![]() Rules of segregation limited where Blacks, Asians, and Jews might live, enforced by deed restrictions, racial restrictive covenants, and by compounding systems of discrimination organized by the real estate industry and white neighborhoods. Blacks numbered 16,453 and the combined Asian origin population was 12,790. Despite significant increases in the number of African Americans who had come to help the war effort, the population remained 96% white. The county claimed 732,992 residents in 1950. King County population had increased 45% in the decade since 1940 thanks to the World War II influx of defense workers and military personnel. Here are block by block maps of residences for Ashkenazik Jews, Sephardic Jews, African Americans, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese. ![]() Sociologist Paul Hatt produced a set of more detailed maps of central Seattle based on a 1939 house to house survey conducted by the WPA. The industrial district south of downtown provided homes for some Black, Japanese, and Filipinos, but foreign-born Whites dominated that tract's population. This neighborhood would become the heart of Black Seattle in the decades ahead, home to important churches and more and more African American homeowners and renters. Blacks also congregated the Madison Valley tract that William Gross had pioneered. Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos and African Americans shared the Jackson Street corridor that climbed the hill east of Seattle's Skid Road area. The map at right shows the percentage of Nonwhites in each tract, revealing the evolving shape of the ghetto where people of color were allowed to live. In other reports, Seattle's populations were identified as follows: 4,039 Black residents, 5,778 Japanese, 1,781 Chinese, 1,392 Filipinos, 222 Native Americans, 354,223 White. Unfortunately, the tract reports designated only three population categories: White, Nonwhite, and foreign-born White. On the eve of World War II, Seattle had a population of 368,302 and for the first time the Census Bureau recorded population data by census tracts, neighborhood clusters of 2,000-5,000 people. Racial restrictive covenants (see database and article) and deed restrictions prevented by Blacks, Asians, and often Jews from renting, buying, or occupying property in most parts of the city and surrounding county. In the following decades, new tools of segregation would be used to make the boundaries firmer. ![]() By 1920, as can be seen on these maps, Black families were more dispersed than Asians, but were mostly living in the Central Area, either near Japanese and Chinese residents along Jackson Street or in Madison Valley where William Gross, an African American hotel owner, had bought and subdivided land in the 1890s. African Americans filtered slowly into the area and initially residential restrictions were loose and informal. Japanese immigrants built Nihonmachi (Japan town) next to the rebuilt Chinatown in the early 1900s and soon became the largest nonwhite group in Seattle. Chinese people were tightly confined in Chinatown before that community was destroyed and its residents forced to flee in 1886. ![]() Segregation was first imposed on Asian Americans, who have outnumbered African Americans through most of Seattle's history. Click the map above to explore an interactive map that allows you to see King County residential distributions for many ethnic and racial populations decade by decade. ![]()
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