By Robert Bauman and Robert Franklin, history faculty at WSU Tri-Cities
As scores of Tri-Citians have joined hundreds of thousands of citizens across America in demonstrating against racial injustice and violence this summer, it is important to remember that the Tri-Cities has a long history of protests against racial segregation and discrimination in this community.
The Tri-Cities was a small but important part of the largest migration in American History, the Great Migration. By 1950, 20% of Pasco’s approximately 10,000 residents were Black, almost all segregated in substandard housing in East Pasco, while few lived in the new atomic community of Richland and none in “lily-white” Kennewick.
In the Spring of 1963, at the same time that Martin Luther King, Jr. was leading marches in Birmingham, Alabama, the first of many demonstrations in support of Civil Rights and against segregation began in Kennewick and Pasco. At a protest in 1963, marchers carried signs advocating that “Kennewick Racism Must Go” and asking “Why is Kennewick All White?” In addition, protests in Pasco in 1969 and 1970 addressed residential segregation and the ongoing use of violence and intimidation by police against black residents.
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