Jimi Hendrix: The Central District Years

James Marshall Hendrix was born at King County Hospital on November twenty-seventh, nineteen forty-two. He grew up in the Central District, the neighborhood on Seattle's First Hill that was, by deliberate legal design, the part of the city where Black families were permitted to live. Restrictive covenants, clauses written into property deeds that prohibited the sale or rental of homes to African Americans, covered most of the rest of Seattle. The Central District was the exception. It was not a community that formed because people chose it. It formed because they had nowhere else to go.

What formed there was nonetheless real. The Central District of the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties produced jazz musicians, civil rights activists, vibrant church communities, and two high school students who would become among the most important figures in American music. Quincy Jones and Jimi Hendrix both attended Garfield High School, a few blocks from where Hendrix grew up, at different times. Jones graduated in nineteen fifty-one. Hendrix attended through the late nineteen fifties, teaching himself guitar in whatever spaces he could find between classes, in the school corridors, at home. He never graduated. The Army took him in nineteen sixty-one.

By September of nineteen seventy, when Hendrix died in London at twenty-seven, the neighborhood that made him was beginning to change. White flight had gone south; capital was coming into the Central District from outside, and with it came rising rents. The community that had coalesced under the pressure of exclusion was being dispersed by the pressure of desegregation and the market forces that followed it.

His grave is in Renton, south of Seattle, at Greenwood Memorial Park. The Central District still exists, still carries the name, still holds some of the community institutions that survived. The Black population of the neighborhood has declined from roughly eighty percent in the nineteen seventies to under twenty percent today. The restrictive covenants that concentrated the community were replaced by economic forces that dispersed it. Hendrix left in nineteen sixty-one. The neighborhood followed him in slower motion across the next five decades.