The Hustle Read Online Free

controlled at the top by the pioneer families, who had divvied up the choicest land among themselves when they founded the town. It was a live-and-let-live kind of place—for example, even though he was a religious teetotaler, Arthur Denny managed to look past the numerous local establishments that gave workingmen the chance to booze, whore, and lose their money gambling.
    Amid all this, blacks in Seattle had more freedom than in most other parts of the United States, even in the West. Oregon, at the time, denied blacks voting rights and prohibited them from settling. While other western states passed laws that prohibited interracial marriage, Washington Territory did not enact any overtly discriminatory statutes. But while blacks did not face a lot of outright harassment, neither did they have much political or economic power. Barred from labor unions, African Americans found themselves at the bottom of the job market, working as janitors or laborers, or, on the more prestigious end of the scale, cooks, porters, chauffeurs and, in several cases, barbers. Robert Dixon, for example, a black barber from Virginia who arrived in 1865, opened a shop downtown where he cut the hair of city fathers such as Arthur Denny (black barbers often did not serve other blacks during business hours for fear of putting off their white customers).
    Part of the reason for the city’s relative tolerance was that there just weren’t very many blacks around to discriminate against. In 1880, African Americans numbered just nineteen of thirty-five hundred people in the town. At the time, the primary targets of racial animosity in Seattle were American Indians and Chinese. Indians, who had lived in the region for centuries, were generally viewed as savages. Hatred of the Chinese, who were recruited to the Northwest to build the railroads, exploded in February 1886, when unionized white workers—who accused the Chinese of undercutting salaries—rampaged through Seattle’s Chinatown and forced Chinese to the docks, where two hundred were loaded on a steamer and sent to San Francisco. Within a month, almost all of Seattle’s Chinese had been deported.
    During this time, William Grose did well. In 1876 he started a restaurant downtown called Our House, and later opened a barbershop and a three-story hotel near the waterfront. An amiable man, he was well known in town—a magazine drawing of a crowd at an 1882 lynching of three accused white murderers shows Grose standing near sawmill owner Henry Yesler. That same year, Grose, whose businesses made him Seattle’s wealthiest African American, paid Yesler $1,000 for twelve acres of land in the northeastern section of the city, a couple of miles from the waterfront. At the time, the land, along East Madison Street, was a wooded area still populated by bears. After Grose started a farm and built a home on the property, he began to sell off parcels to other African Americans. By the 1890s, the area was developing as the center of Seattle’s “respectable,” middle-class African-American population, gaining it the disparaging nickname “Coon Hollow.”
    William Grose died in 1898, and Arthur Denny followed the next year, both having made their fortunes. By this time, Seattle had established itself as the primary city on Puget Sound. As the town’s residential patterns began to emerge, wealthier whites moved away from the area downtown to outer neighborhoods. Near the waterfront around Jackson Street—what is today known as the “International District” or simply “Chinatown”—lived Asians and poorer blacks, in the city’s red-light neighborhood, home to brothels and residential hotels. Over the coming decades, the Jackson Street area and the East Madison neighborhood—two communities separated by a couple of miles and a class barrier—would grow toward each other as more African Americans arrived in the city and filled