Seattle: The Modern Bookend

by bam

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on Seattle: who could live where, the neighborhoods that racial restriction built, and the two Supreme Court opinions that bracket a single argument thirty-three years apart. The building block is a boundary you cannot photograph. You will read Seattle out of a rare searchable primary archive, the University of Washington's Racial Restrictive Covenants Project, which has documented tens of thousands of deeds that once barred nonwhite families from most of the city. You will sit with the Central District, the corridor where a constrained Black Seattle built a full community, and with Bainbridge Island, the place the first forced removal of Japanese Americans began in 1942, now marked by a memorial the community keeps. Then you will read two opinions directly. Milliken v. Bradley (1974) stopped a court-ordered desegregation remedy at the school district line: it limited what a court could compel. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007) stopped a district that had never been segregated by law from using race in school assignment: it limited what a district could choose to do voluntarily. You will quote the operative language of both, including the plurality and concurrence split in Parents Involved that decides what the case actually held, correct what it is popularly said to have held, look up a real covenant or parcel in the public records, learn how Seattle assigns students today, and write one grounded, checkable piece. Prerequisites: The Green Book: How to Read a Route (the method) and The Gym and the Color Line (the district-line course this one bookends). A 360 tour of the ground is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.