The untold story of Seattle’s racist mayor *AA Group* [View all]

[freshwest]

Knute Berger - 2015.08.12


Portrait of frontier journalist and Seattle mayor Beriah Brown and his wife Jeanie taken at E. F. Dollarhide’s Seattle studio in the 1870s. Credit: Brown Family Papers Collection, University oF Washington, Neg # 36689

The legacy of the Civil War is in the news. The debate over the Confederate flag in South Carolina brought up reminders that the rebel banner flies along I-5 in Washington in a private park dedicated to Jefferson Davis. A Confederate veteran’s memorial on Capitol Hill has been vandalized and a local group is calling for its removal. One hundred and fifty years after the war’s end, we are learning that our region was not untouched by the conflict or its politics, and that issues of race are still unresolved and infuse our present-day politics.

In that context, meet Beriah Brown, one of Seattle’s most important pioneer citizens. When he came to the young city, he brought the first power press and in 1871 founded Seattle’s first real daily newspaper, the Puget Sound Dispatch, which later merged with a competitor to form an entity that became the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Brown also served as president of the budding territorial University of Washington’s board of regents in the mid 1870s, and was clerk to the U.S. District court here. He was active in politics, too, and in 1878 he was elected to a single term as Seattle’s mayor.

But Beriah Brown was no ordinary frontier newsman. He came to Seattle as a refugee of Civil War and antebellum politics who sought to reinvent himself in fresh country. At one point, Brown fled to the Pacific Northwest from San Francisco to save his neck from an angry lynch mob.

That’s because Brown’s politics were not unlike those of Confederate President Jefferson Davis himself: He believed in white supremacy, defended slavery, wrote harshly about the “malignant” Abraham Lincoln. He was accused of Southern sympathies and suspected of heading a secret society dedicated to extending slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere, including the West Coast...

Much more of this part of a series of Crosscut stories discussing race in the Puget Sound region:

http://crosscut.com/2015/08/the-untold-story-of-seattles-racist-mayor/

Now we see why Marissa talked the way she did. Van Jones has also come out in support of her and of BLM Seattle.

*Please read the SOP in 'About this group' and the pinned threads in the AA Group's index page. This is for the regular members of AA. This is not GD.*