Roger Sale’s Seattle, Past to Present has become a beloved reflection of Seattle’s history and its possible futures as imagined in 1976, when the book was first published. Drawing on demographic analysis, residential surveys, portraiture, and personal observation and reflection, Sale provides his take on what was most important in each of Seattle’s main periods, from the city’s founding, when settlers built a city great enough that the railroads eventually had to come; down to the post-Boeing Seattle of the 1970s, when the city was coming to terms with itself based on lessons from its past. Along the way, Sale touches on the economic diversity of late nineteenth-century Seattle that allowed it to grow; describes the major achievements of the first boom years in parks, boulevards, and neighborhoods of quiet elegance; and draws portraits of people like Vernon Parrington, Nellie Cornish, and Mark Tobey, who came to Seattle and flourished. The result is a powerful assessment of Seattle’s vitality, the result of old-timers and newcomers mixing both in harmony and in antagonism. With a new introduction by Seattle journalist Knute Berger, this edition invites today's readers to revisit Sale’s time capsule of Seattle—and perhaps learn something unexpected about this ever-changing city.

Seattle was a very different city in 1960 than it is today. There were no black bus drivers, sales clerks, or bank tellers. Black children rarely attended the same schools as white children. And few black people lived outside of the Central District. In 1960, Seattle was effectively a segregated town. Energized by the national civil rights movement, an interracial group of Seattle residents joined together to form the Seattle chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Operational from 1961 through 1968, CORE had a brief but powerful effect on Seattle. The chapter began by challenging one of the more blatant forms of discrimination in the city, local supermarkets. Located within the black community and dependent on black customers, these supermarkets refused to hire black employees. CORE took the supermarkets to task by organizing hundreds of volunteers into shifts of continuous picketers until stores desegregated their staffs. From this initial effort CORE, in partnership with the NAACP and other groups, launched campaigns to increase employment and housing opportunities for black Seattleites, and to address racial inequalities in Seattle public schools. The members of Seattle CORE were committed to transforming Seattle into a more integrated and just society. Seattle was one of more than one hundred cities to support an active CORE chapter. Seattle in Black and White tells the local, Seattle story about this national movement. Authored by four active members of Seattle CORE, this book not only recounts the actions of Seattle CORE but, through their memories, also captures the emotion and intensity of this pivotal and highly charged time in America’s history. A V Ethel Willis White Book For more information visit: http://seattleinblackandwhite.org/

Seattle's first black resident was a sailor named Manuel Lopes who arrived in 1858 and became the small community's first barber. He left in the early 1870s to seek economic prosperity elsewhere, but as Seattle transformed from a stopover town to a full-fledged city, African Americans began to stay and build a community. By the early twentieth century, black life in Seattle coalesced in the Central District, a four-square-mile section east of downtown. Black Seattle, however, was never a monolith. Through world wars, economic booms and busts, and the civil rights movement, black residents and leaders negotiated intragroup conflicts and had varied approaches to challenging racial inequity. Despite these differences, they nurtured a distinct African American culture and black urban community ethos. With a new foreword and afterword, this second edition of The Forging of a Black Community is essential to understanding the history and present of the largest black community in the Pacific Northwest.

Seattle, often called the "Emerald City," did not achieve its green, clean, and sustainable environment easily. This thriving ecotopia is the byproduct of continuing efforts by residents, businesses, and civic leaders alike. In Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability, Jeffrey Craig Sanders examines the rise of environmental activism in Seattle amidst the "urban crisis" of the 1960s and its aftermath. Like much activism during this period, the environmental movement began at the grassroots level—in local neighborhoods over local issues. Sanders links the rise of local environmentalism to larger movements for economic, racial, and gender equality and to a counterculture that changed the social and political landscape. He examines emblematic battles that erupted over the planned demolition of Pike Place Market, a local landmark, and environmental organizing in the Central District during the War on Poverty. Sanders also relates the story of Fort Lawton, a decommissioned army base, where Audubon Society members and Native American activists feuded over future land use. The rise and popularity of environmental consciousness among Seattle's residents came to influence everything from industry to politics, planning, and global environmental movements. Yet, as Sanders reveals, it was in the small, local struggles that urban environmental activism began.