BlackPast.org Blog
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Editor's note: today's blog post is written by guest blogger Lisa Myers Bulmash
It is nice to point out heroes of color during
Black History Month, like legendary poet/playwright/author Langston Hughes, but
as readers of the Black Past blog well know, black history is something
everyday people create, every day. For the past four decades, the Langston
Hughes Performing Arts Institute (LHPAI) has created performing arts history
vital to the Seattle African American community.
The Institute seems to have always been part of the Central Area, and, in a way it has:
its landmark building was originally erected as the Chevra Bikur Cholim
congregation's synagogue and dedicated in 1915. At that time, the Central Area
was a mostly Jewish neighborhood with some residents of black, Japanese, and
Scandinavian heritage.
More black people began to move to Seattle during
World War II, but were restricted to the Central Area by job and housing
discrimination. It took long-term challenges from dozens of Seattle civil
rights activists and thousands of demonstrators and protestors of all racial
backgrounds in the 1960s for the city and state to improve housing, educational
and recreational opportunities for blacks and other people of color.
By
the late 1960s many of these activists sought a chance to establish a cultural
center in the Central Area. That chance
arrived in 1968. The congregation of Bikur Cholim sold its synagogue to the
City of Seattle as many of its members migrated out of the area south to Seward
Park and east to Mercer Island and other suburbs. In 1969 Seattle’s leading
anti-poverty organization, the Central Area Motivation Project (CAMP), utilized
federal funding to help create the Langston Hughes Cultural Arts Center in an
unusual partnership with the City of Seattle.
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