
Plugging Into Online Opportunities
The project began with a tiny budget and our determination
to create an online resource that documented and publicized
stories of civil rights activism in a city that had
learned to forget its history of white supremacy. Community
groups and students were immediately eager to help with
the project. After eight months, we posted a preliminary
version of the Web site and have steadily expanded the
content since. Media attention and strong working relationships
with prominent local activists helped us at every stage,
as people in the community and students on campus volunteered
to do research, share photographs, and publicize the
project.
Web site design and management can be expensive, but
does not have to be. We learned the basics of content
management and have benefited from the advice of a graduate
student who is a Web programmer. Grant-funded graduate
students serve as associate editors, conducting oral
histories, editing videos, and editing student papers
for publication. Nearly 100 undergraduates have been
involved in producing content. Students help with oral
histories, conduct archival research, and digitize newspaper
articles for the online databases. Most importantly,
they write research papers that we publish on the Web
site. This has been one of the project’s great
innovations: we treat students as producers, not consumers,
of knowledge.
Affecting Students and the Community
The potential for publication has dramatically improved
the quality of undergraduate work. We encourage students
to write with careful attention to narrative and accurate
use of primary and secondary sources, and we publish
only essays that meet high standards. Students rise
to the challenge, and several articles have won widespread
recognition. The Seattle Police Department has used
one paper (on the history of efforts by the black community
to stem police brutality) in its officer training program.
Our students’ excitement has transformed our teaching
and made us appreciate the great potential for public
history projects to improve undergraduate learning.
The project has made a demonstrable public impact.
Many area high schools and middle schools use the Web
site as a teaching tool, and the project has appeared
in instruction modules for city employees, police officers,
union apprentices, and Teach for America volunteers.
In a brief for the momentous recent Supreme Court decision,
Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School
District No. 1, the project’s contents were
cited as proof that segregation’s widespread effects
require continuing mediation. The legislature recently
passed a law addressing another issue the project uncovered:
the lingering effects of racially restrictive covenants
in property deeds throughout the region.
The project has provided the students involved in its
development with important professional experiences
that are not standard in history programs. Students
have learned to conduct research and oral histories.
They have interacted with community groups and veterans
of various civil rights campaigns. In some instances,
this training has transformed students’ sense
of themselves as cultural workers in their communities.
By making the community our classroom and treating students
as scholars, the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History
Project illustrates how academic historians can produce
history that makes a difference.
To view the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History
Project, visit www.civilrights.washington.edu
Editor’s Note: This article is adapted
from an article that originally appeared in the April
2007 issue of Perspectives, the newsmagazine of the
American Historical Association. The original article, “Teaching a City its Civil Rights History: A Public
History Success Story,” is available online at
www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2007/0704/0704tea1.cfm
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