Mossback’s Northwest: The enduring legacy of Seattle’s Jazz Age

Seattle was a really segregated metropolis again then. By day, the social norms of the white majority and their redlines have been steadfast, racist covenants unfold by means of neighborhoods and the native KKK rallied. However there was semi-clandestine aid from these pressures as races blended exuberantly within the after-hours golf equipment that featured Black musicians — golf equipment just like the legendary Alhambra, later often known as the Black and Tan, at twelfth Avenue South and South Jackson Road.

This crossroads, jazz historian Paul de Barros has written, was the epicenter of the scene that stretched from the late teenagers to the Sixties. In golf equipment, dance halls, cabarets, playing dens and speakeasies, he has written, “Seattle rocked with wine, ladies, whoopee — and jazz.”

Historian Quintard Taylor has written that venues just like the Congo Membership, the Rocking Chair and the 300 Membership “flouted regulation and customized by permitting playing, after-hours ingesting and inter-racial mingling. They have been the one locations the place well-to-do white businessmen and socialites met Black and Asian laborers and maids as social equals.”

All-night golf equipment, dance flooring and illicit institutions have been the connective tissue of an expansive vice district with Jackson as its predominant artery. As Seattle urbanized and the inhabitants grew — together with a Black inhabitants leaving the Jim Crow South — the demand for leisure boomed, partly because of Washington’s early prohibition regulation in 1916 and later with an inflow of employees throughout WWII.