Title Info: Bicentennial Oral History Program, Black Project, 1975-1976

As part of the United States' Bicentennial celebration, the Washington State Archives undertook an oral history project which focused on the Black community in Seattle and King County. These 69 interviews were conducted by Esther Hall Mumford in 1975 and 1976, and include audio, transcripts, and negatives. Transcriptions were created shortly after the interviews took place. Negatives can include portraits of interviewees, as well as images taken of photographs, clippings, and other items belonging to or relating to interviewees.

While these interviews were conducted in the mid-1970s, interviewees discuss events as early as the 1880s regarding homesteaders, farmers, strikebreakers, and race discrimination. The majority highlight the years between 1900 and 1945, and relate to early housing, employment, education, recreation, and the changing Black community in greater Seattle.

It is important to recognize the project’s interviewer, Esther Hall Mumford, who was hired by the Oral History Program in the spring of 1975. Born in Ruston, Louisiana in 1941, she enrolled at University of Washington in the early 1960s. While there, she was an active member of CRAG (Civil Rights Action Group) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). She graduated in 1964 with a degree in Political Science. Her work with the Oral History Program led to her continued research of Black lives in the Pacific Northwest, and to the publication of several books on the subject, including Seattle’s Black Victorians, 1852-1901 in 1980 and Calabash: A Guide to the History, Culture and Art of African Americans in Seattle and King County, Washington in 1993. She is considered a leading authority of Black history in the Pacific Northwest.

The Washington State Archives’ Bicentennial Oral History Program included six projects, each involving several interviews. These include the Black Project, the Filipino Project, the Kittitas Project, the Pacific Project, the Wahkiakum Project, and the Whatcom Project. Each project was an investigation of a particular way of life, based on interviews of people with a number of things in common such as geographic location, occupation, race, time-frame, etc. The results are snapshots of life as it was experienced by a number of people within a given context.