Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights History Projects

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The Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights History Projects are a series of multimedia public history initiatives. The projects cover a range of themes and subjects in the Northwest and Seattle, with a particular focus on working people and their movements. The effort, particularly the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, has garnered praise for the breadth of primary and secondary resources made available and its joint creation by academics, community members and hundreds of students. It has been recognized as a model of digital and publicly engaged scholarship. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

Projects

The primary projects in the series are the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, the Great Depression in Washington State Project, the Waterfront Workers History Project, the Labor Press Project, the Seattle General Strike Project, the Communism in Washington State Project and the Antiwar and Radical History Project. The Strikes! Labor History Encyclopedia for the Pacific Northwest draws together the resources available on the other sites and adds additional information on workers from the many industries and communities of the region. [4] Many of these resources are only digitized and available through the projects, having been culled from archival material and personal collections, and materials including the only known film of the 1919 Seattle General Strike and the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike are exceedingly rare.

Impact

The Projects have gained attention as a trailblazing initiative in public scholarship and engagement between the University of Washington and the Seattle community to record histories like Filipino Cannery Unionism [5] and the Chicano Movement in Washington state that are largely unavailable elsewhere. A unique, collaborative process has also given community members greater control over content than traditional academic research and created more investment by students in their work. [6] [7] The impact of the Projects beyond the academic realm was demonstrated when Washington state law on neighborhood association covenants changed as a result of information brought to light on racially exclusive housing covenants that remained in neighborhood charters. [8] [9] In other cases, the projects have brought light to rarely studied topics, like the Seattle Black Panther Party. The local Chapter was one of the first founded outside Oakland and one of the longest-lived. The Civil Rights and Labor History Project unearthed material and conducted oral histories that form the largest body of material on any Party chapter in the nation, including the founding chapter in Oakland. [10]

All of the projects have been notable for the quantity of material made available online. The Labor Press Project hosts thousands of digitized articles from more than thirty different union and radical newspapers, and the Strikes! Labor History Encyclopedia contains a day-by-day database of articles from the Northwest related to labor, covering the crucial periods of 1915-1919 and 1930-1939. Video oral histories are a key part of the projects, showing first-hand perspectives that are placed alongside original academic essays and digitized historical materials. [1] The Projects have also focused on outreach to Washington's public schools, working with educators to design curriculums using the materials to teach students about the sometimes forgotten history of labor and civil rights in the Northwest and fulfill State requirements. [11]

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The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, one of the Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights History Projects, is dedicated to social movements and labor history in the Pacific Northwest. It is directed by Professor James N. Gregory of the University of Washington. The project represents a unique collaboration between community organizations and University faculty, as well as undergraduate and graduate students. It has become a model of public history across the US and has been credited with changing the discussion of race and civil rights in the Seattle area.

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The Martin Luther King. Jr. County Labor Council, AFL-CIO, (MLKCLC) is the central body of labor organizations in King County, Washington. The MLKCLC is affiliated with the national AFL-CIO, the central labor organization in the United States, which represents more than 13 million working people. Over 125 organizations are affiliated with the MLKCLC, and more than 75,000 working men and women belong to Council-affiliated organizations. Not only does the MLKCLC support labor organizations, but it acts as a voice for the interests and needs of the working people in King County, WA.

The Waterfront Workers History Project is a program of the University of Washington, which serves to document the history of workers and unions active on the ports, inland waterways, fisheries, canneries, and other waterfront industries of the western United States and Canada, specifically, California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and British Columbia. In collaboration with the Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights History Projects, and sponsored by the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, the Project is a collective effort to organize and present historical data covering significant events from 1894 to the current day.

The Great Depression in Washington State Project is a multimedia web resource based at the University of Washington in Seattle. Created in the context of renewed economic hard times in 2009, the Project includes essays, maps, digitized newspaper articles and hundreds of rare photographs from the 1930s. In addition to rapid industrialization and demographic change, the Depression ended decades of Republican rule, created a powerful labor movement, changed the face of the Democratic Party and molded new set of political priorities. In several thematic sections, the Project examines these changes in everyday life, culture, politics and work. The Project is one of the Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights History Projects, characterized by student-led research and public scholarship.

The Seattle General Strike Project is a multimedia initiative to chronicle the Seattle General Strike, the first general strike in the United States. In February 1919, what began as a wage dispute in the city’s shipyard expanded into a week-long walkout involving more than 50,000 workers that heralded a wave of post-war labor unrest and America’s first red scare. The website maintained by the project is one of the foremost collections of primary and academic material on the event, and is part of the Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights History Projects program at the University of Washington.

The Labor Press Project: Pacific Northwest Labor and Radical Newspapers is a multimedia website housing thousands of digitized articles and editions from the late 19th century to the present. Newspapers and newsletters from unions, early socialist groupings, anarchist communes, ethnic community groups and radical organization are presented on the site with accompanying research articles on their context and evolution. Many of the digitized materials were previously unavailable except as archival material. The extensive resource is one of Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights History Projects developed by the University of Washington.

The Black Panther Party History and Memory Project is a multimedia effort to chronicle the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party. Founded in 1968, the Seattle Chapter was one of the first to be formed outside Oakland and became one of longest lived bases of the Party. The Project is the largest online collection of materials about any branch of the organization. The materials include detailed video oral histories, historical documents and photographs and the complete transcript of a 1970 Congressional Hearing held on the Seattle Chapter. The Project is an initiative of the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project at the University of Washington.

Strikes! Labor History Encyclopedia of the Pacific Northwest is a clearinghouse of information on the labor history of the region developed by the University of Washington and Professor James N. Gregory as part of the Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights History Projects. The Encyclopedia covers the major industries of Washington state, major unions and worker struggles, civil rights activism among many ethnic communities, radical organizations, the Great Depression and the New Deal and the region's rich history of labor and radical newspapers.

The Cannery Workers and Farm Laborers Union, Local 7 was the first Filipino-led union in the United States.

History of Chinese Americans in Seattle

Greater Seattle has had a Chinese American community almost since its founding in 1851. Chinese workers arriving in the 1860s were welcomed, because the Seattle area was sparsely settled and workers were needed; within a few decades, however, newly arrived white settlers resented the Chinese workers, and there were several anti-Chinese riots as the whites attempted to expel the Chinese from the area. Chinese settlement persisted, with the immigrants settling in a well-defined Chinatown where they maintained their culture through family groups, associations, and churches. In the mid-20th century Chinese Americans joined with other immigrant groups to oppose racial discrimination. In 1962 a Chinese American became the first person of Asian ancestry to hold elective office in the state of Washington.

Chris Delarna Mensalvas, also archived as Chris D. Mensalvas and Chris D. Mensalves was a Filipino American union organizer most active during the 1940s and 1950s. A communist and leader of the immigrant Filipino labor movement in the Pacific Northwest, Mensalvas was closely associated with famous Filipino American author and activist Carlos Bulosan as well as Ernesto Mangaoang and Philip Vera Cruz.

Revels Cayton (1907—1995) was an American civil rights leader active in the states of Washington and California.

References

  1. 1 2 Dublin, Thomas (Summer 2010). "The New Labor History, the New Media, and New Challenges" (PDF). Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. 7 (2): 83–96. doi:10.1215/15476715-2009-078.
  2. ↑ Klinetobe, Charles. "Review:The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project". Digital History Project. University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
  3. ↑ Griffey, Trevor (January 2012). "Rethinking Race and Place: The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project". OAH Magazine of History. 26 (1): 47–50. doi:10.1093/oahmag/oar049.
  4. ↑ Gregory, James; Trevor Griffey (Spring 2007). "Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project: an Online Video Oral History Collection" (PDF). Northwest Oral History Association Newsletter.
  5. ↑ "Filipino Cannery Unionism Across Three Generations 1930s-1980s - Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project". depts.washington.edu.
  6. ↑ Cole, Peter (March 2008). "Web Site Review: Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project". Journal of American History. 95 (4). Archived from the original on November 10, 2013.
  7. ↑ Rosales-Castaneda, Oscar (Spring 2012). "Writing Chicana/o History with the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project". Writing History in the Digital Age.
  8. ↑ Turnbull, Lornet (June 3, 2005). "Homeowners find records still hold blot of racism". Seattle Times.
  9. ↑ Gregory, James (April 6, 2006). "Stain of racism still haunts Seattle neighborhoods". Seattle Times.
  10. ↑ Solomon, Cara (May 21, 2006). "The story of Seattle's Black Panther Party". Seattle Times.
  11. ↑ Gregory, James; Trevor Griffey (April 2007). "Teaching a City about Its Civil Rights History: A Public History Success Story". Perspectives. 45 (4).
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