Divided It Stands
The opening of the Northwest African American Museum last March was a long time in coming. Can it rise above the conflicts that delayed its debut for 30 years?
IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A DAY supposed to be a day for community celebration. In front of the old Colman School on South Massachusetts Street, bunches of balloons dotted the vast field. Singers and percussionists swathed in African textiles readied themselves to perform. About a thousand jubilant spectators gathered under blue awnings, awaiting speeches by dignitaries like Mayor Greg Nickels, King County Executive Ron Sims, Governor Chris Gregoire, and Reverend Samuel McKinney of Mount Zion Baptist Church. A yellow ribbon stretched across the lovingly restored red brick of the 100-year-old building’s arched entry, and above, a sign read “NAAM” in bold, stylized letters, white on red.
The grand opening of the Northwest African American Museum this past March had been a long time in coming—nearly 30 years. More than a few of the assembled well-wishers on that overcast afternoon had gone to grade school at Colman before I-90 slashed the Central District in half in 1985, precipitating the school’s closure. Others had taken part in the decades of lobbying, politicking, demonstrating, fundraising, and civil disobedience aimed at creating a black history museum in Seattle. And some had just walked past the boarded-up pile for years, watching it crumble. Now, all were there to witness its return to life.
Not everybody present, though, had come to celebrate. Before the official speeches began, Wyking Kwame Garrett, an African American community activist, stepped up to the lectern, raised his fist, and called out the NAAM leadership. “This is a disgrace!” he yelled. “It’s not what we sacrificed our lives for.” The event’s organizers had prepared for protest; the Seattle Police Department was on hand. Garrett was booed and, after refusing requests to leave the podium, arrested. Out in the crowd, a lone supporter of Garrett’s held up a sign that read, “Not in Our Name.”
Though the fracas made the papers, it didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who’d been paying attention to the NAAM saga. At 31, Wyking Kwame Garrett was too young to have been a student at Colman, but he had more or less grown up in the building: He was eight in 1985 when his father, Omari Tahir-Garrett, and four other activists occupied the shuttered school to pressure the city into funding a black culture center there.
Two years earlier, Central Area residents had petitioned then-Mayor Charles Royer to start a black culture center. The mayor backed the formation of the African American Heritage Museum Task Force, which recommended Colman School as the best site for the museum. But in the fall of 1985, amid rumors that the school district planned to sell the building to the state, museum supporters broke in, planning to stay the weeks or months it took to get the city genuinely invested in the project. No one in city government wanted the bad publicity that the forcible removal of the activists would unleash. The occupation lasted eight years.
Wyking Garrett remembers playing basketball in Colman School’s gym, seeing black history exhibits the occupiers put together on the fly, and watching his father fight for a dream in a city that didn’t seem to care. “It’s been the best education I could possibly get,” he says. “I learned how our society really functions—for the worse, in a lot of ways.”
While the younger Garrett got lessons in realpolitik, the city dragged its feet, spending nearly a decade and more than $350,000 on feasibility studies. It took Norm Rice, the city’s first black mayor, to take the decisive action necessary to end the occupation: In 1993, he created a museum committee that teamed the occupiers with a multiracial group of business and civic leaders, with the idea of injecting the money and structure to make their vision a brick-and-mortar reality. The city pledged funds but by the mid-’90s, the museum board had split into two factions. The new business-class members were battling the old-guard activists for control of the endeavor—and the latter was voted off the board one by one. After nearly a decade of missed deadlines and bitter recriminations, the black community confronted the appalling possibility that their museum might never get built at all. Then, in 2003, the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, under the leadership of its president, James Kelly, stepped in to buy the building from the Seattle School District for $800,000 and shepherd the project that eventually got built: a museum on the ground floor and 36 affordable apartments on the second and third stories, all designed by local black-owned architecture firm DKA (Donald King Architects).
At the project’s June 2006 groundbreaking, Tahir-Garrett (who’d served prison time for attacking then-Mayor Paul Schell with a megaphone five years earlier) stood on the sidewalk outside the property, barred from entry due to alleged threats he’d made against NAAM board members. Depending on whom you ask, Tahir-Garrett and the other original activists either had been elbowed aside by powerful downtown interests or were so belligerent and disorganized that they had to be removed before anyone with any credibility or resources would get on board.
Published: October 2008
