Continuing on our tour of landmarks named for local Black heroes, here are just a few historical figures who should be household names in Seattle.
Perhaps you’ve noticed new activity in the old fire station at 23rd and Yesler, across the street from the Douglass-Truth Branch Library. In 2020, the space was re-dedicated as the William Grose Center for Cultural Innovation, an incubator and hub for creativity and entrepreneurship in the Black community. Learn about its namesake, William Grose, a 19th Century Black pioneer and entrepreneur whose property along East Madison Street laid the foundation for the Central District. After arriving in Seattle in 1860, he opened several successful businesses, and his home became a community hub for Seattle’s earliest Black residents. Prior to arriving in the Northwest, Grose formed a west-coast branch of the Underground Railroad, and successfully convinced the government in Panama to stop returning escaped Black slaves who traveled there.
Learn about the namesake of Pratt Park and Pratt Fine Arts Center, Edwin T. Pratt, a civil rights leader who fought for equal access to education and fair housing. Read this extensive essay written by playwright and novelist Nancy Rawles, published by Pratt Fine Arts, to learn more about his life before relocating to Seattle, where he served as Executive Director of the Urban League. Learn about his legacy, which included improving educational opportunities for minority students of all ages, and helping to start the Central Area Motivation Program (CAMP.), a community-led organization working to fight poverty. Pratt was tragically murdered in front of his home in Shoreline, in 1969. In addition to the landmarks named in his honor, early donations to the Library’s African American Collection were made in his memory.
Read about Roberta Byrd Barr, an educator, community leader, civil rights activist, and librarian who helped develop the African American Collection at the Douglass Truth Branch. She was the first Black woman appointed as principal of a high school in Seattle, in 1973 – just one of her many notable achievements. She also ran the Freedom School, a free and temporary school for Black students, during a 1966 boycott of Seattle Public Schools to demand integration. In 2018, the long-time community and social services hub in the Central District formerly known as CAMP (see above) was renamed in her honor, to Byrd Barr Place.
Read more about these and other notable figures in our city’s history – and not just in February – with this resource list, and watch out for the arrival of a new and expanded edition of Mary Henry’s “Tributes: Black People Whose Names Grace Seattle Sites,” coming soon to The Seattle Public Library.
Note: If you’re not familiar with the history of the Central District, and wonder why so many of the landmarks named for Black historical figures are located there, it’s not a coincidence. Seattle has a deep history of segregation and redlining, as well as resistance to it, which you can learn more about on the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project’s incredible resource, Segregated Seattle.
~ Posted by Emily G.
Shelf Talk 