Merlin Rainwater was, admittedly, “white, liberal, self-consciously anti-racist” when she moved to Seattle’s Central District in the 1980s and took advantage of the cheap houses for sale. At the time, the neighborhood was undergoing vast change. In the 1970s, the Central District was
nearly 75% Black . Nowadays,
about 15% of the area’s residents are Black . Working as a home care nurse in her new community, Rainwater got to know her neighbors. One woman asked Rainwater to accompany her to the hospital for a pregnancy-related emergency because she thought she’d be treated better if a white person was with her. Rainwater agreed to go, but the conversation shook her. “I was completely oblivious to the reality around me,” Rainwater said. Not so much anymore. As she discovered — and as she hopes others will learn through a new smartphone-powered, self-guided audio walking tour she developed — the history of the city’s Central District is on display, if you know where to look. So, in turn, is the story of Black Seattle. The digital walking tour —
Seattle’s Infamous Redline Guide , available as an app — takes people on a two-hour outing around the neighborhood, generally circling around 21st Avenue and East Madison Street, a once thriving intersection of Black-owned businesses and culture. The tour has 12 locations, and takes people from the founding of the Central District by
William Grose , and through 20th-century efforts to exclude Black people from homeownership and its related wealth-building. It ends at Africatown Plaza and the
Wa Na Wari art center , where the guide describes current efforts to reverse years of disinvestment and celebrates the people who made the neighborhood what it is today. As Rainwater and her project collaborators — local filmmakers Malika Lee and Allycea Weil — detail, there’s much to celebrate, even while acknowledging the devastation brought by a racist housing policy made law by the federal government, commonly referred to as
redlining .
Invisible lines
Lee, the tour’s creative director and curriculum consultant, grew up in the Central District and attended Mount Zion Baptist Church as a kid. She remembers her grandmother, every Sunday, checking her account at the
credit union associated with the church . At the time, it was nothing to her. Now she sees it in a different light, one where a community is blocked from accessing things that others take for granted. Bank accounts. Homeownership. “Working on this project really connected some dots that had shaped my upbringing,” said Lee, who was the assistant director on the 2020 documentary “
Keepers of the Dream: Seattle Women Black Panthers ” and now lives just south of Columbia City. “One of the things that really stood out for me was that at one time, Black homeownership in Seattle was amongst the highest in the nation,” Lee said. “Now we’re
amongst the lowest .” Mount Zion, which was
established in 1890 , has its own unfortunate connection to this chapter in Seattle history. In the 1920s, the church built a new brick chapel for its congregants at 19th Avenue and East Madison Street. As churchgoers celebrated their new house of worship, in 1926, white homeowners across the street — where the large apartment building, Lawrence Lofts, stands today — launched a campaign. As the walking guide describes, they “went door to door, collecting signatures.” Soon all the home deeds on the block carried restrictive covenants that said, in short, they would never “be used or occupied by or sold, conveyed, leased, rented or given” to Black people. These
covenants , depending on location, also restricted the sale or renting of the homes to people who were Black, of Asian or Jewish heritage, and anyone else considered nonwhite. These covenants drew an invisible line down the middle of 19th, a form of segregation and discrimination that was sanctioned with the creation of the federal Home Owners Loan Corporation in 1933. This New Deal-era, government-sponsored corporation drew maps of U.S. cities, coloring sections of town red it deemed to risky for mortgage insurance. Those redlined sections were invariably home to communities of color. That invisible line of discrimination
wound around the Central District . Redlining was finally outlawed with the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which
banned racial discrimination in real estate and mortgage lending . But the damage had been done. Lee said redlining “feeds and fuels itself” by first devaluing Black property and neighborhoods. That, in turn, leads to gentrification, and the reinvestment in formerly Black neighborhoods by wealthier, usually white, people. “The Central District is a textbook example of that,” she said.
Black enterprise
An example of this loss of Black wealth, and entrepreneurship, is around 21st and Madison.
Sponsored
For decades, the block was home to
Birdland , a fabled live music club that hosted Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Jimi Hendrix and countless others before it was demolished, its location now home to a Safeway. The area almost exclusively hosted Black-owned businesses, including the pharmacy of
Russell Gideon , whose contributions to Seattle’s civic life led to Ebony magazine calling him for years one of the most influential Black people in the U.S. Today,
DeCharlene’s Beauty Salon is the only remaining Black-owned business there, according to the guide. On the walking tour, DeCharlene Williams —
who died in 2018 and whose family continues to run the business — describes in her own words how she overcame the difficulties she faced looking for work and acquiring a loan to start her business, thanks to an interview recorded by the
Shelf Life Community Story Project , which seeks to preserve the history of the Central District. The tour uses audio from numerous oral histories, many collected by
the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project . Rainwater said the team also relied on retired
University of Washington professor Quintard Taylor ‘s masterful book, “The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District From 1870 Through the Civil Rights Era.” The tour ends near 23rd Avenue and Union Street, where it shifts from the past to the present, detailing the work of the
Africatown Community Land Trust , which with Community Roots Housing
built 126 units of affordable housing there . The tour praises the state
Covenant Homeownership Program , created in 2023, that offers homebuying assistance to Washingtonians who faced housing discrimination in the early to mid-20th century and their descendants. These efforts, in some way, seek to repair past wrongs, but there’s still more to do. Weil, who worked on the technical side of the app and helped gather and take photos for the project, moved to the neighborhood with her two teen boys about five years ago and is currently working on a
documentary called “Critical What?!” that follows a handful of local kids as they struggle with issues like homelessness, tech inequality, gender bias and book banning. Like Lee and Rainwater, Weil said people shouldn’t dwell too much on the past, but instead focus on the present. Weil said she gets her undercut maintained at
Earl’s Cuts and Styles barbershop , loves getting Ethiopian coffee at
Avole and buying gifts at
Arte Noir . She said the best jerk chicken she’s ever had is at
Jerk Shack Kitchen in Midtown Square. Spending money at these Black-owned businesses is her own way of making history, she said. “We’re living history,” she said. “How you move in this world will impact another.”
App launch party
For Rainwater, she’s glad the digital walking guide is coming out now, as the
Trump administration seeks to purge government websites of references to diversity and inclusion . “Some of the things that have happened in the last few weeks, especially the erasing of Black people from the historical record, reminded me why I did this in the first place,” Rainwater said. And that was exactly why she did it — to restore a history many of us never learned, or didn’t want to remember. Including herself. “As I did this,” she said, “it became more and more clear that it was me who I was educating.”
