PASCO, Wash. – This Saturday, the Hanford History Project and Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church will host an important event aimed at preserving archiving the Jim Crow-era history of East Pasco.
WSU Tri-Cities and the church are organizing “Mapping East Pasco” from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
The event seeks to document previously unarchived communities from the 1950s.
Black history in the Tri-Cities has deep roots, but urban renewal campaigns have paved over most historical sites. Historical sites like Morning Star and other churches, as well as Kurtzman Park and Salon Playa, are among the few remaining.
“The whole purpose of it is to preserve some history there that otherwise is going to be lost,” said Albert Wilkins, pastor for Morning Star.
In the 1950s, Pasco was 20% Black, the largest per capita Black population in the Pacific Northwest at the time.
Thousands of Black workers were recruited to work at the Hanford site, but they were confined to living in East Pasco.
In 2005, WSU Tri-Cities history professor Robert Bauman wrote an article titled “Jim Crow in the Tri-Cities,” which began a retrospective on the Black experience in East Pasco. ‘
More articles and a book by Professors Bauman and Robert Franklin have since archived segments of this history through oral histories and community members present during that time.
However, what’s still missing is a map.
The event aims to gather community members to help fill in the gaps. The organizers will provide maps of Pasco from the 1950s, and they encourage attendees to share where streets, businesses, and community sites used to be.
Pastor Wilkins emphasized the importance of remembering these histories.
“It’s a feeling of validation…that it mattered,” he said.
He and professor Franklin both hope both older and younger generations will attend to learn and educated about this unique part of the Tri-Cities’ history.
“This was also a story that wasn’t just a Black story. This was a Tri-Cities story,” said Franklin.
