The Civil Rights & Labor History Consortium brings together 14 online projects with more than 1,200 separate pages - featuring articles, video oral histories, maps, and thousands of photos and documents. Based in the University of Washington History Department and directed by Professor James N. Gregory, the consortium is also supported by the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Center for the Study of Pacific Northwest.
Included are lesson plans for teachers. The projects have registered nearly 15 million page views since 2010.
Here are links to more than 400 webpages of research reports, films, slideshows, map and document collections categorized by subject.
The civil rights movement in Seattle started well before the celebrated struggles in the South in the 1950s and 1960s and the Seattle movement relied not just on African American activists but also Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. This site features video oral histories from more than 80 civil rights activists; hundreds of photos and documents; reports on dozens of organizations and campaigns; an extensive section on the history of "Segregated Seattle," including a database of racial restrictive housing covenants that are still to be found in deeds throughout the greater Seattle area.
The Great Depression first shattered and then rebuilt the economy of Washington State, leaving it with roads, bridges, dams, and a new electric grid that set the stage for rapid industrial growth. It rearranged the state's politics, ending decades of Republican rule, setting up a powerful labor movement, a new Democratic Party, and a new set of political priorites. This project multimedia web project explores this important decade. Here you will find detailed accounts of issues, incidents, institutions, and people, along with hundreds of photographs, documents, and news articles from the period.
This project produces and displays free interactive maps showing the historical geography of dozens of social movements that have influenced American life and politics since the late 19th century, including radical movements, civil rights movements, labor movements, women's movements, and more. Until now historians and social scientists have mostly studied social movements in isolation and often with little attention to geography. This project allows us to see where social movements were active and where not, helping us better understand patterns of influence and endurance. Here are more than 120 interactive maps, charts, and data tables.
The Racial Restrictive Covenants Project involves teams of researchers at the University of Washington and Eastern Washington University. We are working to identify and map racial restrictions buried in property records. These restrictions, known as racial covenants or racially-restrictive deeds, were used in most American communities to prevent people who were not white from buying or occupying property. This project is authorized by the state legislature under SHB 1335 (May 2021) and charged with identifying and mapping neighborhoods covered by racist deed provisions and restrictive covenants.
Using the new tools of digital history, this project explores the dimensions of race, politics, and social movements in Washington State. Here are valuable resources for researchers, classrooms, and anyone interested in the past and present of labor and civil rights movements. We have developed detailed geographic data and maps showing the history of racial segregation in major cities, tracking the political history of leftwing and mainstream political parties, locating key locations in Seattle's labor history, and exploring key social movements, identitying locations where membership, activities, or other measures of support were concentrated.
The West Coast connects to the world through its ports. Ships have been the economic lifeblood of the West Coast since the early 19th century, and the ports where goods and people move from water to land and from land to water have keyed important parts of the the history of this region. This project explores this vital history, focusing first on the men and women who have worked in the ports, the inland waterways, the fisheries, canneries, and other waterfront industries of California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. Strikes and struggles for workplace rights have been part of that history and waterfront workers have created some of the most influential labor unions anywhere, including the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).
Antiwar movements have never been separate from movements for civil rights, union recognition, and social change. In the Pacific Northwest, labor unions and socialists played a large part in the movement against World War I, while civil rights activism paved the way for the growth of the antiwar movement during the Vietnam era. This project multimedia web project chronicles the rich history of antiwar activity in the Northwest with video oral histories, hundreds of photographs and documents, GI underground newspapers, movement biographies, and research reports.
The Seattle General Strike of 1919 was the first city-wide strike anywhere in the United States to be proclaimed a "general strike." This project explores the strike and the early 20th century history of labor and radicalism in the state of Washington. Here you will find rare film footage, photographs, documents, political cartoons, and contemporary newspaper reports. In addition we explore the event and its historical background in nearly two dozen research essays. Topics include: "African Americans and the Seattle Labor Movement," "Spying on Labor: The Seattle Minute Men," "The International Union of Timberworkers," "The University of Washington: Henry Suzzallo and the General Strike," "The IWW in the General Strike," and others.
Communism made a larger impact on Washington than almost any other state. "There are forty-seven states in the Union, and the Soviet of Washington," Postmaster General James Farley joked in 1936. The remark, for all its exaggeration, had some foundation. This project explores the controversial history of the Communist Party in the Pacific Northwest from 1919 to the present. Here you will find video oral histories with CP veterans, historical essays covering each decade of Communist activities, more than 200 photographs, political cartoons, and newspaper headlines, a Who's Who, and an historical timeline.
Founded in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World captured the imagination of a generation with its fiery rhetoric, daring tactics, and program of revolutionary industrial unionism. This project explores the IWW in its first three decades. We have compiled a database of hundreds of strikes, campaigns, arrests, and other incidents involving IWW members and present this information both yearbook format and in elaborate interactive maps. Here you will also find accounts of important events and a wealth of photographs and documents.
Upton Sinclair's 1934 campaign for governor of California has been called "the Campaign of the Century." One of the most dramatic and influential contests in California history, it helped change the political landscape of the nation. This project explores the campaign and the End Poverty in California (EPIC) program that captured international attention in 1934. Here you will detailed accounts and a wealth of primary sources, including political cartoons, newspaper and magazine articles, campaign pamphlets, pages from Upton Sinclair's Epic News (the campaign newspaper), and Upton Sinclair's writing during and after the campaign.
This project assembles the most extensive online collection of materials about labor history for this, or any other, region. Here you will find detailed information and primary sources about key historical events, including the Seattle General Strike of 1919, the unemployed movements and labor crusades of the 1930s, farmworker campaigns from the 1930s to 1980s, timber worker unions, waterfront strikes, Filipino cannery worker unions, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the history-making WTO confrontation of 1999.
Labor media has been a critical part of American labor movements since the early 19th century and an equally critical part of the history of American journalism. This project brings together information about the history and ongoing influence of newspapers and periodicals published by unions, labor councils, and radical organizations in the Pacific Northwest. Here you will find facsimile images from and detailed historical reports over 30 historical and contemporary labor newspapers including the Seattle Union Record, The Industrial Worker, The Socialist, The Agitator, Voice of Action, Portland Labor Press, Philippine-American Chronicle, Washington Teamster, and The Timber Worker, just to name a few.
This project explores a number of consequential migrations--Great Migrations--that helped reshape culture, politics, or economic structures. It has five units, each with detailed information and interactive maps, charts, and data: (1) the migration of African Americans out of the South 1900-2000; (2) the enormously consequential migrations of Latinx Americans, both from Latin America and inside the US 1850-2017; (3) the diaspora of whites from the South to northern and western states; (4) the Dust Bowl migration to California from Oklahoma and neighboring states in the 1930s. (5) In addition, we provide migration histories for all fifty states showing decade-by-decade from 1850-2017 where residents have come from.