Olympia Time

History, politics, people of Oly WA

HB 2554 and the Long Shadow of Initiative 456

March 7, 2026 / / 0 Comments

A relic of institutionalized racism has lived in a corner of Washington State law for over 40 years. As House Bill 2554 moves through the 2026 legislative session, that language is finally on the verge of being wiped clean.

The bill seeks to remove the statutory leftovers of Initiative 456. It was a ballot measure passed in 1984 during a time of intense anger toward tribal sovereignty. Similar repeal efforts made very little headway in 2010 and 2021, but the persistent work of Representative Debra Lekanoff has finally pushed the bill onto the governor’s desk. I wrote about this history five years ago, but I want to revisit it again.

It did receive a strange amount of opposition in the House. Most of that dissent focused on the technicality of repealing a voter-approved initiative rather than a defense of the words themselves.

To understand why this repeal matters, we have to look back at the concerted efforts to dismantle tribal treaty rights that followed the Boldt Decision.

The roots of Initiative 456 go back to the immediate aftermath of 1974’s U.S. v. Washington (the Boldt Decision). When the Supreme Court finally upheld Judge Boldt’s ruling in 1979, it did so against a backdrop of defiance. It is important to remember that the Supreme Court did not just uphold the Boldt Decision itself. It ruled on a group of cases that were actively trying to overturn it. These cases started in local courts and wound their way through the State Supreme Court and finally into federal courts. They were an effort by private actors (like fishing charter owners) to force the state of Washington to stop recognizing the sovereignty of treaty tribes in salmon management.

This era of resistance is best captured through the words of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Alfred Goodwin wrote the appeals-level decision in the “Passenger Vessel” case. He did not hold back regarding the state’s behavior. Goodwin was born in Bellingham and spent his youth in the Pacific Northwest. He eventually became one of the most respected judges in the country.

He observed that the resistance to tribal rights was uniquely aggressive. He wrote: “Except for some desegregation cases …, the district court has faced the most concerted official and private efforts to frustrate a decree of a federal court witnessed in this century.”

This comparison to the Jim Crow era South was not an exaggeration. He was writing in the 1970s when the comparison to the legal opposition to school desegregation was fresh and real. It was a direct reflection of the legal and physical blocks put in place to prevent tribes from using their court-affirmed right to half of the harvestable salmon.

In our own backyard, the Thurston County Courthouse was a stage for this resistance. Local judges, including Gerry Alexander, found themselves in a jurisdictional tug of war. Groups like the Washington State Commercial Passenger Fishing Vessel Association sued state agencies in local courts. Judges like Alexander would rule in their favor, leaning on state law. The groups wanted the state to stop complying with federal orders. They argued that the fifty percent allocation violated the equal protection clause of the state constitution. They were essentially trying to use state law to override federal treaty obligations.

When the U.S. Supreme Court finally used the Supremacy Clause to cancel these state judgments, the opposition did not give up. It just moved from the courtroom to the ballot box.

Initiative 456 was born from this shift in tactics. It was organized by a group called S/SPAWN, which stood for Steelhead and Salmon Protection Action for Washington Now. The measure was a masterclass in mom and apple pie political framing. Supporters admitted to writing the ballot title to sound deceptively wholesome. They wanted to avoid any immediate association with the controversial Boldt Decision. By focusing on the decommercialization of steelhead and claiming that state natural resource management should not consider special rights based on race, they confused a lot of voters. Polling at the time showed that half of the voters were undecided. Many were simply confused by the technical language.

This confusion is born out in the results. Initiative 456 had the third largest voter drop-off of any statewide election on the 1984 ballot. Only insurance and lands commmissioner races drew fewer voters. Initiative 464 (which dealt with sales tax on cars) had the most voters. Initiatives show up at the top of the ballot, so for over 28 percent of voters to drop off between one initiative and the next, and then to turn back around and vote in other races, it means something. If 75 percent of the voters who didn’t vote on 456 had voted against it, the initiative would have failed.

Despite a massive coalition of opposition, the initiative passed in all but four counties. This opposition coalition included Senator Dan Evans, church leaders, environmentalists, and even major timber companies. They argued the initiative was racist and illegal under the Supremacy Clause. They also warned that it threatened international fishing treaties with Canada.

The opposition campaign did not do its job to turn the undecided votes into no votes. Looking back at last week’s essay on pragmatism, I could see a simpler argument was possible, focusing on “we’re a serious state, we need to focus on bigger things and not let opposition to treaty rights define us” being an easy reason to vote no. But the populist appeal of “equal rights” carried the day. It was framed as the removal of special tribal privileges.

The 456 longtail

While the initiative was largely a message to Congress with no immediate power to override federal law, it stayed a strong political tool for years. Senator Slade Gorton tried to implement the core goals by introducing a federal bill in 1985. He wanted to ban tribal commercial steelhead fishing. The effort failed and even created a rift among conservatives. Senator Dan Evans joined the Reagan administration in speaking out against it.

However, the spirit of I-456 was kept alive by later Republican candidates for governor like Bob Williams (1988) and Ken Eikenberry (1992). Both insisted they would enforce the initiative if they were elected. Eikenberry’s endorsement showed that anti-tribal sentiment stayed embedded in the state’s conservative platform for years after the initial vote.

Another reason why 456 mattered was that the tribes’ work wasn’t done in the 1980s. A year after Bob Williams lost in the governor’s race, the tribes went back to court to reaffirm their treaty rights to shellfish, just as they had done in the 1970s for salmon. The decision to expand the federal understanding of treaty rights was not firm, and the tribes did not understand where exactly this new fight would end. Eventually, spanning the time of the Eikenberry campaign, the tribes would win reaffirmation of 50 percent of the shellfish harvest in 1995. But it was a possibility that with shellfish and its corresponding issues of private shellfish companies and private property rights on beaches, the treaty rights structure would fall apart.

Also by the mid-1990s, I-456 began to lose its relevance. The state started to transition toward more stable co-management. Tribal political power grew significantly. Campaign donations increased from the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. As the state and tribes moved further into what people called the “dawn of cooperation,” the aggressive tactics of the 1970s started to look outdated. Although the language of the initiative stayed in the Revised Code of Washington, it was seen as dead law. It was unenforceable because federal treaties are the supreme law of the land.

If you look at the actual text of RCW 77.110, you can see why it’s so problematic. It claims that the state should not recognize any rights to natural resources based on “ancestry” or “race.” This sounds fair on a very surface level, which is why the “Mom and apple pie” strategy worked so well. But in the context of Indian law, this is a direct attack on the political status of tribes. Treaties are not based on race. They are agreements between sovereign nations. By trying to redefine treaty rights as racial privileges, the writers of I-456 were trying to strip away the legal foundation of tribal sovereignty.

Our history can have a haunting presence.

There is a current lawsuit filed by Fish Northwest against the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife following the same pattern as the Passenger Vessel era lawsuits in the 1970s. Fish Northwest is an interesting group that has picked up anti-tribal sentiment that has found new energy over the past 10 years or so. Their litigation strategy echoes the past efforts by trying to cancel current fishing rules through state administrative law. It was filed in the same Thurston County Superior Court that hosted the original post-Boldt challenges. Currently, Fish Northwest is challenging salmon fishing seasons by claiming the state failed to follow procedures like the Regulatory Fairness Act.

The parallels are striking. The state describes the current lawsuit as a backdoor attempt to attack a federal agreement in state court. This happened after Fish Northwest was denied the right to join the federal U.S. v. Washington case directly. The underlying motive is still the same old “Fair Share” grievance. It is a long-standing belief that non-treaty fishers are not getting their due.

In July 2025, a Thurston County judge granted part of their petition. The judge found that the state’s rules were invalid because they failed to conduct a required Small Business Economic Impact Statement. This is a clever evolution of the 1970s and 1984 tactics. Instead of attacking treaties directly, they are using the language of “regulatory fairness” and “small business protection” to gum up the works.

This small business angle is particularly cynical. It frames the state’s cooperation with tribes as a burden on local economies. It ignores the fact that tribal fishing is also a massive economic driver for the region. While the state is currently appealing this ruling, the case represents a spirit that refuses to see tribes as partners. It is an attempt to run around decades of established case law.

As HB 2554 nears the governor’s desk in 2026, it serves as more than just a legislative cleanup. It is a formal rejection of the era of frustration described by Judge Goodwin. By removing the language of Initiative 456, the state is closing the book on an era that tried to turn Washington back into a battlefield of resistance.

Legal challenges like the one from Fish Northwest will probably keep happening. But they will no longer have the comfort of seeing their ideas reflected in our state laws. The meaningless words are finally being stripped away. This leaves room for a future defined by working together rather than constant conflict. We’ve spent forty years with these words on the books. It’s about time we stop letting the past dictate how we manage our future.

Bush, Billings and the Peace that Forces Out

February 28, 2026 / / 1 Comment

South Puget Sound holds a secret about our local character. We are not a monolith; we are the result of decades of pragmatic decisions resulting from a slow-motion collision. To understand why Washington works the way it does, you have to look past the modern Evergreen progressivism. You have to see the ghosts of two rival civilizations, New England and Appalachia, fighting it out over decades and finding ways to make peace. This dualism of the region is best described by Colin Woodard’s American Nations in his description of the Left Coast region.

Our regional identity is defined by a specific, recurring deal. It’s a truce between the institutional, moralizing drive of the New Englander and the fierce, reactive independence of the Scots-Irish borderer.

This synthesis created a unique form of Western whiteness. It’s pragmatic, corporate, and deeply exclusionary. It’s a culture that prioritizes the peace of the collective and the space of the individual, provided both parties are part of the original cultural contract.

Wealth over the Lash

In 1844, the Oregon Trail was less a path to freedom and more a filter for racial purity. When George Washington Bush reached the Willamette Valley, he was met with the Lash Laws. These weren’t mere suggestions. They were mandates for public whippings every six months for any Black person who refused to leave. This was the raw, Appalachian side of the frontier. It was a warrior ethic designed to protect white labor from any perceived competition, including enslaved peoples.

Bush’s response highlights the first major workaround in our history. He was a Black frontiersman of immense skill and even greater fortune. Rather than submit to the lash or return to Missouri, Bush used his wealth to lead five white families north of the Columbia River. He carried several thousand dollars in silver ingots. By settling in what would become Tumwater, he entered a geopolitical gray zone disputed between the U.S. and Great Britain. Bush was a seasoned veteran of the fur trade who had worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company. He knew the terrain. He knew the British authorities at Fort Vancouver. He knew how to navigate the cracks between empires.

The pragmatism of the early Washington establishment soon became clear. Federal laws like the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 technically barred Black settlers from owning land. However, the local white leadership saw a different calculation. Bush wasn’t just a neighbor. He was the wealthiest man on the frontier. He had financed the region’s first gristmill and sawmill. During the grain shortage of 1852, he refused to sell his wheat to speculators for a profit. Instead, he shared it freely with hungry white settlers. He only asked for repayment when they were able.

To the Yankee-minded legislators in the new Washington Territory, Bush was an asset to the order they wished to build. In 1855, the Washington Territorial Legislature unanimously petitioned Congress to grant him a special legal title to his 640-acre farm. They didn’t do this to challenge white supremacy. They did it because Bush’s wealth and conduct aligned with the Yankee desire for a stable, prosperous society. The deal was struck. The rules would be bent for the wealthy and the useful, even as exclusion remained the baseline for everyone else. This established a precedent that remains a cornerstone of our regional psyche.

The law is a tool for stability. Stability often requires the pragmatic absorption of exceptional outsiders who bolster the existing order.

The Olympia Method

The tension between these two nations reached a fever pitch in the 1880s during the Chinese expulsion craze. Across the Pacific Northwest, white labor was in revolt. In Tacoma and Seattle, the Appalachian impulse for direct action took over. Mobs led by the Knights of Labor burned Chinatowns and forced residents onto steamers at gunpoint. This was called the Tacoma Method. It was a visceral, populist purging of outsiders to protect the sovereignty of the white worker.

Olympia faced the same pressure on February 9, 1886. A radical mob gathered at the sound of the city’s fire bell. They intended to drive the Chinese population out of their homes on Fourth Avenue. But here, the Yankee impulse for institutional order stood its ground. Sheriff William Billings and 62 leading citizens didn’t step in because they were radicals for equality. In fact, a formal resolution from the Billings group in 1885 showed that the majority of Olympia’s white residents wanted the Chinese gone. They just disagreed on the method.

To the business elite, a riot was godless anarchy. It would ruin the town’s reputation and scare off investors from the East Coast. They were decidedly opposed to expulsion by force because it threatened the fabric of the New England on the Pacific they were trying to build. Under the protection of these deputies, the leaders of the mob were arrested and tried. They were eventually sentenced to prison at McNeil Island. This was a clear message from the Yankee leadership. The warrior ethic of the mob would not dictate the terms of society in the capital.

The law and order faction essentially told the mob that they agreed the Chinese should go, but they wouldn’t have a riot in the capital. They protected the Chinese residents from violence to preserve the sanctity of the law. This created a relative safety for Chinese merchants like Sam Fun Locke. He remained in Olympia for decades. He paid tribute to the Sheriff’s family every Lunar New Year in gratitude for the protection of the state. It was a pragmatic peace. The elite maintained the rule of law. Meanwhile, the white workers were eventually pacified by the slow, legalistic exclusion of Chinese labor through federal acts rather than street brawls.

The Two Nations

To understand why these events played out this way, we have to look at the two distinct parent nations that settled this place.

First, there is Yankeedom. According to Woodard, these settlers came largely by sea. They were the descendants of Puritans who believed in social engineering and the perfectibility of society. They viewed government as a tool to create a moral and highly regulated community. In their view, the collective had a responsibility to oversee the behavior of its members. Theirs was a missionary impulse to bring order to the wilderness.

Then there is Greater Appalachia. These settlers arrived overland via the Oregon Trail. They were the Highlanders of the American South and the Borderlands. Their culture was forged in centuries of constant warfare on the fringes of the British Isles. They were a heritage of border raiders who learned early on that the state was usually an enemy. They brought a warrior ethic and a deep, bone-deep suspicion of any authority that tried to tell them how to live. To them, personal sovereignty and the protection of kith and kin were the only true laws.

The Pacific Northwest became a battlefield where these two cultures collided. The Yankee wanted to build a schoolhouse and a tax system. The Appalachian wanted to be left alone on his prairie with his gun and his family. We see this battle time and time again in our state. In the battle between the Grange and the railroads, fostering the creation of port districts. And then the later subversion of port districts by corporate interests.

The resulting Left Coast culture is a bipolar soul. It is a place that loves regulation but demands individual self-expression and freedom from constraint. The peace between them is maintained by the Yankee side, promising to manage the logistics of the world. They handle the schools, the roads, and the corporate legalities so the Appalachian side can feel free. It is the pragmatism of Yankeedom easing the libertarian needs of the Appalachians. If you need space, they will engineer a way for you to have it, as long as you play by the institutional rules.

The Sawdust Aristocracy

This peace found an economic engine in the timber industry of the early 1900s. The conflict here was between the Industrial Workers of the World and the American Federation of Labor. The IWW, or Wobblies, were the true radicals. They wanted one big union that included everyone. They welcomed workers from different ethnic backgrounds and unskilled laborers. They represented a threat to the racial and social order of the region because they rejected the idea of a cultural contract based on race or skill.

In contrast, the craft unions of the AFL were the aristocrats of labor. They were overwhelmingly white. They bridged the gap between Appalachian Free Labor and corporate interests from New England. They focused on protecting their narrow privileges as skilled workers. As historian Aaron Goings observes, the timber barons found it much easier to deal with the AFL. The corporations and the white craft unions entered an alliance of convenience. The timber barons would grant modest wage increases and better conditions to the white skilled workers. In return, those workers would help the corporations and local vigilante groups purge the militant Wobblies.

This was a classic Yankee-Appalachian deal. The corporate interests provided the structure and the wages. The white workers provided the warrior ethic to keep the radicals at bay. The creation of the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen during World War I was the ultimate expression of this deal. It was a company-funded union that combined patriotism with a partnership between capital and white labor. This was the regional identity in its final form. It was a peace between corporations and white workers. They agreed to exclude outsiders as long as it protected the peace and profits of the insiders. The Yankee corporate interest got the stability it needed to grow. The Appalachian descended worker got his sovereignty and his respectable wage. He got the comfort of knowing he was part of the aristocracy of labor.

This is the situation we see reflected in our current landscape. We create a world of high regulation and good government. They are the heirs to the leading citizens who deputized themselves in 1886 to keep the peace.

But to keep the peace, they must buy off the libertarian needs of the regional population. This is done by creating a framework where personal freedom is framed through the lens of corporate access and lifestyle choice. We see the cooperation between people who are deeply attached to kith and kin and the corporate interests that need a predictable environment for capital to thrive. The deal is the same as it was in the timber woods. The corporations provide the order and the space. The people provide the peace.

The whiteness of the region is the silent glue of this deal. It is a majority-white culture that has agreed on a synthesis. We will follow the rules as long as the rules protect our space and our sovereignty. This creates a region that is superficially progressive but deeply exclusionary in practice. We will exclude the outsider if their presence threatens the peace of our corporate labor compact.

Ultimately, our regional identity is a pragmatic one. We are a people who say that if you’re going to get all worked up about needing some space, we’ll figure out a way to get you some space. This is the true meaning of the Left Coast. It is a land where the order is designed to keep the freedom profitable.

The freedom is designed to keep the order from being overthrown. It is a truce written in silver ingots, fire bells, and timber contracts. It is a deal that ensures the aristocrats of labor and the barons of industry can coexist in a quiet, white-washed peace. We have built a world where the pragmatic decision is almost always to protect the status quo of the insiders, even if it means ignoring the ghosts of those who were never invited to the table.

Racism in Housing and the Importance of the Local Grind

February 21, 2026 / / 0 Comments

As soon as Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Olympia didn’t look at the news. It looked inward.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, and one that feels incredibly familiar to us now. It’s the same collective gut punch we felt when George Floyd was murdered. We hit the streets, we organized, and we finally started asking the hard questions about our own backyard. In the days following Dr. King’s death, the Olympian ran a series of articles based on interviews with the local Black population. These pieces laid bare truths that we deeply know now, but they were radical to see in print back then.

In early April 1968, Black residents and activists explicitly labeled Olympia a “racist town.” They pointed to the city’s consistent failure to enact any kind of open housing legislation as the primary evidence. An activist named Dickson was particularly outspoken. He criticized the local hypocrisy of excluding Black people from institutions like the Elks Club while using their tax dollars to provide that same club with fire and police protection. He emphasized that the avenues normally open to any promising individual were closed to him solely because of his race.

In her research for “Blacks in Thurston County, Washington, 1950–1975” Dr. Thelma Jackson documents how systemic real estate practices actively pushed Black families out of the city centers. We often hear the local story that Black residents settled in Lacey because it was close to the military bases at Fort Lewis. Dr. Jackson’s work reveals that the steering was actually driven by legal barriers.

Because Lacey was largely unincorporated and newly developing during the 1950s and 60s, it lacked the exclusionary property deeds that barred non-whites from other neighborhoods. Real estate agents and developers capitalized on this by funneling Black buyers toward the few areas where they were legally allowed to own property. It was segregated by design, and it created a geography that persists in our county’s demographics today. Dr. Jackson notes that these obstacles forced families to find creative workarounds, like using white allies to scout and purchase homes on their behalf just to bypass door-slamming discrimination.

This was true even though these racially restrictive covenants had been legally unenforceable since the late 1940s after the Supreme Court struck them down. That didn’t stop Thurston County developers. They continued to add them to deeds for at least another half-decade after the court decision. They were banking on the fact that social pressure and realtor cooperation would do the work the law no longer could.

The local real estate industry was a major point of criticism. Residents were disturbed by a trend toward “ghettos,” and they accused realtors of steering Black families into specific areas while simultaneously discouraging white buyers from those same spots. John Finley noted that despite high employment, the local racial situation remained as dire as in other states. Others warned that forcing Black families into decaying, older housing would inevitably lead to state-sanctioned neglect.

Workers like Ed Chatman faced such significant difficulty finding any housing at all that activists began considering marches around City Hall. They wanted to force action against the pervasive slights and slurs that defined the community’s daily life.

The path toward open housing in Thurston County in 1968 was a contentious journey. It wasn’t a smooth transition. It was marked by urgent activism and fierce, vocal opposition. The movement gained real momentum in April 1968, shortly after Dr. King’s assassination, when the Thurston-Olympia Open Housing Committee presented petitions with over 1,500 signatures to county commissioners.

Key organizers like Patricia Avery, Herb Legg, and Paul Whelan led the charge, and they were supported by students and faculty from St. Martin’s College. Olympia eventually led the way by passing an emergency open housing ordinance on April 29. Lacey followed in late May, but only after its City Hall was jammed by proponents. Lacey’s path had bumps along the road because councilmen like William C. Ryan and Thomas Huntamer questioned the need for such laws. They suggested that discrimination simply wasn’t a local issue.

Opposition was often out in the open. Duke Stockton, a former teacher and self-described segregationist, was a fixture at these hearings. He argued that these laws infringed upon individual property rights. He was a true believer in being an actual racist, was a local organizer for a racist political party, and regularly spoke on a literal soapbox to rail against integration.

The Greater Olympia Board of Realtors, led by president Lee Childers, endorsed the view that fair housing legislation deprived property owners of a basic individual freedom. Mrs. Maxine Padget, a spokesperson for the realtors, argued that civil rights advocates were attempting to dominate policies even when existing rules weren’t being violated.

One of the most specific fights was over the timeline for filing complaints. The proposed ordinance suggested a 50-day window for a citizen to file an unfair housing statement. The realtors pushed back hard. Mrs. Padget argued the limit should be 30 days, while Lee Childers suggested a 10-day limit. They reasoned that a long delay was unreasonable and unfair to brokers. In reality, a 10-day window would have made it nearly impossible for a victim of discrimination to gather evidence and file a claim.

Childers also argued that the real estate fraternity shouldn’t be the only group subject to these regulations. He felt that any non-discrimination requirements should fall equally upon private homeowners as they did on agents. While some realtors stated they would go along with an ordinance as businessmen, they remained firm that civil rights go both ways and that the protection of property must be maintained above all else.

Legal hurdles further complicated the process. County Prosecutor Harold Koch identified numerous legal loopholes in the proposed county-wide human rights commission. He criticized it as an unenforceable gesture and accused the committee of trying to grant vigilante investigative powers to a group that wasn’t part of law enforcement.

These disagreements led to a fractured system. While proponents wanted one uniform law, Tumwater eventually divorced itself from the area-wide effort by passing its own specific version. This version included blanket defenses for landowners and provisions for private hearings. Bruce Pym argued these additions subverted the entire spirit of the law. Because of these complexities, while the county adopted an ordinance in late May, they deferred action on a human rights commission for a long time.

Ten years later, this history should feel familiar. Where open housing ordinances existed, zoning and economic realities began to undercut the progress. Olympia’s modern housing landscape was forged in the late 1970s, which was a period marked by the largest influx of new residents in our history. Before this, the construction of small multi-family housing, like duplexes and quadplexes, generally tracked with population growth.

However, a series of contentious debates starting in 1976 fundamentally altered the city’s trajectory. This led to systematic downzoning that prioritized exclusive single-family neighborhoods. A pivotal moment occurred with the Nut Tree Loop proposal. A developer envisioned 21 quadplexes on what is now a neighborhood of expensive single-family homes. This project sparked fierce public opposition.

Residents expressed a fear of the urban and the potential for denser, poorer communities to enter their neighborhoods. Opponents used inflammatory rhetoric. They claimed that multi-family housing would turn Olympia into a ghetto and lead to increased crime. By 1980, despite some city leaders arguing for denser living to prevent sprawl, the city commission succumbed to pressure and began shelving plans for multi-family expansion.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Olympia implemented systematic downzones that outlawed anything other than single-family homes in many residential areas. This policy transformed hundreds of existing duplexes and small apartment buildings into non-conforming units. The stated goal was to encourage home ownership, but the practical result was gentrification.

The impact on our city’s racial makeup has been profound. While we passed Open Housing ordinances in 1968 to combat explicit discrimination, the subsequent zoning laws created a different form of segregation. In the Pacific Northwest, income serves as a proxy for race. Because single-family homes are the most expensive housing type, neighborhoods dominated by them have remained predominantly white.

Data shows a clear correlation: the more single-family homes a neighborhood has, the higher its percentage of white residents. In recent decades, the city adopted a nodes approach to density. They concentrated apartments in commercial areas like Capital Mall while protecting single-family neighborhoods. This strategy has led to a stark racial divide. Between 2010 and 2017, the high-density node in Tract 105.1 on the westside became significantly more diverse, while the adjacent single-family neighborhood in Tract 105.2 actually grew whiter.

This isn’t a unique local failing. You can see similar examples across the country of communities using downzoning as a tool to implicitly preserve racial divisions when other methods became illegal. In Arlington, Massachusetts, they once zoned for plenty of apartments. But as integration became a real prospect in the 1960s, their attitude toward development shifted. Activists used both explicit and coded anti-integration language to rally opposition to apartments and push for downzoning.

Unlike earlier efforts, our local downzoning efforts are largely absent of on the surface racial animus. I’m not saying these neighborhood activists weren’t trying to keep their neighborhoods white. I think you can draw a pretty clear conclusion there. I’m just saying there isn’t much smoking gun evidence in the historical record.

However, you don’t have to look far to see downzoning tied directly to the broader civil rights struggle. When you pull back from these small-scale efforts to a nationwide view, you see single-family zoning being discussed in a much different way. When we were downzoning, the NAACP was struggling to find inroads in the courtrooms to fight against exclusionary zoning.

HUD Secretary George Romney tried to force the Detroit suburb of Warren, Michigan, to strike single-family zoning and allow affordable housing in 1970. His effort failed, and his political career ended because of it. Civil rights organizations then retrenched to fight unheralded courtroom battles over zoning in the Midwest and the East Coast.

According to the NAACP in the early 70s, the suburbs were the new civil rights battleground. They argued we should do battle in the townships and villages to lower zoning barriers and create opportunities for Black families seeking housing closer to jobs. The National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing said segregation won’t stop until local governments are deprived of the power to manipulate zoning to screen out families on the basis of income and, implicitly, of race.

In Seattle, the end result of five decades of downzoning is white-majority neighborhoods expanding across the city. One collection of blocks in the Leschi neighborhood went from over 90 percent Black in the 1970s to 11 percent today. The Black population of King County was pushed south and out of Seattle.

In Olympia, neighborhoods that downzoned saw a smaller increase in racial diversity over the last 10 years. Not only did these neighborhoods stay whiter, but in the middle of a historic housing crisis, these neighborhoods actually had fewer people living in them in 2020 than they did in 2010.

I’ve said this before. But it is well worth repeating: There are few open racists left. Duke Stockton’s don’t stalk city council meetings anymore. That is obviously an advancement in my lifetime. But you don’t have to be racist to benefit from racist outcomes and a racist system. There is a huge layer of people who will tell you they are not racist but participate in racist systems before you ever get to the people working to dismantle them.

We know the current landscape of dominant, exclusionary single-family zoning happened at the same time the last tools to legally and openly discriminate in housing were taken away. We also know the nation’s leading civil rights organizations have actively worked against this kind of zoning for half a century.

I’ve been writing these essays specifically this month because it’s February. I’ve tried to get out of my own way during Black History Month and give space to stories that highlight where we’ve been.

We sure do live in interesting times. It is hard for us to slow down and take a look at our context when we seem to be hurtling downhill. Every day, some new outrages and crises draw our attention away from the ground at our feet. What I am reminded of is that there is always so much to fight for here and now.

Martin Luther King was killed in Tennessee, the country caught on fire, and the right thing to do for Olympians was to finally force the passage of open housing ordinances. They were weak. They didn’t address the underlying zoning. For decades, we lost the plot.

But this slow boring of hard boards in local politics is always there for you if you have passion and perspective.

It is something you can impact. You have more control here than you think.

We are tending a garden in a storm. We can’t stop the wind from blowing. But we can choose which stakes to reinforce and which seeds to protect. It is easy to get overwhelmed by massive, national debates that feel completely out of our hands, but that energy can be better spent on the hard boards right in front of us. By focusing our effort on things we can actually influence, we trade anxious, unattached frustration for tangible progress. We accept that we can’t control the entire city’s direction, but we have agency over how we show up.

Move fast, break things: The life and times of Washington’s first black, female prosecutor

February 14, 2026 / / 1 Comment

In the history of Washington state politics, some figures are remembered for their scandals, and others are remembered for their longevity. Then there is Bernardean Broadous.

In 1994, Broadous did not just win an election. She shattered a glass ceiling that had remained untouched since Washington State was founded. She was the first Black woman elected to a county office in the history of Washington, and the first African American to hold an executive county position in Thurston County.

Today, her tenure is largely a footnote. It is often treated as a failed experiment in management. Meanwhile, the man who replaced her, Edward Holm, oversaw an office that cost taxpayers millions of dollars because of his documented behavior. Looking closely at the years between 1994 and 2002 in Thurston County reveals a stark hypocrisy. We see a woman of color judged by the noise of change she was trying to force, while her white male successor was given a pass for actual, adjudicated damage to the public.

The 1994 campaign for Thurston County Prosecuting Attorney was a masterclass in grassroots disruption. Broadous was a Republican with only three years of legal experience. She ran against John Bumford, a veteran Democrat who was the hand-picked successor of the retiring 20-year incumbent, Patrick Sutherland.

On paper, Broadous was a long shot. Bumford had fifteen years in the office and the public endorsement of 26 of the 28 deputy prosecutors in the department. The institutional resistance was immediate. Before the first ballot was cast, her future subordinates called her incompetent in the local press. Bumford focused his campaign on experience. Broadous flipped that argument. She did not say she had more years in a courtroom. She said those years were spent perfecting a broken status quo. She accused the office of being too quick to settle cases and claimed that, as a deputy, cases were taken away from her when she refused to reduce charges.

Broadous used a specialized team of volunteers to bridge the funding gap. Bumford outraised her two-to-one, with the vast majority of his funds coming from his own pocket. Her campaign used a fleet of painted vans to counter the expensive bus advertisements of her opponent. They filmed Broadous in living rooms answering questions to show her forthright nature. This was a sophisticated data operation, too. Her team analyzed precinct numbers to find winnable areas in the suburbs. They timed their mailers to hit exactly when ballots arrived. This strategy worked.

Broadous pulled off a stunning upset and won by 867 votes. And, in the broader sweep of history here, it was the last stand for Republican institutional power in Thurston County before it became a Democratic stronghold. 1994 was the last high-water mark for Republicans in Washington State and Thurston County, before falling reliably into today’s pattern.

Broadous entered office in 1995 with a mandate for change. She inherited an office that had functioned under one man for two decades. She brought a focus on accountability and efficiency. Her most significant achievement was the Juvenile Diversion Reform. Before Broadous, the juvenile system was slow and lacked direction. She started a program that required offenders to face sanctions or charges within 12 days of an arrest. She used Community Accountability Boards made of local volunteers to determine punishments. This program resulted in a 50 percent reduction in felony recidivism. Broadous was also a founding architect of the Thurston County Drug Court. She pushed for a system that offered non-violent offenders treatment and testing as an alternative to jail. She believed the message of the law was lost if punishment was not swift and sure.

Just looking at the raw numbers, prosecutions in Thurston County went from around 1,000 each year before Broadous to nearly double that during her tenure.

However, we cannot ignore that these reforms created internal conflict. Broadous was a demanding manager. She restricted plea bargains to prevent deal shopping. This stripped deputy prosecutors of their autonomy. To Broadous, this was accountability. To her staff, it was a lack of trust.

In her first 19 months, 18 deputy prosecutors left the office. This high turnover became the main criticism against her. Critics claimed the remaining staff were overworked. Defense attorneys complained that her refusal to negotiate was clogging the court system. Broadous did not back down.

By 1998, Ed Holm saw the turnover in the office as a political weapon. He campaigned on a platform of restoring stability. The narrative against Broadous was cemented by two legal actions filed just weeks before the primary election. In July 1998, a former employee named Betty Benefiel filed a lawsuit alleging Broadous treated her unfairly. In August 1998, a secretary named Sheila Kirby filed a claim for emotional distress. Broadous called these attacks politically motivated. The timing was certainly suspicious, but the damage was done. Holm used the lawsuits to argue that Broadous could not lead. Broadous lost the election and received less than 40 percent of the vote.

Holm was hailed as a stabilizer.

But the stability he promised was a myth. By 2001, three female deputy prosecutors sued Holm and his management team for sexual discrimination and a hostile work environment.

The details revealed in the Holm trial were far worse than anything alleged against Broadous. The plaintiffs alleged that women were given lower pay and less desirable assignments. They described the office as a boys’ club. The lawsuit detailed inappropriate sexual comments and lewd jokes. The jury eventually found that Holm and his office retaliated against the women after they complained about the discrimination. In 2006, a jury ruled in favor of the women. They found that the county had discriminated against them based on their gender. They also found that the office had created a hostile work environment.

The most telling part of this story is the final cost to the public. The lawsuits against Broadous that dominated the news in 1998 went nowhere. They stayed in the court system for four years. In 2002, after Broadous was out of office and Holm himself decided not to run again, the parties signed an agreement to drop the cases. No money was paid to the plaintiffs. No wrongdoing was ever proven. The cost to the taxpayers for these lawsuits was zero dollars. These claims were dismissed with prejudice, meaning they could never be brought again.

Compare that to the Ed Holm settlement. The jury awarded the three women $1.52 million for the discrimination and retaliation they endured. The judge then added $1.45 million in attorney fees. By the time the case was fully settled and the appeals were finished in 2011, the total cost reached nearly $6 million. When you weigh the two administrations, the Broadous years were characterized by administrative friction and turnover that cost the public nothing in court. The Holm years were characterized by systemic misconduct that left the county with a multi-million dollar bill.

The historical memory of Thurston County should take another at Bernardean Broadous. She was a historic first who tried to modernize a stagnant system. She was a Black woman who walked into a white male-dominated field and demanded high standards. She was punished for it. We remember her for the turnover and the noise of lawsuits that ended in nothing.

The Science and Art Departments at Olympia High School in 1960. All or the other departments were white too.

The Small Power of Photos, the Large Power of Enforcement

February 7, 2026 / / 2 Comments

In 1961, if you wanted to teach at Olympia High School, you had to show the district exactly what you looked like. Before anyone looked at your degree or your references, they looked at your face. This wasn’t just about record-keeping. This was an era when racial discrimination was common in Olympia but rarely admitted in public. A mandatory headshot was an incredibly effective gatekeeping tool. It allowed the district to maintain a white faculty without ever having to say a word about race out loud.

The State Board Against Discrimination eventually stepped in and told the Olympia School District to stop. The district didn’t just disagree. They took the board to court to fight for their right to require those photos. This legal battle lasted nearly two years. The board argued that a photograph was a graphic specification of an applicant’s race. They said it was just as revealing as requiring applicants to write down their race on the form. Their lawyers pointed out that photographs mainly provide information about physical beauty. Unless beauty was a requirement for teaching, they argued, the policy was a direct violation of state law.

Superintendent Rolland Upton led the defense for the school district. He claimed the photos were just for reference. He said the images helped officials judge professional dignity and personal appearance. The district’s lawyers even argued that because an in-person interview would reveal race anyway, the photo wasn’t the primary tool for discrimination. 

That argument is hard to take seriously. A photo allows a recruiter to toss an application into the trash immediately. It ensures that a minority applicant never even gets the chance to prove themselves in an interview.

Upton’s defense feels hollow when you look at the rest of Olympia’s history. Discrimination wasn’t an accident here. It was built into the system. Ten years before this court case, racially restrictive covenants were still being filed in Thurston County. These were documents that barred non-white people from owning certain homes. They were filed years after the Supreme Court ruled they couldn’t be enforced.

We know these barriers were real because local historians like Thelma Jackson documented them. In her book, Blacks in Thurston County, Washington: A History, she explains how Black residents were treated when they arrived. Real estate agents would simply, without explanation or excuse, refuse to show them homes in specific neighborhoods. It is hard to believe that a school district in that same environment would magically ignore the race of an applicant. Given what we know about Olympia in the 1960s, it’s clear the photos acted as a silent filter.

Research since then backs up what the board suspected back then. We know that visual cues trigger deep biases. When Upton talked about professional dignity, he was likely using a code word. Recruiters often equate professional looks with white beauty standards. This makes people of color seem less capable before they even speak. The board was right to call the photo a graphic specification. A headshot is the strongest signal of race an applicant can provide.

There’s even a technical side to this exclusion. Historically, color film was calibrated using Shirley Cards. These cards featured white models and were used to set the color balance for developing photos. Because the technology was designed for white skin, photos of Black people often lacked detail and texture. Researchers believe this helped promote bias by making minority faces look less human or expressive in print.

This wasn’t just about aesthetics. It was about economics. By using these look policies, the district could cultivate an all-white workforce. This was segregation disguised as a preference for appearance. The consequences were real. Even today, studies on sites like LinkedIn show that Black profiles get fewer responses. By mandating photos in 1961, the Olympia School District put Black educators at an immediate disadvantage. This led to lost careers and long-term wage gaps.

The legal side of the story is just as messy. The local Thurston County judge, Charles T. Wright, originally sided with the school district. He ruled that the board had gone too far. He didn’t think a simple request for a photo proved an intent to discriminate. It was a very narrow way of looking at the law. It ignored how systemic racism actually works. The board appealed to the State Supreme Court. This time, they won. The high court issued a unanimous decision. They ruled that under the specific laws of that time, orders issued by the board against government agencies were not subject to judicial review.

This was a huge win for the commission. It re-established their power to stamp out discriminatory practices in city governments and school districts without getting stuck in long court battles. When the board was first created in 1949, it was weak and underfunded. It didn’t have much power to change things. But by the 1960s, groups like the Congress of Racial Equality were putting on pressure. The state legislature eventually expanded the board’s reach. They started looking at discrimination in housing and public spaces, too.

By 1970, the agency had grown into a much more visible force. It eventually became the Washington State Human Rights Commission. Cases like the one in Olympia fueled this growth. The state had to decide whether to protect the preferences of white officials or the civil rights of its citizens.

Because of the Supreme Court ruling, the ban on photos was upheld. Superintendent Upton had to announce that the district would change its forms. They finally removed the space for the photograph. It was a clear victory. But the people who lost weren’t finished. Some board members suggested they should change the law so they could appeal these decisions in the future.

That’s exactly what happened five years later. In 1971, the legislature rewrote the law. They gave the commission its new name, the Washington State Human Rights Commission. But they also gave other public agencies the right to appeal the board’s decisions. The board had won the battle over the photos, but the legislature had quietly cancelled the war. School boards and city councils found a way to tie the commission’s hands again.

Institutional racism doesn’t need a loud voice. It can work through small rules and administrative details. The Olympia School District didn’t have to say they were discriminating. They just had to say they wanted to see who was applying. But in 1961, seeing was a form of sorting. 

Progress also isn’t a straight line. Every time a barrier is removed, the system can find a quieter way to rebuild it.

This is why the work of people like Thelma Jackson is so important, because it keeps these stories alive. It prevents institutions from rewriting their own history. The 1961 photo case was an early version of the debates we still have today about bias in hiring, banking, policing, and our everyday practices.

This history also shows how far and deep the work to reverse the damage we’ve done in our communities goes. It reminds us that equity isn’t just about changing a form or a policy. It requires a constant, active commitment to tearing down the walls that were built to be invisible.

The Power of Nightmares but Dreaming of Something Better

January 31, 2026 / / 1 Comment

The streets were under a state of siege. They were gripped by a level of civic breakdown that feels ancient in its brutality. 

A powerful media figure styled himself as a guardian of law and order. He spent months radicalizing the public against a perceived foreign threat. Through his writing and speeches, he cast social conflict as an invasion and dissent as subversion. 

This campaign led to the formation of a heavily armed force that ignored the courts and civic institutions. In organized raids, its members rounded up hundreds of people they didn’t like. They beat them with clubs. They forced them at gunpoint out of town and banished them from the places where they lived and worked. 

The air was thick with talk of Americanism versus treason. The local press framed these purges as a necessary cleansing of the community.

This wasn’t Minneapolis or Chicago in 2026. This was Hoquiam in 1912.

The events of the Grays Harbor County War started a political firestorm. It shattered local politics and created the framework for the immigration system we’re still fighting over today. What happened on the banks of the Hoquiam River wasn’t a weird one-off event. It was a prototype.

Albert Johnson was the central figure. He was a newspaper editor who later carried this model of vigilante justice to Congress. The workers he targeted were immigrants tied to the Industrial Workers of the World. Like the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the Citizens’ Committee that terrorized the IWW was made up of local businessmen. These men believed they could restore order with ax handles and rifles. This conflict was a rehearsal for the nationalistic energy that became the Immigration Act of 1924. Our technology is different now, but the blueprint is the same. People exploit local unrest, turn economic stress into a cultural threat, and use that panic to justify national fear.

Grays Harbor was the lumber capital of the world. Its wealth came from the hard work of Finns, Greeks, and Slavs. These immigrant workers lived in dirty camps and worked ten-hour days in dangerous mills. In late 1911 and early 1912, the IWW organized them. They started with free speech fights and ended with a massive strike in March 1912. The mills stopped. The business elite panicked.

Johnson was the editor of The Daily Washingtonian. He became their main voice. He didn’t just write columns. He used his paper to help lead the Citizens’ Committee. This was a vigilante group made up of people who saw themselves as “respectable.” They ignored the police and did whatever they wanted. They raided union halls and beat strikers. By May 1912, they crushed the strike. Workers were loaded onto trains at gunpoint and told to never come back. Johnson told the public this wasn’t about wages. He said it was about protecting America from foreign anarchy.

That story became the foundation of his career. He was elected to Congress in November 1912. He brought another paper, the Home Defender, to D.C. to keep the fight going. Over the next decade, he turned the logic of Grays Harbor into federal law. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917, which added literacy tests. This was just the start.

By 1919, Johnson was the chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. He wanted his ideas to look official. He hired a eugenicist named Harry Laughlin to be his expert. The results were laws that narrowed who was allowed to be American. In 1921, he wrote the Emergency Quota Act. In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act finished the job. It used the 1890 census to decide who could enter. This was a trick to exclude the same Southern and Eastern Europeans Johnson fought in Washington. When President Coolidge signed it, Johnson called it a second Declaration of Independence.

He turned mob violence into a government machine. Things like deportation and visas weren’t acts of a crowd anymore. They were part of a permanent system.

Alternative History of Hoquiam

But I’m not writing today to just tell you what happened in Hoquiam was inevitable. Right now, we’re trying to find a way out. So, let’s imagine a world where Johnson didn’t succeed.

But what if this didn’t happen? It’s useful to look at how history could have gone differently. We’ve seen that history isn’t always a straight line. There’s a version of this where the “Red Coast” didn’t just resist but built a bridge between different groups. Imagine if the 1912 strike ended with a coalition of workers and farmers. In this version, the local middle class is disgusted by the violence. They decide that you can’t have law and order if you’re breaking the law to get it. Johnson’s paper is sued for libel. He loses his money and his reputation before he ever gets to D.C.

The Washington State Grange helped make this possible. They were a powerful group of farmers who cared about the democratic process. They hated the vigilantism of the Citizens’ Committee. They saw the deportations as a threat to everyone’s civil liberties. The Grange condemned the business elite. They put their support behind local leaders who stood against the violence. This gave the middle class the cover they needed to speak up. It broke the power of the anti-labor group and made room for a new Labor Defense League.

In this timeline, Stanton Warburton, a progressive Republican, wins the 1912 election instead of Johnson. He beats him by speaking out against the ax handle tactics. Because Warburton keeps his seat, the path to the 1924 Act is severed. Instead of racist quotas, we get the 1928 Integration Act. It creates a federal office to help new workers. By 1930, 18% of the population is foreign born. These people become a huge group of customers that helps the economy stay stable during the Depression. American identity becomes about what you contribute rather than where your parents were from.

The labor movement wins by changing what it means to be American. They argue that including people is the best way to stop exploitation. The Labor Defense League teaches English and civics while they organize. They say an immigrant with a union card is a better American than a man with a club.

Without Johnson, eugenics would never have become a part of our policy. The leaders of the immigration committee are progressives who care about the economy, not “purity.” This focus on solidarity changes everything. Unions and farmers work together. Farm owners in the fruit regions agree to fair wages and housing in exchange for a stable workforce. They create a direct path to citizenship.

If that had happened, our politics today would be different. We wouldn’t be obsessed with demographics or cultural panic. We’d talk about economic solidarity instead. We wouldn’t hear much about “replacement” or “dilution.” We’d focus on building unions and protecting workers. This would stop the race to the bottom that makes people hate immigration.

Our experts would change too. We wouldn’t listen to people who scream about border crises. We’d listen to people who study how to help newcomers join the community. Success would be measured by how fast people pay taxes and join the workforce.

Johnson’s power came from turning local fights into a national panic. We still see this. A fight in a city or a border dispute becomes an existential crisis. The lesson of this alternate history is that local resistance matters. If Hoquiam had said no to Johnson in 1912, we might have a more open democracy today.

The 1924 Act is still with us because it made immigration a matter of crime and race. Before Johnson, “illegal aliens” weren’t really a thing in our laws. He built the world of border patrols and caps. Even after the overtly racist parts were removed in 1965, the structure stayed. Johnson didn’t just win a fight in a small town. He changed the whole conversation. He made us ask if people should be here at all instead of asking how to welcome them. That choice still has us stuck today.

The Current Counterfactual

We can see the emotional reality of this counterfactual in modern Pacific County. It sits right next to Grays Harbor. In 2017, the area was shaken when ICE agents detained Mario Rodriguez at the post office in Long Beach. Mario wasn’t a stranger. He’d lived on the peninsula for twelve years. He worked as a bilingual teaching aide in the local schools. He was a neighbor, a volunteer, and a friend. When he was taken, the reaction from the local white community was not what you might expect. Many of these people had voted for the very policies that led to his arrest, but they weren’t happy. They were shocked.

Even the local police chief, Flint Wright, was rattled. He had supported a tougher border, but he spoke up for Mario. He called him a pro-law enforcement guy. He said anyone would want him as a neighbor. This reaction shows that when abstract talk about “illegal aliens” meets a real human being, the old logic falls apart. The people of Pacific County didn’t see an invader. They saw a hole left in their neighborhood. They formed a support group that eventually became a nonprofit. They fought for their neighbor.

This local pushback is today’s proof that Johnson’s vision was never inevitable. It shows that even in the conservative timber and fishing towns of Southwest Washington, people can choose their neighbors over a club. The ghost of 1924 is still in the machine, but stories like Mario’s remind us that we can choose a different path. We don’t have to live in the reality Albert Johnson built. We’ve seen a glimpse of something else. It’s much closer than we think.

1949 and the accidental, mistaken transformation of Olympia

January 24, 2026 / / 4 Comments

The layout of downtown Olympia is burned into my brain. It just seems inherent to the space that coming down from the Upper East Side, both State and 4th are one-way. Especially coming from my neighborhood, this doesn’t always make 4th and State the fastest way across town. But it does feel like it’s always been this way, that when we created this part of town, the original layout was two paired one-way streets.

But that’s not actually true. Before the late 40s, downtown was just a normal grid. You could go both ways on every street.

The switch to one-way streets wasn’t some long-planned city project either. It was an accident caused by a massive earthquake in 1949. What started as a quick fix to get around piles of fallen bricks turned into a permanent setup. Then the state highway department saw an opening to turn our local streets into a highway for commuters, and they took it. It’s a classic case of prioritizing fast cars over a walkable neighborhood.

Before 1949, Olympia’s downtown felt a lot tighter and more connected. We didn’t have all these massive parking lots everywhere. Instead, it was just row after row of actual buildings. This was also when the residential neighborhoods surrounding downtown were interconnected using similar grid patterns, before growth had grown beyond Division on the west and Boulevard on the east.

When a street goes both ways, twice as many people see a storefront. You aren’t “eclipsed” by the direction of traffic. But after WWII, engineers became obsessed with “throughput.” They stopped thinking about downtown as a place to be and started seeing it as a hurdle to drive through. They wanted to move the tides of cars as fast as possible. The old two-way grid was standing in their way, but it took a disaster to finally break it.

The real turning point happened on April 13, 1949. It was just before noon when a 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit. It was the biggest one the region had seen all century. Two people died, and the damage was immense. Eleven buildings were so damaged that they had to be boarded up immediately.

4th Avenue and State Street were a mess. To keep things moving while crews cleaned up the rubble, the city made a quick call: make them one-way. It was supposed to be a temporary fix to manage the chaos. But the streets never went back to the way they were. The earthquake gave engineers the perfect excuse to push a one-way vision that had been bubbling under the surface for years.

By late October, downtown business owners were joining forces to ask for a return to the pre-April alignment downtown. “Promises were made to return to two-way traffic as soon as the emergency was relieved,” said a downtown druggist and head of a business committee.

This is where the State Highway Department really left its mark. As the city debated whether to keep the temporary measure through the fall of 1949, the state didn’t just suggest keeping the one-way streets; they basically mandated it. They decided to fold 4th and State into the state highway system. 4th Avenue became the southbound lanes for the Pacific Highway, and State Avenue took the northbound traffic.

The legislature had passed a law the year before, allowing the Highway Department to take a heavier hand in ensuring state highways efficiently passed traffic. To that end, the highway department studied the issue of now one-way streets in Olympia and gave the city government two options: stay with one-way or lose all the parking along 4th and State. 

By doing this, the state prioritized regional travel over the people actually living in Olympia. The main goal was throughput, moving people from the suburbs to their jobs or across the state as fast as possible. Our downtown streets weren’t local roads anymore. They were effectively a highway split in half. Once that highway designation was set in stone, there was no going back. The state had its high-speed corridor, and the city was stuck with the noise and the speed.

Business leaders talked about suing, saying the state was taking too heavy a hand. But no lawsuit followed, and downtown settled into its current pattern. Just less than 10 years later, Interstate 5 bypassed downtown Olympia, but one-way streets stayed. 

We’re still paying for that 1949 decision today. On paper, one-way streets move cars fast, but they make life harder for everyone else. Research shows that child pedestrians are 2.5 times more likely to get hurt on one-way streets. It makes sense if you think about it. Drivers get into a highway mindset and stop looking for people. 

Looking back, the 1949 earthquake broke the way Olympia functions. We traded a walkable, easy-to-navigate downtown for a system that treats downtown like a bypass. This isn’t even getting into the number of buildings that were torn down in the last 75 years to make way for parking.

I focus a lot of attention on downtown Olympia in this discussion. But it is worth pointing out that most of the mileage for the one-way streets in Olympia goes through formally residential neighborhoods. The city has slowly changed how the blocks are treated around the one-way paired throughfairs, but to me, even if we build denser, mixed-use neighborhoods up the Eastside hill, slower, more people-oriented traffic orientation makes sense as well. 

Today, plenty of cities are realizing this was a mistake. They’re converting one-way streets back to two-way streets to lower crime, help local businesses, and stop the constant speeding. It makes you wonder what Olympia would look like if we had just cleared the 1949 debris and stayed the course with our original grid. We might have had a downtown that feels more like a community and less like a race track.

The Whitman Statue Is Our Confederate General Statue. It is Time to Go

January 17, 2026 / / 1 Comment

For the last year or so, the state has been tied in knots over a very simple question: where should we put the Marcus Whitman statue once it’s removed from its current spot at the Capitol?

Down the hall? Near the Senate dining room? Outside, under cover, fingers crossed it doesn’t get vandalized or fall apart? Maybe leave it where it is and move everything else around it?

Watching this debate unfold has been oddly familiar. Not because the details are the same, but because the pattern is.

We’ve seen this movie before. Just not here.

In the South, communities spent decades arguing about what to do with Confederate statues. Every option was explored except the obvious one. Move it somewhere else. Add context. Put up a plaque. Keep it for history. Avoid controversy. Respect “both sides.” Study it a little longer.

Sound familiar?

Eventually, many of those places had to face the truth. Those statues were never neutral. They weren’t built to teach history. They were built to tell a story about power, race, and who belonged. And once that truth was unavoidable, the only honest option was removal.

Marcus Whitman occupies the same space in Washington’s history.

That may make some people uncomfortable, but discomfort isn’t a reason to avoid clarity.

The Whitman statue was not erected because historians reached a careful consensus about his importance. It was erected because a specific myth needed a physical anchor. The “Whitman Saved Oregon” story wasn’t just wrong. It was useful. It framed white settlement as inevitable, benevolent, and divinely sanctioned. It pushed Native people to the margins. It wrapped colonization in religion and heroism.

That story has been thoroughly debunked. Not recently, but decades ago.

And yet, the statue remains.

That’s why the comparison to Confederate generals matters. In the South, statues of Robert E. Lee and others weren’t really about the Civil War. They were about reinforcing white dominance long after the war ended. Many were erected during periods of backlash against Reconstruction or the civil rights movement. They told a story about who was in charge and whose version of history mattered.

Whitman’s statue does the same thing here. Different region. Different century. Same purpose.

The Whitman myth emerged in the late nineteenth century, decades after his death, at a moment when the Pacific Northwest was trying to explain itself to the rest of the country. The story claimed that Whitman’s 1842 ride east “saved” the region from British control and secured it for American settlement. It cast him as a lone, heroic figure whose actions supposedly determined the fate of the entire region.

That version of events was never supported by serious evidence. The boundary question between the U.S. and Britain was already being negotiated through diplomacy, economics, and military power. Whitman played no decisive role. But the myth stuck because it did important cultural work. It centered white, Christian settlers as the rightful authors of Washington’s history and treated Indigenous nations as background characters in their own homelands.

The myth also served a political purpose. Elevating Whitman, it justified land seizure, missionary violence, and the displacement of tribal members as part of a righteous and inevitable process. It replaced treaty rights and sovereignty with a comforting story about destiny and sacrifice. That framing made colonization feel moral instead of brutal. It made white supremacy feel like history instead of ideology. It is no mistake that we spent decades denying treaty rights and jailing tribal fishermen like Billy Frank Jr., because the story of Whitman made that inevitable.

The Legislature already recognized this, even if it didn’t quite finish the job. In 2021, lawmakers voted to replace Marcus Whitman with Billy Frank Jr. in both the U.S. Capitol and the Washington State Capitol. That decision wasn’t subtle. It was a clear statement about who represents Washington’s values and history.

Billy Frank Jr. fought for treaty rights, environmental protection, and the rule of law. His life and work are grounded in truth, not myth. Elevating him was the right call.

But when it came time to deal with the Whitman statue in Olympia, the Legislature stopped short. No clear instructions.

At a recent joint meeting of the State Capitol Committee and the Capitol Campus Design Advisory Committee, Lt. Governor Denny Heck said the quiet part out loud. The committees, he acknowledged, don’t have guidance from the Legislature on what to do with the Whitman statue here. They’re trying to navigate “sensitivities” without knowing what outcome lawmakers actually want.

So now we’re stuck in the process.

We’re talking about structural engineering studies to see if a four-ton statue can sit in a hallway. We’re debating whether it should be inside or outside. We’re spending time and money figuring out how to preserve a monument the state has already decided should no longer represent us.

Meanwhile, Billy Frank Jr.’s family has made it clear they don’t want his statue sharing space with Whitman. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Pairing them would flatten history into a false equivalence. As if these figures occupy the same moral or historical ground.

They don’t.

What’s striking is how often people say this is all too complicated. It isn’t.

Across the country, far larger and heavier bronze statues have been removed. Robert E. Lee monuments towering multiple stories high came down in Richmond and Charlottesville. A massive Confederate monument in Raleigh was dismantled. One Lee statue was melted down and turned into new public art. Size didn’t stop those communities. 

Washington isn’t being asked to do something unprecedented. We’re being asked to catch up.

And here’s the part that often gets lost. Removing the Whitman statue does not erase history. It corrects a distortion. History lives in books, archives, classrooms, and museums. Statues live in civic space. They tell us who we choose to honor.

Right now, the state is bending over backwards to honor a lie because it’s heavy and old and awkward to deal with.

That’s not a good reason.

The Whitman statue is our Confederate general statue. It was built to promote a false, harmful narrative. We know that now. Pretending otherwise just delays the inevitable.

The Legislature should finish what it started: tell the Capitol Committee plainly that the Whitman statue should be removed from the Capitol Campus entirely. Not relocated. Not tucked away. Retired.

Deaccession it. Dismantle it. Repurpose it. But stop pretending it needs a place of honor.

This isn’t about tearing down history. It’s about telling the truth.

The South’s Mythology, the Northwest’s Bureaucracy: How a Single Football Game Defined Two Eras of Exclusion

January 10, 2026 / / 0 Comments

One of the most compelling ironies of regional history is the fact that 100 years ago, the University of Washington was on the losing side of “the game that changed the South.” While the 1926 Rose Bowl is often remembered in Seattle as an athletic footnote, for the American South, it was a cultural baptism. 

By defeating Washington 20-19 on New Year’s Day in Pasadena, Alabama became the first Southern team to achieve national legitimacy, effectively birthing the SEC and a century of collegiate football dominance. For white Southerners, this victory acted as a symbolic “do-over” of the Civil War, allowing them to reclaim a sense of honor and “manhood” through what contemporary writers called the “Spirit of Lee.”

However, to be honest about the nature of this regional pride, this era of Southern football was an exclusively white phenomenon. It was rooted deeply in the “Lost Cause” mythology. While the victory projected an image of modernization and grit to the rest of the country, it was strictly gatekept by Jim Crow laws and “gentleman’s agreements” that barred Black athletes from the field. Football in the South reflected a new, formidable image of Southern strength to the nation while simultaneously protecting a segregated social order at home.

The 1926 Rose Bowl was The Birth of a Nation on the gridiron.

For decades after, Southern football remained a regressive stronghold. Politicians attempted to block integrated matchups as late as 1955, framing them as a social “Armageddon.” Yet, the South’s near-religious obsession with winning eventually turned the sport into a Trojan horse for progress. Coaches eventually realized that to remain national powerhouses and secure lucrative TV contracts, they had to prioritize the “pragmatism of winning” over prejudice. This forced the integration of Southern athletics faster than many other social institutions, simply because the region refused to keep losing to integrated Northern teams.

While the South used the 1926 Rose Bowl to march toward a new identity, the Pacific Northwest was navigating its own version of a white-centric movement. By 1927, the Ku Klux Klan was losing steam in Washington, with an Olympia rally drawing only a fraction (only 12,000) of the crowds seen during the “mega-rallies” of 1924 (above 50,000). It is easy to mistake this decline for a burst of progressivism, but the reality is that the Klan faded because it had already won its primary legislative battles. Most notably, nativists had secured the 1924 Immigration Act, a law spearheaded by Aberdeen’s Rep. Albert Johnson that codified eugenics and racial exclusion into federal policy. In the Northwest, the Klan didn’t need to keep marching because its vision for a white America had already been signed into law.

There is a striking parallel in how both regions disguised their intolerance to make it more palatable. In the South, white supremacy was repackaged as athletic valor; in the Northwest, it was masked as a weekend family outing or “Christian nationalism.” By framing the politics of hate as entertainment, the Klan in Washington made radical exclusion feel remarkably normal. Historians often downplay this era as a fad, but that overlooks how deeply these everyday prejudices were ingrained in our local culture. Just as the Rose Bowl victory elevated an exclusionary Southern identity, the thousands of people who watched the Klan march through Olympia were witnessing a movement that had already successfully institutionalized its goals.

Comparing these two regions reveals the different ways systemic racism settles into a community. The South used football to hide its regression behind a mask of modernization, while the Northwest used a “liberal” shrug to hide how deeply its nativist victories were embedded in the law. We tend to remember the eccentric spectacle of the hoods, but we often forget the boring, bureaucratic laws that those individuals successfully passed. While Southern identity was being forged on the gridiron, the Northwest was allowing its own radical movements to melt back into the community, leaving behind a legacy of exclusion that didn’t require a uniform to persist.

After the 1926 loss, Husky football seemed to become a barometer for the region’s volatile economic pulse rather than a pillar of regional identity. While Alabama fans greeted their team with brass bands, Seattle met the Huskies with a collective shrug. As the region entered the Great Depression, the team’s struggles mirrored the grim reality of the “Boeing Bust” and other economic downturns. Conversely, our Rose Bowl successes in 1960 and 1992 served as the atmospheric backdrop for the Seattle World’s Fair and the global cultural dominance of the early dot-com era. Football in the Northwest never forged our soul the way it did in Dixie.

However, we cannot ignore what was happening beneath the surface during those years of economic struggle. As the prosperity of the 1920s pulled back like a receding tide, it exposed the jagged rocks of prejudice in Cascadia. The Great Depression turned the region into a desperate battleground where the “first to be fired, last to be hired” rule decimated minority communities. In cities like Portland, white workers began displacing Black workers from service jobs, while Mexican and Filipino laborers were targeted for state-sanctioned purges.

This era also saw the quiet institutionalization of the Klan’s nativist mission through federal relief programs. The Civilian Conservation Corps eventually adopted complete segregation, and the Federal Housing Authority’s 1934 rating system officially gave birth to redlining. By drawing lines around neighborhoods with even a single Black resident, the government strangled minority districts like Portland’s Albina District. This wasn’t the loud, “Spirit of Lee” racism found in the South; it was a cold, bureaucratic version that baked inequality into the very geography of our cities.

Looking back at New Year’s Day 1926 in Pasadena, we see two regions attempting to define themselves through very different means. The South used the football field to march away from its past toward a multi-billion-dollar future, turning regional pride into a national powerhouse. In the Northwest, we won our battles for exclusion early and then largely forgot we ever fought them. We watched the Klan march, allowed them to influence our laws, and then permitted them to return to being our neighbors without much further thought.

Ultimately, we have to remember the laws as much as the rallies. If we only focus on the spectacle of the fiery crosses, we miss the long-term impact of redlining and immigration acts. The South’s shield was football, but our shield in the Northwest was often our own indifference. Understanding this history is essential as we continue to debate policies to combat institutional racism today, as it reminds us how easily these systems can persist once they are quietly integrated into the fabric of a community.

Brier Dudley is wrong about the news

January 3, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Brier Dudley’s recent column, “No wonder election results are wacky: Fewer follow the news,” carries significant weight in Washington State. As a leading voice in the movement to fund news organizations, Dudley often frames the boundaries of what policymakers consider possible for future public funding of journalism.

However, his latest diagnosis of our “wacky” election results rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how voters actually behave and where they are finding their signal in the noise.

Dudley’s thesis is that a lack of news consumption leads to “civic illiteracy” and “wacky” results, such as the election of progressive Katie Wilson as mayor of Seattle. But on his way to create a thesis that builds support for local journalism, he ignores the basic calculus of voting. Voting is an opt-in activity.

In political science, this is called “information efficacy”: the belief that you know enough to make a choice. People who truly feel uninformed don’t typically cast “wacky” ballots; they don’t cast ballots at all. This “voter roll-off” is why local turnout is often a fraction of national turnout. If someone shows up to vote for a “neophyte,” it’s rarely because they are operating in a vacuum. It’s because they have consumed media, be it a TikTok breakdown, a thread on X, or a digital endorsement, that gave them the confidence to act.

The Seattle Blind Spot

Also, if Dudley’s thesis were universally true, Seattle would be a strange place to prove it. He laments the decline of newspapers and TV, yet ignores the vibrant, digital-native ecosystem that currently drives Seattle politics.

While the Seattle Times remains a vital institution, it is not the only game in town. The city continues to fund public television; KUOW is a massive, robust newsroom; and then there is The Stranger. Whether one agrees with its politics or not, The Stranger remains a primary driver of city elections. When “neophytes” win, it is often because they were vetted and promoted by these alternative local outlets. By ignoring these players, Dudley isn’t describing a news desert; he’s describing a landscape where daily newspapers no longer hold the only map.

Olympia and Thurston County are a better example of the news desert that Dudley wants to use. The election results here, though, don’t match the results of his thesis. Rather than “wacky,” we tend to elect local leaders who stand in the deep trough of our local version of centrism. This is because the voters who tend to opt in have the time and inclination to do the extra work to research their choices. This is not an argument for less information. A broad and informed public is obviously a good thing for electing good leaders, but ensuring that once they are elected, they do the right thing.

“Social Media” Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

Dudley, like many, uses “social media” as a catch-all for “no news” or “unfounded opinion.” However, by 2025, telling a researcher that you get your news from social media is a meaningless data point. It doesn’t tell us what you are seeing. Are you following KUOW’s journalists on Mastodon? Are you watching live-streamed City Council clips on YouTube? Or are you reading a post from your neighbor on Nextdoor?

Social media is a delivery mechanism, not a source. The problem isn’t that people are “on social media.” The problem is that we have outsourced our civic square to attention-seeking algorithms.

Credibility is Now Built on Engagement

We cannot recreate the 1995 newsroom. The back-and-forth between media and audience has opened up permanently. Today, credibility is built on engagement, not just clicks to a paywalled article, but the actual work of being present where people are.

However, we must admit the anti-democratic force of current algorithms. Most platforms optimize for outrage because outrage pays more. This is fundamentally different from a newspaper’s old role of setting a shared civic agenda. We don’t just need people to come back to paywalled websites; we need a next way that fixes the digital architecture itself.

The Next Way: Digital Public Spaces

What does a pro-democracy digital space look like? It looks like an algorithm that benefits the community by not stoking outrage, and moderation systems that protect people from harm while inviting debate.

A promising example is Roundabout, a new product from the nonprofit New_Public. Roundabout is designed to revive the civic commons role that local newspapers used to play. Unlike Facebook, it is intentionally built against virality. It organizes local information, events, and shared concerns through structured channels and local stewards who guide the conversation.

Instead of a feed designed to keep you scrolling via conflict, Roundabout creates a digital space meant to help neighbors actually know one another and act together. It prioritizes usefulness over headlines and relationships over “likes.”

Looking back at old newsrooms and tsk-tsking candidates for making social media videos isn’t a strategy for the future. We don’t need to save the press of the past; we need to build a digital commons that treats us like neighbors and citizens rather than data points for an outrage machine.

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