Desperately seeking Seattle: A stage for silenced voices
Author’s note: Beneath cranes ushering in urban transformation, one Seattleite searches for the soul of her beloved hometown in this weekly column.
In searching for the cultural soul of Seattle, it’s important to recognize some of the city’s uglier practices.
Beyond its problematic beginnings (the city literally sits upon land stolen by white settlers from the Duwamish), Seattle has a deep history of discrimination. Housing covenants and redlining restricted where specific ethnic and racial groups were allowed to live in the city. The African-American population of Seattle was thus forced to settle mostly in the city’s Central District. While the African-American population, which came to Seattle primarily during World War II, faced racist restrictions and general discrimination, it ultimately thrived, especially artistically.
“The history of African-American arts in this city is very long,” Sandra Boas-DuPree, operations manager of the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, explained.
Seattle-based artist and curator of the Central District’s Northwest African American Museum (NAAM), Hasaan Kirkland, spoke to the relationship between artistic expression and marginalization in Seattle’s African-American community.
“[Discrimination] provides oftentimes a lot of inspiration as far as narratives and reasons or passion to produce content or compositional depth or rationale to the works that are produced,” Kirkland added.
While discrimination and segregation are by no means the most pleasant sources of artistic inspiration, and the history of expression emerging from this community should not be romanticized, these artistic efforts do deserve recognition, a privilege rarely doled out to Seattle’s black population.