December 21, 2022 The Skanner Portland & Seattle Page 3
News
cont’d from pg 1
50 miles (80 kilometers)
east of Seattle. Northeast
of Seattle, U.S. Highway
2 over Stevens Pass was
also closed in both direc-
tions because of multiple
collisions, the Wash-
ington Department of
Transportation said.
The agency said it has
deployed plows to major
thoroughfares
across
the region and said its
“
The county
said it will
open four
severe
weather
shelters
maintenance crews will
be working through the
night for the next several
days.
Snowfall
has
also
impacted
air
travel
throughout the region.
In Vancouver, Canada,
authorities at the city’s
YVR airport said the con-
ditions have resulted in
an “unprecedented num-
Griot
ber of cancelled flights,”
adding that cancellations
and delays “will persist
for the majority of sched-
uled flights” and that
de-icing operations will
continue to be necessary.
At Seattle-Tacoma In-
ternational Airport, 195
flights had been canceled
and 295 delayed as of 3:20
p.m., according to online
tracker
FlightAware.
Earlier in the day, the air-
port said de-icing opera-
tions were in effect.
Areas north of Seattle
received heavy snowfall.
About 90 miles (145 kilo-
meters) north of the city,
in and around Belling-
ham, people were shovel-
ing sidewalks and drive-
ways, as well as sledding
and cross-country ski-
ing, after about a foot (30
centimeters) of snow fell
in some places.
In Oregon, officials are
preparing for frigid tem-
peratures that have been
forecasted for later in
the week.
Multnomah
County
and its seat, Portland,
both declared a state
of emergency starting
cont’d from pg 1
And just as quickly, the neighbor-
hood’s Black identity and any sem-
blance of its history began to disappear.
“For the white folks moving into it,
they don’t see themselves as having
displaced anything,” Merriwether said.
“It’s not like they’ve got malice. The
Blacks, to a great extent, have been salt-
and-peppered out into the south-end
cities of Seattle. But they didn’t move
into a neighborhood. They’re all over
the place. So there is no Black neigh-
borhood.”
Merriwether has few complaints
about his family’s relocation to Kirk-
land, or the fact that he and his brother
and sister were the only Black students
in their new school. On the contrary,
Merriwether recalls having an excel-
lent time in high school.
But he regrets the loss of any real
kind of Black neighborhood in Seattle.
And so, with Evans and Charlie James,
he has become one of the three main in-
terviewers for the Seattle Griot Project,
which is now headquartered in the Co-
lumbia City Theater in Seattle, where
sit-down conversations of around two
hours are recorded onstage or in a con-
ference room nearby.
Inevitably, the project expanded its
scope.
Hard Copies of History
After sitting down with longtime ac-
tivist Eddie Rye Jr., interviewer Char-
lie James reported on the wealth of re-
source materials Rye had held onto that
validated his stories.
“Eddie has been saving newspapers
since 1969,” Evans said. “He had a ga-
rage full of this stuff. So for that year of
2021 until March of 2022, I went over
there twice a week sorting, scanning
and logging this information.”
The interviewers began asking
whether their sources had any materi-
als to go along with their oral histories.
They found that the vast majority did.
“So now we’re in all these peoples’
homes, and some of the stuff is so inter-
AP PHOTO/TED MATHIAS
Freezing
Today in History: Christmas Styling
Roslyn Williams, a hairstylist at high-Tech Hair Stylists in Pikesville, Md., Sunday, Dec. 22, 1991 gives first class treatment to Ronnits
Coleman, a homeless woman living at My Sister’s Place in Baltimore. The owner Darnetts Royster, wanted to help give homeless women
something to feel good about at Christmas time.
Tuesday, the county said
in a statement. Officials
said the declaration is
meant to “alert the pub-
lic to the life-threatening
temperatures” and give
stellar,” Evans said. “A lot of these elder-
ly people don’t know how to scan their
own work or don’t have the tools. You
offer this service for free because they
have let you into their lives, and it’s a
win-win situation.”
“The real secret, it’s been overlooked,
is if the people have survived the expe-
rience and they’re still in our commu-
nity or any community, quite a large
amount of them will have artifacts.
These artifacts alone may not tell the
whole story, but the convergence of the
different articles and stories that are
told, become the story of what went on.
“
For the white folks
moving into it, they
don’t see them-
selves as having
displaced anything
“Digitizing isn’t like taking posses-
sion. You’ll go into the home or they’ll
loan you the document for a period of
time, you digitize it and give it back in
the same state it was before or better,
and they get a copy of the digital and
you get a copy of the story so now you
can tell it.”
Volunteers with the Seattle Griot
Project have begun offering a comple-
mentary thumb drive to interviewees
containing newspapers, photos and
other materials they contributed that
have been digitized.
And though elders are generally pret-
ty eager to share their stories, the group
did not lose sight of the fact that all of
the remembering and sourcing was un-
paid. This, Evans explained, has been
key to securing funding for the project.
“All of the work we’re doing with
these people, they’re volunteering,”
he said. “It’s allocated as volunteer-
ing. When you have 100 people, now
you’ve got a community involved. A
lot of these neighborhood grants look
for programs – whether it’s to solve
crimes or preserve heritage content –
and within these projects, they’re look-
the county the maximum
flexibility to respond.
The county said it will
open four severe weath-
er shelters at 8 p.m. on
Wednesday for as long as
conditions require.
Temperatures in the
Portland area on Thurs-
day morning could dip
down into single dig-
its with wind chill and
ing for cohesion. If you have a cohesive
community, now your police don’t have
to do any work.”
Another source of funding that dove-
tailed with the Seattle Griot Project’s
process was a grant from the National
Endowment of Humanities.
“If you’re preserving newspapers
that are from 1963 or older, you can ap-
ply,” Evans said. “You’re digitizing and
preserving stuff so the Library of Con-
gress gets access to it.”
Recent Forgotten Eras
“I’m finding the biggest abyss be-
tween the digital age and the analog
age is there’s this divide, where the
material has not been digitized, so it’s
not online, it’s not available, so it really
doesn’t exist,” Evans said. “When you
start getting into the 70s, the 80s, the
90s, you are in fresh territory.”
“The stories carry so much weight.
They wanted to preserve this legacy,
and they wanted people to recognize
hey, we’ve been here. I know 99% of these
people didn’t really know what they
were going to do with this material.”
He has found sources with file cabi-
nets full of information. Norman Proc-
tor, the son and namesake of a former
Tuskegee Airman, kept issues from
The Garfield Messenger, his largely
Black high school’s campus newspaper,
from the mid-60s, along with the odd
issue of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
that covered his time participating in
track and field competitions.
“I’m finding that most of the people
we do oral histories with have some
kind of paper trail to validate what they
say,” Evans said. “It’s literally, ‘I bought
the car, here’s the receipt.’”
Important Data
Evans sees additional significance for
gathering such histories – data.
“As we’re scanning as many of the
newspapers as possible, I want to an-
alyze the economic potential of the
Black community in the United States,”
he said. “(Studying ads and local hu-
man interest features) gives us a better
gauge of, how was our little communi-
plunge to near zero
degrees Fahrenheit in
and near the Gorge, ac-
cording to the National
Weather Service in Port-
land.
ty’s economy doing? If we could target
Cleveland’s Black economy, New York’s
Black economy, etc., from the same
time, and see were people buying stuff
for this much? Did they have big un-
employment rates? Then we can start
gauging what builds and what stag-
nates our communities. We want to
have this database, and we want it to be
verifiable. So the newspaper archives
with dates and times will validate our
statistics.
“If (Black members of the community)
had a little garage, a barbershop, if they
had a beauty shop, you would see the
name, you would see the address, you
would see who’s running it, then you
find the innerconnectivity to the activ-
ity of the business as well as the impact
in the community, talking to people
who are doing these interviews.”
For now, the group is in the process of
transitioning its website “from being
a presentation site to being an infor-
mation site” with an easily navigable
index. Grant funding has allowed them
to bring on an archivist, too, who holds
workshops for the community on how
to preserve tangible relics like newspa-
pers and photos.
Ultimately, the group would like to
expand to become the Pacific North-
west Griot Project, and aims to see its
methods replicated in other states and
regions.
“This task is so big,” Evans said. “Ev-
ery time I mention it, people take a step
back. But if you don’t even attempt to
do it, it will not happen.”
He has found more financial support
for the endeavor in the wake of the
George Floyd and Breonna Taylor kill-
ings, and emphasizes the importance of
preserving and making accessible
“We have to find commonality to stop
all the craziness that goes on,” he said.
“When everybody finds out they’re in
the same pot, or we even share some
history or ancestry or experiences
with our grandparents, the world just
becomes a little bit smaller.”
For more information, visit https://
www.theseattlegriotproject.com.