Editor’s note: This commentary is by Julia Purdy, of Rutland Town, a copy editor, freelance writer and retired educator.
Tonight I could not tear myself away from news coverage posted online of possibly the most sustained, passionate social movement this nation has seen in a generation. As I scrolled down through the photographs and text from various cities, I chanced upon Spokane, Washington. The city’s Riverfront Park sits atop a chunk of rock surrounded by the unspoiled Spokane River that surges through downtown. It’s a grassy, shady respite in the midst of the high dry Columbia plateau. Powwow is held there each summer, and on the Fourth of July Handel’s “Fireworks Suite” is performed by the Spokane Symphony from a float in the park’s lagoon. The whole area turns out for it. This week it was crammed with thousands of people. My mind flashed back to the Spokane I knew 30 years ago.
When I moved to Spokane in 1990, the city felt like a placid place, ticking along without much excitement. But the Aryan Nations compound was just across the state line in Idaho. While I lived there, a black man and a white woman who were perusing the newspaper rack at the bus station were shot by a skinhead who had just alighted from a westbound Greyhound for that purpose: to attack interracial couples (it was not clear whether the couple were “together” or not). Later in my stay there, Gonzaga University experienced a rash of nasty, unsettling neo-Nazi posters.
All the while, the sun kept shining and the sky stayed blue, a place “where the deer and the antelope play and never is heard a discouraging word and the sky is not cloudy all day.”
I had a new job as a housing counselor for the federally funded Spokane Neighborhood Action Program, the counterpart of our BROC and NeighborWorks. I worked with homeowners who were facing foreclosure on their HUD mortgages, counseling them as well as I could in budgeting, strategies and helping them navigate the foreclosure process and their rights.
Along the way, I also took on the role of Fair Housing counselor. I would hear from the real estate people, “Spokane doesn’t have housing discrimination, no one ever complains.”
Well, I knew better. In fact, when I was looking for a house to buy, the affordable ones were down in the terraces along the river. Interstate 90 sliced those neighborhoods in two and the noise from it was continuous. The agent kept driving me up into the rimrock neighborhoods, way out of my price range. I kept trying to get him to show me the streets around my workplace — mixed neighborhoods, single-family homes on smallish lots, shade trees, pleasant. Finally I asked him why he wasn’t showing me anything there, and his words were: “Too many brown faces.” Coming from well-diversified Massachusetts, I heard it and knew that alone was worth a lawsuit.
I learned. Discrimination against African Americans might have been a bit too obvious, but discrimination against Native Americans, other people of color, families and the disabled was rampant. I learned that the reason “no one ever complains” was that there was no one to complain to!
We set about developing a working relationship with the Washington State Human Rights Commission, we published a newsletter called “Fair Housing Today,” and we did what we could to get the word out. The real estate industry had mixed reactions: Some saw the handwriting on the wall, others got mad.
When the two-year HUD contract ended, I decided to go to graduate school in Spokane. At the same time, I knew personally people who had been rendered homeless through discrimination, so we banded together and formed an all-volunteer organization, the Northwest Fair Housing Alliance, using our connections to the state, social service agencies, street ministries, the police, supportive lawyers, the Homeless Project, and the Spokane Association of Realtors.
It wasn’t long before we realized we would stall out if we didn’t have experienced leadership. As it happened, we were put in touch with a woman whose daughter was about to attend Reed College in Oregon. Florrie Brassier was straight out of the high-powered world of Washington, D.C., in the field of fair housing, and she was excited to stay in the field while being near her daughter. Together we put together a grant application to Housing & Urban Development — not as easy as it sounds — and landed a $400,000, four-year grant. The Alliance has consistently been awarded operations grants since its beginnings, and now reaches into all 17 counties in eastern and central Washington state.
Discrimination is very hard to budge. People do know better so sometimes simple embarrassment works on them. But the most effective weapon is lawsuits, and we were the go-to place.
So looking down on Riverfront Park on my laptop, courtesy no doubt of a drone, I feel proud for Spokane. This is real. It’s a paradigm shift. We have all seen, now, the dark side of America. We can’t “unsee” it. If there is any reason to be thankful to Donald Trump’s presidency, it is that we are experiencing probably the greatest civics lesson in the history of our nation, at a time when we have the resources, the education and the sophistication to turn the page — not a moment too soon.
