"No section of the above property shall be sold, conveyed, leased to, or occupied by a person or persons other than of the Caucasian race, except that a domestic servant of persons then residing upon said property shall be allowed hereon in connection with his employment."

I'd first met Karen at the swimming pool a couple of years ago when my granddaughter was having a swimming lesson and Karen was swimming.  We hit it off right away - but I suspect she has this way of charming people.

We met again last year at the Bainbridge Island High School protest.

And now she was speaking at the Bainbridge Library.

She started off talking about finding a water damaged photo album at a gathering of family members after a funeral.  An aunt had been on the couch watching news about a fire on tv.  What she didn't realize until the fire fighters got into her room, that it was her house that was on fire.  And that's how the album got damaged.  Karen took it to someone she knew and they were able to get many of the pictures digitized and printed again.

And that set Karen on a quest to learn more about her family - most of whom were in the Virginia and North Carolina area.

Karen had gotten to the Seattle area with the military and her husband.

When her dad died, she spent time in Connecticut going through his things and doing research to discover how her family got to Connecticut.




And when she finally got back to the Seattle area, she took a class on (I'm not sure exactly whether it was genealogy in general or geared specifically to African-American history).

In any case, she got started researching the African-American history of Kitsap County and Bainbridge Island.

I have to admit that I was a bit surprised that there was much African-American history on Bainbridge Island.  One of my problems with Bainbridge is the relative lack of diversity.  But the military brought African-Americans to Kitsap County after WW II.   Joe Louis even fought on Bainbridge Island as part of the opening of the Town and Country Market in 1957.

The event was co-sponsored by the library and the Bainbridge Historical Museum where Karen is doing lots of her research.  So I went by the museum the next day and found her with materials spread all over.

She's also getting into Native American history.  Seems these folks kept moving west and thought they could just build wherever they wanted, regardless of whether people were already using the land.

This chronicle attempts to be fair to the Indians, but it's written by the victors and really doesn't present the Indians' side of the story.

Here are much more detailed accounts.  The first one from someone who was there.  It seems clear that there was plenty of warning before the Indians attacked in what is called the White River Massacre by the whites.  And a number of the settlers left.

http://themossback.tripod.com/indianwar/wrmassacre.htm   These are very extensive and detailed first hand accounts by whites of what they called the White River massacre.

Here's a more general account, but gives more context and attempts to view things from a native perspective.  https://omittedhistory.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/the-puget-sound-war-1855-1856/  Here's a part:

"As a precursor, the Native American tribes of the area consisted of the Nisqually, Muckleshoot, Puyallup, and the Klickitat peoples. The war itself was triggered by The Treaty of Medicine Creek, penned by Washington Territory Governor Isaac Stevens in 1854. The American-favored treaty granted about 2.24 million acres of land to the United States in exchange for the creation of three reservations, cash payments over twenty years, and “recognition” of traditional native fishing and hunting rights. Unfortunately, Nisqually farming land was taken as part of negotiations (Washington State Historical Society)."

Getting into the 20th Century, Karen showed me this lease agreement to buy land in Port Blakely Bay on Bainbridge Island.  She highlighted two parts in yellow.  Restriction 7, I'll just write out here for people who have trouble reading the image:

"No section of the above property shall be sold, conveyed, leased to, or occupied by a person or persons other than of the Caucasian race, except that a domestic servant of persons then residing upon said property shall be allowed hereon in connection with his employment."

This is dated November 1943.

From a 2006 NY Times article about a Virginia case three years earlier where the seller used this sort of language in the deed of his house to deny a sale to an African-American family.  

"The Supreme Court ruled against racially restrictive covenants in 1948, and they were outlawed by the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. But because so many of them remain in deeds and neighborhood bylaws, some states, including California, have moved to eliminate them. Advocates for their removal reason that the restrictions, even if illegal, provide justification for subtle racism -- or, as in Mr. Matthews's case, outright discrimination. (Mr. Matthews declined to comment.)"

 This kind of discriminatory language still remains in many deeds - even in Anchorage - to this day.  In part because the procedure for changing the deeds is often difficult or impossible.  A key was to make them part of the subdivision, not the individual house.

This is the kind of thing that is meant by white privilege.  In this case whites had the 'privilege' of buying land and people of color did not, even if they had the money.  Here's a post I wrote in 2012 about  Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby who does a really good job of presenting a very readable history of how these covenants got started and helped lead to red-lining.

And while these clauses are no longer enforceable, people have many ways of making life harder for people of color than for whites.  I believe that people who are upset about losing those kinds of privileges make up a good part of Trump's supporters.

And talking about privilege, this week's TED Radio Hour on NPR was about luck.  The first speaker  I heard, Tina Seelig [Starts around 12:30 min in], talked about luck being about your own mental image.  But damn, she taught at Stanford, she must have had some pretty good luck to start with.  But the next ones talked about luck happening before your were born. Amy Hunter who starts around 20 minutes in.  This one is critical.   She relates luck to which zip code you're born into.  The next one was a Canadian, Mark Sutcliffe, who said being born there as a white guy was great luck. Eshauna Smith follows this up by exploring how she got out of her zip code (she didn't say it that way) while most of the other really smart kids there did not.

Well worth listening to while you're cooking, folding laundry, or waiting in line somewhere.   I'd particularly recommend listening to Hunter,   followed by Mark Sutcliffe.  And then Eshauna Smith.

Here's the whole thing.