Rainier Vista, March 1942. African American residency in public housing was as problematic as home ownership. Jesse Epstein, director of the Seattle Housing Authority insisted, successfully, on integrated housing in West Seattle, Sand Point, Holly Park, and Rainier Vista. In the words of Quintard Taylor in The Forging of a Black Community (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1994), "those residents, already apprehensive over public housing for the white poor, including a disproportionate number of southern-born war workers, now feared an influx of Southern black migrants, into their neighborhoods." (Special Collections Division, University of Washington Libraries.)

Return to Lesson Twenty One.