A Pasco Civil Rights Protest and How Discrimination Built Tri-Cities
In this installment of NWPB’s “Past as Prologue” series, we learn about a protest in Pasco, Washington against police brutality and intimidation against black residents that happened more than 50 years ago. Robert Franklin, WSU archivist and oral historian at the Hanford History Project, explains what led to that moment and considers its connection to the broader Civil Rights Movement in the Pacific Northwest.
RAMELLA: Imagine hundreds of protesters against police brutality damaging police cars and setting fire to trees in front of a courthouse. You may think this is from today’s headlines, but it happened over 50 years ago in Pasco. WSU archivist and oral historian at the Hanford History Project, Robert Franklin, explains what led to that moment.
FRANKLIN: In the summer of 1943, thousands of temporary African American workers were recruited by the Du Pont company to build the secretive Plutonium works. After the war, the expansion of Hanford and the construction of many dams on the Snake and Columbia Rivers again drew thousands more African Americans to the Tri-Cities.
By 1950, 2,000 African Americans were confined to segregated East Pasco, literally “across the tracks” and connected to Pasco by a dark underpass. Few lived in the new atomic community of Richland and none in “lily-white” Kennewick — a fact that Kennewick city leaders and police at the time were proud.
In 1963, Kennewick was dubbed the “Birmingham of Washington,” alluding to the housing and employment discrimination practiced there. Although as one local pastor noted: “People are saying that Kennewick is worse than Birmingham, for Negroes CAN LIVE in Birmingham.”
Most protests in the Tri-Cities were peaceful, but in 1969, a protest in Pasco against police violence and intimidation against black residents turned violent. The protesters, many with weapons, damaged police cars and burned the trees in front of the Franklin County Courthouse. Local Civil Rights leader James Pruitt saw that he needed to defuse the situation before it turned deadly. Pruitt recalled: “I got on the wishing well and I cried like a baby. If those kids had pulled out those guns out there and start shooting at them police, they were going to destroy them. And I promised them, if they would just think about it and go back home, I said ‘as long as there is blood in this body, I would never let this happen in this town again. And the kids dispersed.”
Shortly after, Pruitt became the first black employee of Pasco, working in the police and community relations department.
In the upheaval currently roiling our nation, it’s important to understand the successes and failures of the Civil Rights movement in the Pacific Northwest. While there were gains, like the desegregation of schools through busing, expansion of job opportunities, fair housing ordinances, the first of which was in Kennewick, and redevelopment of the east Pasco neighborhood, many of the injustices and inequalities were not addressed.
Black employees at Hanford continued to report instances of racial discrimination, the Urban Renewal of East Pasco dispersed the black community, and in influx of Latino migrants joined the black community in older areas of the Tri-Cities, triggering white flight. We see these persistent inequalities reflected in economic disparities by race in our communities, and in the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the recent protests over the killing of unarmed black citizens by our police forces. Clearly, the work of the Civil Rights era is still present and immediate today.
RAMELLA: That’s Robert Franklin, archivist and oral historian at the Hanford History Project at WSU Tri-Cities. The project has over 200 oral history interviews to preserve the Manhattan Project and Cold War history of the Hanford Nuclear Site. Recently, with African American workers and residents of the Tri-Cities.
About the Author:
Robert Franklin is the assistant director and archivist of the Hanford History Project, director of the Hanford Oral History Project, a certified archivist, and a Lecturer in the History department at WSU Tri-Cities. He is also a docent at the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, Hanford Unit, and adjunct faculty at the History Department at Columbia Basin College. Franklin received his MA in history with a public history focus at Washington State University in 2014. At WSU, his thesis examined New Deal rural agricultural resettlement in the Territory of Alaska. That interest in federal activity in the West soon turned to the Hanford Site in eastern Washington and led him to the Hanford History Project. Franklin is co-editor, with Robert Bauman, on two books using those oral histories to tell the history of the Hanford region. The first volume of that series, Nowhere to Remember: Hanford, White Bluffs, and Richland to 1943 was released in 2018 by WSU Press, and the forthcoming book, Echoes of Exclusion and Resistance: Voices from the Hanford Region, is to be published by WSU Press in late 2020.