This week I’m traveling to Seattle for a long weekend with a long lost friend from the time I lived in Seattle several decades ago. I’m excited to see her, and to spend a little bit of time in my favorite city. Last week I gave an abbreviated, historical overview of Oregon’s racial makeup. This week I’ll write about my home state — Washington State, a state where Black people currently account for ~4% of the total population.
As a child growing up in western Washington, in a military, and working class city, I was fortunate to grow up viewing the world as a place where Black people were part of my school and church community, along with being fellow soldiers to my Dad. The statistics that I saw for my early teen years, showed my home town as having an African American population of nearly 7%, not much different than Seattle, the largest city in the state. I’m not sure if that includes the soldiers living on the nearby Army and Air Force bases or not, where during the Vietnam War Black soldiers comprised a large portion of the troops.
However, there are large portions of Washington State that don’t have a very diverse population, and even my hometown isn’t very diverse compared to other metro areas across the country.
I was hoping to provide some real insight as to why Washington State isn’t very diverse, similar to what I was able to find about Oregon, but that wasn’t the case. So I’ll share some of my thoughts as a lifelong west-coaster, and amateur social scientist.
I did find an interesting table that broke down the population of the state from 1860 to 2017, by race and location of birth. The early data didn’t look very reliable, and I’m not exactly sure how it was gathered so long ago. I looked at the data for 1920 post WWI, 1950, post WWII, 1960, and 1970 Vietnam War. My assumption was that those years might show migration after leaving the military or growth of industries in the state.
1920 — Most Black people that were born outside of the state came from Canada or California, and then the remaining from all over the US.
1950— Black residents not born in the state came primarily from the south, with Texas and Louisiana leading the way. My assumption is that this may reflect those that came through the area during the war and stayed/returned.
1960 — The number of Black people born in Washington State rose from ~4000 in 1950, to 13,300 in 1960. People are staying in the state and starting families. The other birth states of Black residents were led by Louisiana, and Texas; followed by other southern states.
1970 — About the same migration pattern as seen in 1960, with Texas leading the way for out of state births, with Louisiana second; followed by other southern states.
My biggest take away from looking at this data, and my own insight is that Washington’s location in the far corner of the lower 48 states didn’t lend itself to a lot of easy migration from other parts of the country that had larger populations of African Americans. The state did however, have a large military presence, especially in the Puget Sound area. Moreover, on the eastern side of the state the federal government needed workers to build the nuclear reactor that would fuel the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. It was a huge undertaking that required thousands of employees, and they were hired from all over the country and included 15,000 African American workers.
Looking at the data for 1950, 1960, and 1970 you can see that a fair amount of Black people migrated to the state, likely being brought my their military service.
Additionally, there were big manufacturing employers like Boeing, Todd Shipyards, & Kaiser Aluminum that surely made use of the former soldiers. Likewise for the big shipping ports in Seattle, and Tacoma; along with construction of Grand Coulee Dam.
There aren’t many famous Black people from Washington State, and those that we do now and celebrate are artists or musicians — Jacob Lawrence, James W. Washington, Jr., Jimi Hendrix and Quincy Jones.