by Doug Merlino
Martin Luther King Jr. believed it was just the start of a process of redressing the damage inflicted by racial subjugation. The “second phase” of the civil rights movement, he insisted, would move past racial discrimination and take on poverty and inequality, a message more often than not now overlooked in the yearly tributes around his holiday that almost always focus on his “I have a dream” speech. “White Americans would have liked to believe that in the past ten years a mechanism had somehow been created that needed only orderly and smooth tending for the painless accomplishment of change,” he wrote. “Yet this is precisely what has not been achieved.”
In Seattle, the industrial base simply did not absorb the new black migrants from the South, even as the city underwent a Boeing-led economic boom in the mid-1960s. At the height, in 1967, employment at the airplane manufacturer ballooned to 150,000 workers, of whom 5,400 (3.6 percent) were black. Three years later, after layoffs had begun, only 1,500 black employees remained at Boeing, 1.4 percent of the workforce. Even in the best of times, unemployment rates for blacks in Seattle remained well above those of whites, even for unskilled jobs. Many construction unions, for example, blocked black membership until well into the 1970s; they started to integrate only after African-American protesters began to shut down construction sites.
A new generation of activists, intellectual descendants of the slain Malcolm X, was losing its patience with nonviolence and negotiation. By 1967 there had already been several long, hot summers, when urban violence—“riots,” “rebellions,” or “uprisings,” depending on who’s talking—had sparked in Harlem, Detroit, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. That April, a young King protégé named Stokely Carmichael came to speak at the Central Area’s Garfield High School. A year earlier, Carmichael had coined the term “Black Power” to describe his more radical approach to civil rights, which included cultural pride, economic independence, separation from mainstream America, and—if necessary—violence.
Garfield High School, the alma mater of musicians Quincy Jones and Jimi Hendrix, had become the center of the black community—more than half of its students in 1967 were African American. If you wanted to take a message to black people in Seattle, the school’s auditorium was the place to do it.
Carmichael lit up the crowd of four thousand. Tall, skinny, and clean-cut in a black suit, white shirt, loosened tie, and a button that read KEEP THE FAITH, BABY, the twenty-five-year-old gave an incendiary seventy-minute speech, his voice oscillating between a roar and a whisper. “We are the victims and white people are the executioners, and they have kept us down by force and by violence, and that if we are violent, it is just that we have learned well from our teachers,” he said. “They have bombed our churches, they have shot us in the streets, they have lynched us, they have cattle-prodded us, they have thrown lye over us, they have dragged our children out in the night. We have been the recipients of violence for over four hundred years. We’ve just learned well how to use it today.… So don’t you get caught up in no discussion about violence. We just making it crystal clear to the honky today that if he try to shoot us, we gonna kill him ’fore God gets the news. Period!”
Martin Luther King Jr. had written sympathetically about Black Power, saying that he understood the movement was sparked by frustration with the lack of progress toward full equality. But King criticized Black Power advocates for stoking anger while failing to offer hope or any realistic political program for change; King argued that it was impossible for blacks, at a bit more than 10 percent of the population, to separate themselves culturally and economically from the rest of the country. Still, Carmichael’s words resonated with African Americans who had not been able to capitalize on the breakthroughs of the civil rights movement. As King acknowledged, “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t have enough money to buy a hamburger?”
Seattle’s civil rights leadership had been drawn from the middle class and was primarily concerned with issues of open housing, integration, and access to jobs; the Black Power movement drew on the anger and disenchantment of poorer, unskilled blacks. It was a division as old as the one between the “middle class” blacks who lived in the community established by William Grose around East Madison Street and the working classes who had settled to the south, in the Jackson Street area. The difference in the 1960s was that rapid migration had tilted the numbers even farther away from the middle class. The two factions in Seattle—as with African-American groups across the country—had been able to maintain common cause when united around issues such as outright discrimination. Once some basic political concessions were won, the coalition could not hold.
Carmichael’s speech stoked feelings of black nationalism in an eighteen-year-old Central Area resident named Aaron Dixon. “Things began to change then,” says Dixon, whose parents had moved out from Chicago for better opportunities. “For a lot of young black people, we for the first time began to feel our anger, and that we had a right to be angry at white people, even white people we had been friends with.” In early 1968, Dixon founded the Seattle Black Panthers with his brother Elmer and a few others. It was the second chapter in the nation after the original in Oakland, which was then calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government.
The Seattle Panthers organized actions such as a sit-in at a high school after two black girls were sent home and told to “straighten” their Afros. They demanded that the school offer African-American history classes and hire a black principal or vice principal. Larry Gossett, a black student leader at the University of Washington who led the high school protest with Aaron Dixon, says, “Seattle just didn’t understand. They said, ‘Sit-ins happen in the South where they’re not nice to their coloreds. Up in Seattle, we’re nice. We don’t have those problems. No need for anybody to want Black Power in Seattle.’ That’s how the white power structure saw our city.”
Willie McClain, fourteen at the start of 1968, was wide-shouldered, muscular, and on his way to becoming captain of the basketball team at Garfield. He looked to the Panthers as role models—they seemed like strong men who could express themselves and get what they wanted. “Black Power hit like a wave,” he says. “It began to give young men a sense of belonging, of power, authority, and strength within numbers.” He was also developing what he later—going one better on Du Bois’s famous formulation—called a “triple personality.” There was an “academic guy” who showed promise in school. There was an “athlete in the upper echelon talentwise, a budding football and basketball star.” And there was “a nasty little bugger who wanted to do violence and harm to everybody.”
On April 4 that year, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on a Memphis motel balcony, sparking anguish and unrest in cities around the country. A full-scale riot was averted in Seattle, but that summer—which saw Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, the continued escalation of the Vietnam War, and riots on the streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention—the situation in the Central Area grew increasingly tense.
In a report written in the spring of 1968, the Seattle Urban League warned about the mounting effects of cramped and dilapidated housing in the Central Area, black unemployment, poverty, and frustration over lack of opportunity for education. The inability to move out of the Central Area—only 4 percent of blacks in Seattle lived in integrated neighborhoods—was leading to a feeling of being trapped, and the situation was deteriorating. “The rise of new militant leaders, many constructive, some destructive, may take us forward or lead us into a holocaust,” the authors cautioned. “There is increasing hostility to an oppressive society—to the police particularly.… Open distrust, contempt and hatred towards Caucasians is no longer contained.”
On the first day of July, Larry Gossett, Aaron Dixon, and another protester who had led the high school sit-in were convicted of “unlawful assembly” and sentenced to six months in jail. That night, several hundred African Americans gathered at Garfield High School to protest.
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Willie McClain was hanging out with his friends in front of the school, which faces Twenty-third Avenue, one of the city’s main arteries. As he remembers it, a white guy in a convertible pulled up to a stoplight. Words were exchanged. Someone threw a rock. At that point, McClain didn’t need any prodding. “I was there with the rioting, I was there with the pillaging, I was there with the late-night destruction,” he says. It heated up faster than McClain could believe. “It started with what I call mischievous youth—boys who were fifteen and sixteen years old—who were out throwing rocks, not gas bottles, just doing what I call elementary rioting, but it got real serious to the point where the police were starting to shoot at people,” he says.
Kathy Jones, a seventeen-year-old African American who was on the streets near Garfield that night, told the Seattle Times decades later that when the riots started, she thought, “We’ve been trying peacefully for three years to get you to listen to us.… Maybe there’s another way. Maybe then you’ll listen.” Willie McClain remembers thinking about the indignities he’d suffered as a black in Seattle and feeling a rush of adrenaline as the destruction started: “All these different things that have always been there pop up and you have a rage that comes over you and says, This is what you can do about it.”
The outpouring of anger continued for two nights, with passing cars getting pelted with rocks and bricks. The police used helicopters and tear gas. Fifteen people were sent to the hospital. Street violence flared periodically for the rest of the summer. The cops basically put the Central Area on lockdown.
In August 1968, the Reverend Samuel McKinney, leader of the Central Area’s influential Mount Zion Baptist Church, called for a “black united front” that would join Seattle’s African Americans across economic classes to work for common cause. “The basis of unity is not fear or coercion, but that the commonality of our blackness demands that we work together or hang separately,” he said. A few months later, a civic commission tasked with looking into the causes of the summer’s “disorders” offered, “Only when we begin to solve the overriding problems of race and poverty which exist in our community will we begin to achieve racial harmony.”
But it was too late for the civil rights movement to regain accord. Even as the Black Panthers seized the national headlines in 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency while employing the “Southern strategy,” purposefully playing to white fears of economic change and disorder, whether of blacks taking their jobs or hippies baking their brains on acid.
Willie McClain’s personal life, mirroring the times, became increasingly unhinged. He would come to see that period as the beginning of a time of confusion and struggle. “There was a big gap,” he says. “The authority left my life. I became the authority, did whatever I wanted when I wanted, as crazy as I wanted, as often as I wanted.”
In March 1972, Willie and Diane McClain had Willie Jr., their first child. By then, the civil rights movement had dispersed into efforts for abortion rights, equality for women, affirmative action, school desegregation, and the environment. The national leadership of the Black Panther Party dissolved, plagued by both internal bickering and the efforts of the FBI to destroy it.
Seattle, too, fell on hard times. During the 1971 “Boeing Bust”—caused by federal cutbacks in outlays for warplanes—local employment at the airplane manufacturer plummeted to under forty thousand, less than a third of what it had been four years earlier. In an article titled “City of Despair,” the Economist magazine reported that Seattle was seeing perhaps the worst economic decline in America since the Depression: “Today, food and shelter have become a prime concern of a large proportion of the unemployed. The most desperate are those in the slums of the city’s center, which contain the racial minorities and those whose hold on jobs is tenuous, even in good times. Here one recent count found 48 percent out of work.”
By the middle of the decade, Aaron Dixon and his brother Elmer, the Seattle Black Panther founders, still operated under the Panther name but were concentrating on running a center that provided schoolkids with free breakfasts. Larry Gossett, the student radical at the University of Washington, became the administrator of the school’s newly created Black Student Division; in the late 1970s, he took a position in the administration of a liberal Seattle mayor. But the position of the majority of blacks in Seattle remained on the outside looking in at the economic mainstream. In 1979, Elmer Dixon told a newspaper reporter that he saw things sliding backward. “There’s more apathy now, the job situation is worse, and unemployment figures don’t reflect true unemployment,” he said. “The only benefits have been for a few on an individual level.”
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This was the uneasy situation in the early 1980s, when the members of our team were in grade school.
By then, Garlic Gulch was long gone. In the late 1960s, open housing became a federally mandated reality. With the Central Area hemmed in to the west, north, and east by wealthy neighborhoods, the only choice for African Americans who wanted to leave the Central Area’s overcrowded and substandard housing was to move south, into the Rainier Valley, home to much of the city’s white working class. During the 1970s, thousands of African Americans did just that. This helped to relieve some of the tension in the Central Area. It also hastened the departure of the remaining Italians in the old neighborhood. “Little by little the blacks moved in and the whites took off,” an old Italian woman told a reporter in 1978. As a kid, I had no idea there had ever been an Italian area of Seattle. My family had long before moved to the North End.
Occasionally I rode through the Central Area along Twenty-third with my parents. We kept the windows rolled up and the doors locked. The businesses that were there—places like nail and hair salons and soul food restaurants—were not geared toward suburbanites. I peered out of our station wagon at the surroundings. Black guys hung out on corners, the cars tended to be old and junky, and there were way more boarded-up and dilapidated houses than I had seen in other parts of the city.
The one time I went to the Central Area as a destination, it was for sports. I was in the seventh grade and in my first year as a football player on a team in the northern suburbs. We were scheduled to play a CAYA team at Garfield. It was not a road trip we looked forward to. In the last practice before the game, our coach told us we were going to have to be careful because the black kids would grab and twist our nuts during plays. We had better not mess around, he warned—if we didn’t take it to them, they were going to beat the crap out of us.
That Saturday, as usual, we met in the parking lot of our practice field and carpooled to the game. We strolled onto Garfield’s rock-strewn, nearly grass-free field in our baby blue uniforms. During pregame drills, a few players on my team, rough kids at the best of times, went into a rage. The meanest kid on our team—he had already broken a helmet by spearing it into an opponent—was almost frothing at the mouth, screaming at the rest of us that we had to “beat these niggers!”
I started to freak out. I didn’t like my teammate, and now, seeing a hate-fueled fury overtake him, I feared him. I knew where his venom was coming from. His mom, of whom my own mother actively disapproved, stood on the sidelines during our games, smoking cigarettes and screaming profanity at our team and our opponents. Race was not a subject discussed in our house—there were no blacks in our suburb, so there was no reason to bring it up. My most regular exposure to black people was through watching sports on television. I was more curious than anything. Still, when we got to Garfield, I could look around, see the surroundings, and know that the Central Area was different. I also had to process the warnings of my coach, who had told us before playing Rainier Beach, a black team in the South End, to leave our helmets on after the game when we shook hands or they might hit us in the face.
By kickoff time, my sole hope was to get through the next four quarters uninjured. Some of the CAYA players tried their best to intimidate us. As I lined up on the offensive line, the kid across from me taunted, “Hey, white b
oy!” At the end of the play, after the whistle had blown, another kid drove his helmet into my ribs from the side, leaving me feeling like I was going to puke. He pointed at me and laughed: “I got you! I got you!” In the meantime, my teammate was fuming in the huddle, spittle flying from his mouth: “Let’s kill them!” I looked around at the other players on my team. Most seemed to be as frightened as I was. We were caught between my teammate and a few others who followed his lead, and a bunch of black kids who supposedly wanted to rip off our balls. I only noticed late in the game that some of their players seemed uncomfortable, too. They stopped when the whistle blew and quietly went back to the huddle. Both of our teams, I realized, had been hijacked by the most extreme elements. The rest of us were caught up in their drama, too cowed to do anything but go along.
A little more than a year later, in March 1986, Willie McClain’s players gathered at his house. The team climbed into the brown Dodge van, the same as they always did when going to a game or practice. This time, though, McClain drove to the freeway. As the van merged with traffic and rumbled north, the players began to wonder what was up.
“Where are we going?” Myran asked.
McClain answered, “We’re going to try something new this year. We’re going to join up with some players from up north.”
“Up north? What do you mean? There aren’t any players up north!” Willie Jr. protested.
“Listen,” McClain told them. “We’re going to have a mixed team this year. We’re going to play with some white players. It might be a culture shock, so I want you to be ready. A lot of things are going to be different. But you remember what I’ve been telling you about opportunities? This could be something really good for you guys.”
