The city of Seattle, reincorporated in 1869, is rich with history. Walking down the streets downtown or past Pike Place Market can make it feel like you're stepping right into a world far in the past. 

Seattle has so much to offer both residents and visitors, but beneath the shiny surface, the city has had a rough history, one that was not so kind to those who were not white and wealthy. While many people recognize that segregation existed in places in the deep south, something that was required by law, segregation also happened in Seattle--by choice--and its effects on the communities there, the racial and economic minorities, continue to exist.

(This website gives a detailed map of Seattle's segregation over the years)

I am a 16-year-old high school student who has direct connections to people who lived through redlined and segregated parts of Seattle. My grandfather, a half-Suquamish man, has had family in Seattle for decades, and when my mother lived with him, they lived in an area that was very poor, and was primarily occupied by other racial minorities. My mother was the only Native American student at her high school, and she remembers that kids her age would make negative and racially motivated comments about her father and her grandfather right in front of her, saying that they were uneducated, they were alcoholics, or much worse.

My mother had to go to the Indian Hospital when she was hurt or sick, because it was the only place that her struggling father's side of the family would be provided aid. Seattle was not segregated during my mother's childhood, and yet the effects of that segregation was something she had to grow up experiencing.

For someone like me, who is privileged enough to grow up in a suburban neighborhood ripe with a diverse community, the results of years of segregation in cities like Seattle has been something I have been able to leap over. But for Black Americans, for Latino immigrants, for Japanese and Chinese Americans, for Jewish people, for first generation children of immigrants, and for Native Americans, that segregation was, and still is, an unfortunate and integral part of their lives.

Educating young students who live in suburban areas, like I do, about the history and the impacts of segregation and redlining is incredibly important. While conducting research for this petition, I found it disheartening that more information on redlining and the past segregation of Seattle was not as readily available or as widely covered as other human rights topics.

While segregation in Seattle may not be an active problem, the structures which caused redlining and segregation in neighborhoods are the same structures which have led to the radical differences in wealth between neighborhood communities, those on the less fortunate side of the scale being, uncoincidentally, of racial minorities.

I think that it is incredibly important to inform the public, especially people who live in and outside of Seattle, about the history of segregation, what caused it, and why people continue to be affected by it.

There must be some way to broadly educate people in Washington more thoroughly on segregation, such as an integration of this history to more high school history classes, or an emphasis on segregation during the mandatory Washington history class. While I don't want this petition to be open ended, I want it to leave room for improvement, and for the voices of others to provide their own ideas, so rather than provide one solution, this petition will serve more as a brainstorm starting point.