This is Part 1 of a two-part series connecting historical segregation policies to how minority groups struggle to get political representation today.
Segregation, red-lining, and sundown town policies in the 1940s through the 1960s shaped the Tri-Cities: Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland, Washington, according to a recent book by two history professors at Washington State University Tri-Cities.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Jim Crow-era policies forced Black, Hispanic, and other racial minorities to live in East Pasco, preventing them from living anywhere else in the region, like in Kennewick, said Bob Bauman, a history professor at WSU Tri-Cities.
“In Kennewick, African Americans were excluded completely by racially restricted covenants,” Bauman said. “Real estate prohibited anyone who was nonwhite from owning a home in Kennewick, and police would remove anyone who was nonwhite who was in Kennewick after sundown. There was a sort of term for these sorts of communities in different parts of the United States called sundown towns.”
Bauman and Robert Franklin co-wrote the book “Echoes of Exclusion and Resistance: Voices from the Hanford Region.” Using oral histories, government documentation about segregation policies, and written witness accounts, the two WSU Tri-Cities professors studied segregation in the area.