By Doug Chin
Board president of OCA Asian Pacific American Advocates of Greater Seattle
In 1946, a multiracial organization sponsored by the United Good Neighbor (forerunner to the United Way of King County) was formed. The Jackson Street Community Council, a grassroots self-help group, sought to improve the declining physical and social conditions and to create racial harmony within the area from Fourth Avenue to 23rd Avenue, along Jackson Street. This area included what is now considered the Chinatown-International District (CID) area, as well as the neighborhoods east of it. These neighborhoods comprised a racially mixed area of Blacks, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and whites. The area was Seattle’s racial ghetto and was quickly becoming a slum back then.
The Jackson Street Community Council was successful and served as a model for other community organizations. It lasted some 20 years as a separate entity. Governed by a 15-member board, the Council was the first neighborhood revitalization organization in Seattle established to improve social, economic, and physical conditions.
Ruth Manca served as its executive director from 1946 to 1955. Much of its work was done in concert with city officials and administrators, who regularly appeared at council meetings. Phil Hayasaka was the Council’s executive director in the 1960s. Don Chin, Ruth Chinn, Lew Kay, James Matsuoka, Clarence Arai, Victor Velasco, Tad Yamaguchi, Rev. P.J. Daba, Juan Catillo, Val Laigo, Ben Woo, Tak Kubota, Fred Cordova, and Yukio Kuniyuki were among those who were actively involved with the Jackson Street Community Council at one time or another during its history.
The Council was effective in initiating and organizing clean-up campaigns, voter registration drives, and naturalization programs. It was a watchdog that worked to eliminate prostitution and was critical of the police for being lax towards such activity in the area. It sponsored chest X-ray campaigns to detect tuberculosis and published posters and leaflets in Chinese, Japanese, and English to promote these campaigns. Its success ranged from clearing and improving vacant lots and bettering health care, to planting trees on the hillside below Yesler Terrace and building a retaining wall along Jackson Street to getting streets paved, installing new traffic lights, and improving street lighting.
Housing was another issue on which the Council was a vanguard. Much of the housing in the area was owned by absentee landlords who did little, if anything, to maintain their properties. The Jackson Street Community Council lobbied the city to pass a minimum housing code ordinance to increase the supply of safe and decent housing in Seattle. It was the first housing ordinance of its kind in the city and an important method to have property owners in the area maintain and renovate their structures.
Perhaps the Council’s most notable achievement was getting the state legislature to allow “urban renewal areas” so that they could receive federal funds and assistance for neighborhood improvements, and to get the Yesler/Atlantic neighborhood designated as such.
Among the most critical challenges the Council faced was the protracted struggle to stop the construction of a viaduct or freeway through the CID. City planners had proposed a viaduct from Dearborn Avenue to Yesler over Eight Avenue as early as 1948. The construction of a viaduct or a freeway through there, the Council feared, would divide the CID in half. In 1965, when the Seattle portion of Interstate 5 was completed, the fears of the Council became reality.
In 1967, under the leadership of Ruth Brandwein, the Jackson Street Community Council merged with the Central Area Community Council to become the Central Seattle Community Council. Four years later, it became the Seattle-King County Community Council Federation, which unfortunately disbanded a decade later.