So, like 5 million other African-Americans between 1915 and 1960, Green became part of the Great Migration and joined his sister, Betty Green, to start a new life in Seattle. When the migration began, 90 percent of African-Americans lived in the South. By the end, 47 percent lived in the North and West. Frank and Betty were just the first two of eight siblings to make the migration; five of the siblings settled in Seattle with the family matriarch, Mariah Wert-Green.

Drawn by the promise of better job prospects, less racial violence and greater educational opportunities, families like the Greens took a huge gamble on the unknown. Yet life in the Northwest was no utopia. Alarmed by the influx of thousands of African-Americans to their cities, Northern whites created a multitude of obstacles to mobility. Cities created “sundown” laws that prevented blacks from being outside after dark; the constitution of Oregon explicitly barred African-Americans from entering the state until 1926.

In Seattle, the African-American population increased from 400 in 1910 to 15,700 in 1950. For those who settled in Seattle, the promise of better jobs was tempered by the reality of institutionalized employment discrimination that relegated black workers to the lowest-paying jobs with little opportunity for advancement.

To illustrate, between 1910 and 1940, the number of black men who worked as servants, janitors and waiters increased from just 45 percent to 52 percent, and the number of black women who worked as domestic or personal servants stayed about the same, at about 83 percent.

And in housing, those who were just one generation removed from slavery experienced new types of controls over their lives. From the 1910s through the 1960s, in reaction to the Great Migration, restrictive racial covenants were established to bar nonwhite residents and sometimes Jews from living in many neighborhoods in Seattle, with housing deeds explicitly barring nonwhites from renting or buying property. These covenants, which still exist on many housing deeds today, effectively relegated black residents to a small number of neighborhoods in Seattle—including the Central District.

Over time, Green and his five siblings established themselves in the Central District, having 23 children between them. Of the 11 homes the extended family ultimately owned in the general neighborhood, six homes were along a three-block stretch of 24th Avenue, several with adjoining yards. By the 1980s, there were 60 members of the Green family living in the family homes in the CD. Family self-reliance, entrepreneurship and resourcefulness were paramount. Frank Green taught himself plumbing, electrical work and carpentry to maintain the houses himself, and passed on the knowledge to his children and grandchildren. Those children were encouraged to go into the construction trades, and an alternative family economy of learning trades and then hiring family members in those trades was born.

Wokoma, Green’s grandson, grew up in this milieu, surrounded by an extended, intergenerational family in a vibrant and walkable black community.



COLOR CODED: This map of Seattle from 1936 shows areas of the city that were "redlineds." The areas in red had predominently black populations; banks declared these "hazardous" areas and either barred loans to purchase homes here, or made interest rates untenably high

For Wokoma, the CD was about more than housing and businesses, it was about home. “Black Seattle was very much a network of families. You knew them from their family name. There’s all these different ways you could be running into somebody on the street and you know there’s a half of degree of separation.…There’s a sense of home that extends out beyond the four walls of whatever your home address is. It extends out into the community.”

That belonging helped forge a sense of identity, freedom and the belief that hard work and commitment to community and family would pay off. “It was a place where you could be who you are with no complications, no caveats, as a black person, as a black human being,” he says. “You could express that in every way you were compelled to do that. Living in a black community affords you the freeness to be your human self—unconditionally. We know what it means to have to censor your humanity as a means to survival.”

While Wokoma grew up in the heyday of the CD, by the late ’80s, numerous strains began to tear the fabric of the black community in general and the Green family in particular. Persistent wealth inequality coupled with economic redlining made loans for home improvements out of reach for black homeowners. For members of the Green family, that meant that although they could do basic home maintenance, more expensive projects—like putting a new roof on a house—were out of reach. As a result, some homeowners sold. Wokoma explains, “My grandfather bought two houses for $7,000 and $10,000,” he says, but maintenance, especially as his grandfather became older, became more challenging and expensive. In this scenario, if someone offers you $150,000 to buy the house, “You may not want to sell your home or move out, but it may be the most pragmatic option you have. You replicate that across the entire community.”

The legacy of racial wealth inequality is a critical yet underestimated factor in gentrification and displacement. According to a report by the Institute of Policy Studies, a progressive think tank with a focus on economic and racial justice, between 1983 and 2013, in today’s dollars, black median wealth (excluding durable goods) declined 75 percent from $6,800 to $1,700. At the same time, net worth for the median white family increased 14 percent from $102,200 to $116,800. Homeownership plays a big part in the wealth gap, with generations of white families able to inherit wealth through homes and home sales. Put another way, it would take 228 years for the average black family to reach the level of wealth a white family has today.



PAYMENT PROCESS: Franklin Green kept meticulous track of his house payments in this ledger

White flight from the nation’s inner cities to the suburbs in the ’40s and ’50s is well known, and Seattle was no different. But by the 1990s, white families in Seattle began returning to the city. In the CD, this resulted in speculators targeting distressed houses that families were not able to maintain, and the homes of elderly people who needed the equity from their homes to stay afloat during retirement. As homes were renovated, white families moved to the CD, raising property values and property taxes, and fueling displacement for families like the Greens. One by one, the Green properties left the family.