When you drive to north Seattle from south Seattle, you may notice that the city becomes a lot more white. That’s because north Seattle is 69 percent white, according to Census data. South Seattle is just 28 percent white. Of non-whites in the south end, Asians make up the majority at 36 percent. Listener David Newman asked the Local Wonder team to look into why Seattle seems so segregated. Our first stop was the Ship Canal, that skinny waterway near Husky Stadium that connects Lake Washington with Puget Sound. Professor Jim Gregory of the University of Washington met Local Wonder at the edge of East Montlake Park, where boaters motored by on their yachts. Top read: Rare Photos Of Black Seattle Unearthed It’s one of the most beautiful spots in Seattle, but Gregory says it represents the city’s ugly history of racial segregation.

“The Ship Canal is a profound barrier between north Seattle and the rest of Seattle, but also between white Seattle and multi-racial Seattle,” he says. Gregory has been researching racial divisions in Seattle for decades, and he says the Ship Canal’s physical barrier has served as a moat. Top read: ‘Is There a Problem?’ That Scary Brown Man And White Privilege “A literal moat that has defended in a symbolic sense white Seattle from desegregation,” he says. In the early 20th century, white people could legally ban blacks and Asians from buying houses in most neighborhoods north of the Ship Canal – and a few just south, including Capitol Hill, Madison Park, Queen Anne and Magnolia.

White neighborhood groups and real estate agents did this by inserting racial restrictive covenants into property deeds. A racial restriction would include language like this one, which showed up on deeds in Queen Anne: "No person or persons of Asiatic, African or Negro blood, lineage, or extraction shall be permitted to occupy a portion of said property." “Other neighbors could sue a homeowner who decided to sell to a person of color,” Gregory says. “In many cases, Jews were also prohibited in neighborhoods.” (In Broadmoor, a gated community in Madison Park, deeds referred to Jews as “Hebrews.”)

In the early 1950s, an Austrian refugee, a Holocaust survivor, bought a house in the Sand Point Country Club, a tony little area near Magnuson Beach. According to Catherine Silva, a UW history student, the refugee was so bullied by the head of the neighborhood association that he ultimately bowed out of his home purchase. Seattle got its first racist deed in 1924; owners who refused to enforce them risked losing their property, according to Gregory. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court said racist restrictions could no longer be enforced. Did your neighborhood have racist covenants? Check Prof. Gregory’s site Adrienne Bailey, 62, remembers what that time was like for people of color. She has been an activist and worked for Seattle Central College. As a child she had access to parts of Seattle her friends couldn’t see.

“My mom was a domestic,” Bailey says. “That meant we had to go where white folks were. And me being the youngest, a lot of times I had to go with her. So I always saw what the other world was.” They shopped at the University Village and Northgate. Top read: A man shouts racial slurs in a Seattle Starbucks. The silence is deafening But later in life, Bailey learned about barriers between white neighborhoods and her own. She knew which real estate agents would and would not rent to people of color. “Black people always had to use shields to buy a house,” she says.