Past As Prologue: Remembering A Pasco Civil Rights Protest And Discrimination That Built Tri-Cities

By NWPB News
Black man in the middle of whites in line at grocery store.
By 1950, 20% of Pasco’s approximately 10,000 residents were Black, almost all living in slum conditions. Few lived in the new atomic community of Richland and none in “lily-white” Kennewick -- a fact of which Kennewick city leaders and police at the time were proud. Not only was housing segregated, but Black residents were forced to endure broad discrimination in Read More

Congress Formally Acknowledges 155-Year-Old Betrayal Of Warm Springs And Wasco Tribes

By Emily Cureton
Warm Springs first tribal council in 1928. From left to right: George Meachum, Isaac McKinley, Charley McKinley, Nathan Heath and Jackson Culps. Courtesy of The Museum at Warm Springs
Faced with the threat of forced removal or worse, in 1855 leaders of the Warm Springs and Wasco Tribes forfeited their claim to roughly ten million acres, and moved to a reservation. In exchange for land to offer white settlers, brokers for the United States government made promises. Among those: Tribal members would not be stopped from traveling off the reservation to Read More

Northwest Mask Wars And Pandemics: Nothing New For Washington As Politics Of 1918 Return

By NWPB News
Volunteers wearing gauze masks at a street kitchen in Cincinnati serve food to children of families afflicted by the flu pandemic in the winter of 1918-1919.
In 1918 Walla Walla, the chief of police, refused to enforce a state mask mandate. He pointed out that he was going to meet heavy resistance and, anyway, that he had no authority to carry out a state directive, only city ordinances. Still, he also openly defied the instructions of the city’s health officer, J.E. Vanderpool, to follow the state health officer’s guidance. Read More

Louis Mann: A Yakama Nation Interpreter, Educator, Advocate Is Heard Again After 100 Years

By Enrique Pérez de la Rosa
Louis Mann, photographed by Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, was an interpreter for the Yakama Nation in the early 1900s who also defended water and fishing rights of other tribal members through correspondence to U.S. government officials.
The Treaty of 1855 created the Yakama Nation reservation as we know it today. In the decades after, the Yakama, Washington state, and the United States were trying to figure out their new relationship. At the turn of the century, Louis Mann was in the middle of it all, working as an interpreter for the tribe. Now, audio recordings of Mann’s strong voice have resurfaced. Read More
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