Black Spokane: Segregation, Covenants, and Carl Maxey

African Americans began settling in Spokane in the eighteen eighties, among the city's earliest urban residents. In those first decades, the community was small but not confined to a particular neighborhood. Successful Black Spokanites owned homes across the city. The community built churches, newspapers, social clubs, and mutual aid organizations.

The character of that openness began to change in the nineteen twenties, as Black migration to Spokane increased and white resistance hardened. The mechanism was the restrictive covenant, a legal clause inserted into property deeds prohibiting the sale or rental of a home to non-white buyers. These covenants spread across Spokane's mid-century neighborhoods from nineteen twenty-eight to nineteen fifty-five. Hundreds of Spokane property deeds still contain this language today, long after covenants were ruled legally unenforceable and later banned outright. The covenants did not create racial separation in Spokane's housing so much as formalize and entrench it.

Throughout the nineteen thirties, forties, and early fifties, public accommodation discrimination was equally overt. African Americans were excluded from most hotels, many restaurants, and numerous social clubs. The practical enforcement of these exclusions was unofficial but nearly universal. We should note that the full scope of daily discrimination in this period is documented through testimony and oral history rather than comprehensive official records.

Carl Maxey changed the legal landscape. Born in Tacoma in nineteen twenty-four, orphaned early, and placed in Spokane institutions that expelled him for being Black, Maxey found his way to Gonzaga School of Law. He became the first Black attorney to pass the Washington State bar exam and practice in Spokane. He filed civil rights lawsuits in the nineteen sixties and seventies that ended the color bar in the school district, forced barbershops and clubs to serve all patrons, and brought Spokane into compliance with state antidiscrimination law. He marched alongside Doctor Martin Luther King Junior during the Freedom Summer of nineteen sixty-four. Five presidents, beginning with John F. Kennedy, appointed him to the Washington State Advisory Committee to the United States Civil Rights Commission. He died in nineteen ninety-seven, still fighting cases.

In nineteen eighty-one, James Chase became the first Black mayor of Spokane, elected by a majority-white electorate.