The Central Area: Seattle's changing heart

E-mail this article Print this article Other links African Americans leaving the neighborhood More African-Americans in South King County Racial changes in the Central Area A 30-year decline in the African-American community

Three hundred bodies — chins, big toes, hips and all — have forsaken inertia to quiver and groove in a demonstrative act of faith at Mount Calvary Christian Center in the Central Area, the heart of Seattle's historic black neighborhood. A person can't worry about wrinkled outfits, smudged makeup, messed-up hair when celebrating the Lord.

"You can't be reserved and really praise God," the Rev. Reggie Witherspoon lectures his worshipers, who have put down their New King James Bibles to sail their hands in the air.

This is how African Americans do church. "Crazy praise" is what Witherspoon calls it.

And in his sea of jubilation, more and more of his congregants are white.

Mount Calvary, sandwiched between a cheese-steak shop and a do-it-yourself car wash, sits at 23rd Avenue and East Union Street, a crossroads in an inner-city neighborhood undergoing tremendous change.

It was just outside the church doors where, on May 31, police shot to death Aaron Roberts, a life-long neighborhood resident, and where, on July 7, Seattle Mayor Paul Schell was assaulted in front of dozens of stunned residents at a community festival.

The violence only cemented the neighborhood's forbidding reputation with those who know it only from commutes or headlines. Through civil rights, race riots and protests over police actions, it has been the seat of black pride — and anger — in a mostly white city.

And there is rage here when the conversation turns to police shootings or racial profiling.

But the city's traditionally black neighborhood is now predominantly white.

That dramatic demographic shift has been greeted not so much with anger by longtime residents but with a mix of regret and acceptance. With gentrification has come money, better-kept homes and safer streets.

Many fewer blacks

The Central Area — also called the Central District, or CD — is now home to fewer African Americans than at any other time in the past 30 years, a slide from about 16,000 to 9,400 blacks. In the last decade alone, according to the 2000 census, the African-American population plummeted 20 percent.

Of the 26,000 residents here, 43 percent are white. Blacks account for 32 percent; Asian or Pacific Islanders, 10 percent; and Hispanics, 8 percent.

While such profound change is obvious to those who live here, the consequences of it creep into daily life almost unnoticed.

At her novelty store at 23rd and Union, Carol Houston now makes sure her merchandise doesn't look "too brown."

Across the street at Mount Calvary, Witherspoon strives for sermons and music that will connect with a mix of races.

And around the corner, restaurateur Carl Thompson mails fliers to doctors' offices and caters events in an attempt to attract more whites to his restaurant, Thompson's Point of View.

"People think Central Area, they think black," he said. "They think Thompson's and they think, `Am I really supposed to be here?' "

Changing neighborhood

Charles Yearby Sr. is a black house painter. He's 52, with thick forearms and thumbs smudged with paint. He wears jeans and a T-shirt with a cap turned backward. Originally from Louisiana, he's lived in the neighborhood since 1968.

"There was a time when you couldn't be over there on that corner," he says, pointing to 21st Avenue and East Union Street. "Now you see white people at 2 in the morning walking their dog."

On Yearby's block in the Squire Park area, 91 people — or 81 percent — were African American in 1990. Last year, according to an analysis of the 2000 census, African Americans made up just under half of all residents.

"Black there," Yearby says, pointing to one house, then another. "White. White. Black."

Yearby doesn't lament the change. "As long as we can get along, the only people in the world are male and female. All this black and white... " He doesn't finish the sentence.

One block over, homeowner Betty Roseboro, 52, who is black, talks about how her mother taught her to live within her means and hold onto real estate. That's a lesson, she says, that some of her neighbors either didn't learn or lacked the resources to heed.

Roseboro, who works at the Darigold plant in nearby Rainier Valley, plans to upgrade her house with new siding and plumbing. Next year, she may put on a new roof.

Many Central Area residents used to have an attitude of "not really wanting to be bothered," Roseboro recalls.

Now she senses that people want to be here, want to fit in, want to get along. Neighbors watch out for one another and will alert you if they see an unfamiliar face walking through your back yard.

"There are a lot of people coming in. I'm really glad to see that," Roseboro says. Down the street, a longtime vacant lot now houses an architecturally stunning home, owned by a white couple.

At the same time, she chided a black man, who works at Boeing, for moving to the suburbs. "I said, `You can buy a big house here,' " Roseboro said. "He said, `I've outgrown the neighborhood.'

"But he comes back to chitchat, whenever he wants to really get down, whenever he wants to blow the breeze."

Much less crime

In the 1980s, guns, crack and unemployment had so pummeled the neighborhood that the Central Area seemed a raggedy, jaded, risky place.

A decade earlier, the Interstate 90 expansion had gobbled up homes and cut the neighborhood off from Rainier Valley. Programs to revitalize the inner city sputtered. Businesses fled.

Today, some houses still droop, and debris and wayward grocery carts still blanket some dirt driveways.

But this is a neighborhood on its way up — so much so that a Central Area Garden Tour, now in its fourth year, is an annual event. For every sagging Volkswagen van with weeds vining across the roof, there is a shiny SUV.

In 1986, the number of violent crimes reported in the neighborhood — murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault — numbered 986. By 1989, there were more than 1,100 violent crimes here. Last year, in a pattern consistent with national crime trends, violent crimes dropped to 373.

In 1985, the median price of a house in the Central Area/Capitol Hill area — which bleeds beyond the technical borders of the Central Area — was $62,000. But in the past 15 years, prices have appreciated faster than anywhere else in King County; last year, the median price for a home here was $286,000. (In June 2000, the median price for a home in King County overall was $234,000.)

On East Union, Windermere Real Estate recently listed a "perfect starter house": three bedrooms, two baths, $260,000.

Race and economics

The neighborhood's renaissance can be explained more by economics than race. More homeowners and increased personal wealth mean the neighborhood is better tended to by residents and, indirectly, by police, residents say.

But economics and race are often intertwined.

From 1993 to 1998, according to the Federal Reserve, 75 percent of new home loans in the Central Area went to whites; 13 percent went to blacks.

Some residents say that too many blacks have been pushed out of their family homes — often inherited from parents — by soaring property taxes.

"They either couldn't afford it or some of them sold the houses, then smoked up the profits," says David Jones, a black graphic artist who has stayed in the neighborhood. "And some just decided to get outta here and moved to the South End."

The Central Area still has the highest concentration of African Americans in the city — almost four times the city's 8.26 percent. But the black populations in Rainier Valley and Rainier Beach are now comparable in size.

Those who have moved here, regardless of their race, like the neighborhood for its racial and economic mix, its convenient central location, and its funky, family appeal.

Some unease

But some whites acknowledge an awkwardness about moving into a historic black neighborhood, or having the money to buy a house while an interested black buyer may not.

"I was totally aware of us buying a home and furthering gentrification," says Hillary Behrman, a white attorney who bought a house from a white couple on 28th Avenue with her partner, Steve Johnson. They have two young children.

"I also feel like if we ever had to sell it, I'd bet 99 percent that a white family would buy it."

John Jeannot, who is white, bought a house here eight years ago from an elderly black woman who was moving into a nursing home. He grew up in North Capitol Hill and wanted to raise his daughter here.

"You can feel the gentrification coming in," says Jeannot, who has gone to parties in the North End and has heard people say the Central Area is "more safe now."

"Which means they're thinking it's not so black."

Jeannot, who's active on the neighborhood community council, is adamant that more mixed-income housing is the only way to preserve the neighborhood's character.

"I can see this area, in five, 10 years, being pretty homogenous — like Wallingford," he says. "That's a horrible thing."

A center of black history

To chronicle black Seattle and the city's civil-rights movement is to return time and again to the Central Area.

This was the place where most blacks lived after World War II, commuting to shipyard and Boeing jobs. Jazz clubs thrived. Garfield High, where minorities outnumbered whites, welcomed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael.

This is the birthplace of the local Black Panthers, where the community protested against segregation in schools and in housing, and which erupted in the aftermath of King's assassination.

Mount Zion, the state's oldest African-American Baptist church at 111 years, is here. The local chapter of the national Urban League, created to address the economic needs of African Americans, started here in 1930.

The local library is named after abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth; a pool after civil-rights leader Medgar Evers; a theater after poet and novelist Langston Hughes; a park and arts center after Edwin T. Pratt, the local Urban League director assassinated at his Shoreline home.

The offices of The Facts and The Seattle Medium, local black newspapers, are here. So is KRIZ, the black AM radio station.

By the cheese-steak shop and the catfish restaurant, the faces of Malcolm X, King and Pratt peer from murals painted on brick facades. When the only Starbucks moved in four years ago, a neon Charlie Parker was hoisted atop the cafe, in recognition of the area's jazz past. Inside, early Seattle jazz photos by local black photographer Al Smith hang from the walls.

The same Starbucks, deemed a symbol of the white establishment, was targeted by protesters demanding police reform after the Roberts shooting.

Ideal location

With Lake Washington, the University of Washington and downtown just minutes away, the leafy Central Area has always been geographically ideal.

"It's so obvious why people want to live here," says Tyrone Bolds, 52, a black barber known as "Mr. T." He sits in front of his barbershop on East Union, dressed in a brim hat and a summer suit, a familiar face to motorists who drive up and down the street, roll down their windows, point their fingers and nod hello.

If a community is measured in numbers only, the Central Area is no longer black. But as long as the churches and other institutions that have long served African Americans remain, blacks say they will continue to regard the Central Area as theirs.

African Americans — some pushed out, some who gladly moved to Woodinville, Issaquah and Kent — return here for church, for family, for hair appointments, for Garfield basketball games.

"I was born and raised here," says Rick Du Pree, an African American who attends Mount Calvary and who lives in Rainier Valley. "Even if it's now mostly white, I do think of the Central Area as a black neighborhood."

Dale Daniels, who is black, lives in Northgate and owns VIP Painting. Last week he was painting an apartment complex on 20th Avenue around the corner from where he, too, grew up.

"My goal is to buy a house here," he says. "That's why I'm up on this ledge painting."

`Too expensive to stay'

At 23rd and East Union, Thompson runs his restaurant with his mother, Louise, and, as important, his mother's recipes.

Oxtails. Corn bread. Liver and onions. The house specialty: "Hallelujah chicken wings."

With its yellow tablecloths and red plastic flowers, Thompson's used to face competition from Ms. Helen's across the street. But that soul-food restaurant, another longtime institution, is red-tagged because the brick building in which it was housed was damaged in the Feb. 28 Nisqually earthquake.

"Yes, the area has changed," Carl Thompson says. "The primary reason is that it's just too expensive to stay."

As a black businessman, Thompson believes it's crucial to remain here, to prove to whites that being black doesn't mean drug dealing and welfare; to show young African Americans that success doesn't always mean being a rap star or pro athlete.

His clientele used to be only black. These days, it's not unusual to walk in his restaurant and see only whites.

Thompson laments the loss of black families, but as the neighborhood has changed, he has tried to adjust without alienating his loyal black customers.

"I'm still going to provide the same service," he says. "I'm not going to switch and just play country-western music."

Across the street, Carol Houston, a black woman familiar with the experience of walking into a card shop and seeing nothing but white faces on the card racks, figured she'd open a business to fix that. Carol's Essentials features greeting cards and ceramic figurines with brown faces. There are books for the black parent, black investor, black teacher and black woman looking for a black man. Journals and graduation sashes are made of African kente cloth.

But as the neighborhood becomes more mixed, Houston has realized so must her store. She doesn't want nonblacks peering in her window at "too many brown faces and thinking, `Oh, there's nothing in there for me.' "

So she added Beanie Babies, purple candles and Six-in-One game sets to her merchandise.

"I'm not trying to exclude anyone," she says. "I'm trying to provide a service."

Changes in church

Mount Calvary is a small, plain church without fancy stained-glass windows, floor-to-ceiling embroidered banners or varnished pews. The place is at its best and brightest Sunday mornings, when men in crisp suits file in beside women in high heels and painted nails.

The Rev. Witherspoon, in a mustard-colored suit, paces in front of his pulpit. Like all good preachers, he is engaging, delivering singular-themed sermons laced with humor and stories of his own family. On this Sunday, his theme is the meaning of prosperity.

"I don't want to see any more George Washingtons down here," he adds, pointing to the $1 bills that congregation members donated.

Witherspoon, 42, has been a pastor for 13 years. When he was younger, he was a "radical African-American preacher" delivering a pro-black message in a way that excluded nonblacks.

"I was so desperate to minister I went overboard," he recalls.

He is still adamant that blacks are treated like second-class citizens, that white society is ignorant of black American life, that blacks themselves need to be better educated about their own history. He has a lot to say about how blacks, because of their experiences, see the world differently than whites.

South King church?

He has considered opening a second church in Federal Way, where he could serve a growing black population in nearby Kent and Renton.

But at his home church in the Central Area, he can't think only of blacks and preach to a congregation that is increasingly diverse. So, for example, Witherspoon will preach about interracial relationships. And along with gospel, the hymn list includes more Christian songs, "so all people can relate," he says.

"As much as I feel a call to this community, I also feel I need to reach out," he explains.

Lori Baer, 33, moved to the Central Area two years ago. While she once encountered some unfriendly African Americans, she says that may have had more to do with annoyance about her dog than her race.

On a recent Sunday morning at Mount Calvary, Baer, the only white member of the choir, is on stage singing loudly, letting loose, praising the Lord in a manner Witherspoon so cherishes.

A week later, the church's band played salsa.

Florangela Davila can be reached at 206-464-2916 or fdavila@seattletimes.com.