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Seattle Takes Steps to Recognize Minorities’ Role in Shaping Region

The Seattle skyline can be seen beyond the former Colman School, which will house the Northwest African American Museum.Credit...Stuart Isett for The New York Times

SEATTLE — Gray and green may be the colors most associated with this forward-focused city, but it has a history in other tones, too. Chinese immigrants helped build railroads, only to be driven out later. Japanese residents were forced into internment camps during World War II. Blacks surged into the city after the war for work. Hispanics are the fastest-growing group.

This year, two new museums and a new traditional gate marking the city’s Chinatown will be completed, formally acknowledging the role minority groups have played in shaping Seattle and the region — even as those roles are changing. The new touchstones will meet dueling misperceptions: that the city has had a bland racial past and that tolerance and unity are among the local natural resources.

“If it’s a nice place, it’s not because it’s always been a nice place,” said James N. Gregory, director of the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project at the University of Washington. “It’s because people fought like hell to make things better. It’s kind of an annoying local mythology: ‘Oh, Seattle doesn’t have problems. It doesn’t have racial problems. That’s just the South.’ ”

In fact, the locations of the new museums — the Northwest African American Museum at the edge of the Central District and the newly expanded Wing Luke Asian Museum in what is now called the International District — are directly linked to the city’s troubled racial history. The neighborhoods became concentrated with minorities beginning in the 19th century because discriminatory housing policies prevented Asians, blacks and other groups from living elsewhere.

Now, however, as efforts are made to preserve the past in some of the city’s historic minority neighborhoods, crossing boundaries is the constant theme. The African-American museum is opening next month in a century-old school at a time when the black population is declining in Seattle but growing in the suburbs, echoing trends in other cities. Asians, too, are moving to the suburbs.

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Jennifer Hopkins, 27, will pay $831 for a Seattle apartment in the former Colman School.Credit...Stuart Isett for The New York Times

The black population, which has dropped to 8 percent of the city population from 10 percent in 1990, was once almost entirely American-born, worked in domestic or industrial jobs and mostly lived in the Central District. Now, one of the museum’s coming exhibits will focus on the increase of East African immigrants in the region. Big companies like Boeing have recruited young engineers from black colleges in the South.

Felicia Kline, president of the Seattle Urban League Young Professionals (but a resident of Renton, a suburb), said that when black newcomers asked her for advice on where to live, their questions were about affordability and traffic, “not about ‘Oh, I need to be around black people.’ ”

Some neighborhoods rich with ethnic cultural history have been gentrified or overrun with condominiums. Others have declined economically. Historians say geographic anchors are less obvious now that immigrants and minorities are less defined by place.

This spring, the Wing Luke museum, named for the first Asian-American elected to public office in the Northwest, will reopen after a major expansion into a historic building in the Chinatown section of the International District. The move comes as the Asian population, which makes up 13 percent of both the city and King County, has also been leveling off in the city but increasing in the suburbs.

This Saturday, the new Chinatown gate will be formally opened, more than half a century after it was conceived and at a time when many well-established residents of Chinese descent return to Chinatown mostly just for dinner, and sometimes warily, because of an increase in crime and panhandling.

“When it turns dark people don’t want to go down there,” said Tuck Eng, 74, who grew up in Chinatown, became a Boeing engineer and has led the effort to build the new gate. “We’re trying to change that.”

Chinatown was built on fill that was hauled in to stabilize the shore of Puget Sound. Workers installing the pillars for the gate had to drill down 65 feet before they hit solid dirt, then an additional 20 feet to create a foundation. The Central District is on a hill that once was a muddy skid road where fresh-cut evergreens were dragged down to the waterfront.

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Tuck Eng, 74, grew up in Chinatown and led the effort to build the gate shown behind him.Credit...Stuart Isett for The New York Times

It has been more than a quarter-century since blacks first proposed building a museum in the old brick Colman School. For a period in the 1980s, activists effectively took over the building after the school district closed it and demanded that the building be dedicated to black culture.

Back then, a surge in the black population that began in the 1940s was expected to continue with the growth of manufacturing jobs in Seattle. Now only about 46,000 of the 105,000 blacks in King County live in Seattle, and blacks are no longer a majority in the Central District.

“I’ve argued that what black Seattle was trying to do, and is trying to do to this day, was come to grips with the fact that it’s no longer a spatial community,” said Quintard Taylor, a professor at the University of Washington who has written a history of blacks in the city and runs a Web site, blackpast.org.

The Urban League, which eventually bought the Colman School, is confronting the community issue directly. On the two floors above the exhibition space, it has created 36 apartments that will be rented to people who earn 60 percent or less of the local median income. About half of the renters so far are black.

Jennifer Hopkins moved in last week. Ms. Hopkins, 27, is black and originally from Durham, N.C., where she said the black community was more cohesive. In her spare time, she volunteers at a nearby senior center that serves mostly black residents who used to live in the Central District but now often come in from suburbs like Kent or Renton to play pinochle or attend fitness classes with old friends.

She said one of the reasons she moved into the new apartments was to better connect with blacks in the city.

“I’m just hoping that more people of color move in,” Ms. Hopkins said.

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