[...] How many among us know that blacks migrating to the Puget Sound area came as early as the 1840s? Some found work in the coal mines of Black Diamond and Roslyn. Many left the Deep South at the end of Reconstruction to escape the evils of apartheid, including the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups. Others who came sought gold in the Klondike region of Alaska in the late 1890s.
We will tell how World War II fueled the next major migration with its wartime jobs at Boeing and in the Bremerton Naval Shipyards, and what it meant to the lives of the young families that settled here.
The latest surge of people of African descent to populate this region is a result of the political upheavals in the East African nations of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia beginning in the 1970s, through the 1980s and 1990s. [...]
| Go back for the rest of Carver Gayton's Seattle Times guest column "It's time to tell the stories of region's black history"
posted in articles on March 2, 2005 2:02 AM | t (0)
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