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By Flynn Espe

In downtown Pasco, just a few blocks from a 150-acre railroad yard that once marked the dividing line of a racially segregated community, a new exhibit seeks to preserve the fragmented memories of a time and place that history nearly forgot. Spanning art, archival research, and interpretive media, “Eastside Temporalities” tells the story of East Pasco from World War II to the early 1970s, when it existed as a predominantly African American neighborhood.

The exhibit, which runs through the end of March at Cafe con Arte in Pasco, came together under the guidance and direction of ���سԹ� faculty, working in collaboration with local artist Joel Nunn-Sparks and other partners. It represents the latest milestone in an ongoing grant-funded project aimed at documenting the history of African American contributions to the Manhattan Project at Hanford.

“By 1950, Pasco is about 20 percent Black, which per capita, is one of the largest Black populations in the West Coast,” said Robert Franklin, ���سԹ� assistant professor and associate director of the Hanford History Project. “But it’s relegated to East Pasco.”

Robert Franklin, ���سԹ� assistant professor and associate director of the Hanford History Project (right) served as principal investigator on a grant-funded project to document the legacy of African American contributions to the Manhattan Project at Hanford.

As the principal investigator for the project, Franklin has spent close to 10 years building the collection of historical artifacts — including photos, essays, oral histories, and more — that forms the foundation of the exhibit. He also co-authored the 2020 book , which documents the experiences of various nonwhite groups in the area, including African American government laborers who migrated from the South in the 1940s.

That migration was driven by the development of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, when DuPont — operating as a U.S. defense contractor — began hiring large numbers of workers to build and operate the massive facilities for plutonium production. The hiring effort followed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 executive order establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission, which effectively mandated an early form of affirmative action.

“It’s an investigative arm of an act of Congress that says, ‘If you’re a federal contractor, your workforce needs to resemble the American people.’ So if the American people are roughly 15 percent, 16 percent African American, guess what?” Franklin said. “Now, it didn’t say what jobs they had to be hired into, but it did say you have to hire them — and you have to pay your workers equally in the position.”

Although good-paying jobs drew Black families to the region, discriminatory housing practices left them few options for where to live. For many, East Pasco was it.

Visitors to the Eastside Temporalities exhibit can learn about the history of East Pasco’s African American community, which formed in the early days of Hanford’s nuclear operations.

“And that was because when Pasco was formed as a railroad town, the railroad company platted East Pasco on the other side of the tracks as where its non-white workers would live — Chinese, Japanese, Black workers,” Franklin said.

The eastside neighborhood lacked basic infrastructure, including paved roads, streetlights, sewers, and home plumbing. Community members instead relied on a shared water tap. On top of that, the Black residents of East Pasco found themselves excluded from many business services outside of their designated enclave and subjected to other racist treatment.

“Kennewick was a notorious sundown town until 1965 when it passed an open housing ordinance — sundown town meaning that Blacks had to be out by sundown,” Franklin said.

Despite the squalid conditions, a flourishing and tight-knit East Pasco community emerged. Black-owned businesses sprouted up to serve local needs. Residents labored alongside one another to establish their own municipal park. And when the civil rights movement swelled across the nation in the 1960s, East Pasco residents organized and took to the streets in protest — actions that resulted in local policy victories.

But as desegregation advanced, social change in the Tri-Cities region also ushered in an era of urban renewal. In an effort to finally fix the blighted conditions of East Pasco, sweeping redevelopment during the early 1970s brought rapid and significant change — not all of it welcome. Old residential blocks were rezoned for industrial use, and many Black-owned businesses disappeared.

“It splintered the Black community. Some people left the Tri-Cities,” Franklin said.

Visitors at the opening reception of the Eastside Temporalities exhibit point to old photos of themselves represented in the artwork.

In the decades that followed, much of old East Pasco’s history survived only through scattered memories and family photo albums. As Franklin’s team set out to document those memories, beginning with a National Park Service-funded oral history project in 2017, earning community trust took time.

“It was pretty awkward being like, ‘Hi, you don’t know me, but I’m at the university and I’d like to talk to you about civil rights and migration and segregation,” Franklin said. “A lot of the questions I got were, ‘What are you going to do with this?’”

As part of the grant deliverables, the team made plans to facilitate two public workshops. Instead of hosting just a passive show-and-tell event, Franklin said, the group sought to incorporate authentic community participation and involvement.

The first workshop was a community mapping event, held last August at Morning Star Baptist Church in East Pasco — the oldest Black church in the Tri-Cities, which once served as an important meeting and community organizing site during the civil rights era. Franklin’s team invited surviving residents of old East Pasco to come and document the locations of former homes and businesses.

“It was so much fun. We basically got an old map of Pasco and blew it up and put it on the wall. We gave people sticky notes and markers and just said, ‘Go nuts!’” Franklin said. “It was a get-together for a lot of folks. There were a couple of people that drove in from Seattle who hadn’t been to Pasco in a few decades.”

“Eastside Temporalities” represents the second public workshop. For this event, the team wanted to showcase the results of their work in a way that similarly honored community voices. Partnering with Cafe con Arte made sense for several reasons, including its proximity to the railroad tracks that once divided Pasco by race.

The exhibit, hosted by Cafe con Arte, brought together partners including the African American Community, Cultural, and Educational Society of Pasco and the Eastern Washington Institute of Black Heritage and Culture.

“The exhibit emerged gradually in conversation with Saul Martinez from Cafe con Arte,” said Kyley Canion-Brewer, a ���سԹ� PhD candidate and Hanford History Project intern who helped organize both events. “Then we got in contact with Joel Nunn-Sparks, who’s an amazing artist. We looked at his art and realized there was an opportunity here.”

Nunn-Sparks, a photographer and mixed-media artist who has lived most of his life in East Pasco, said he was eager to join the project. Although he wasn’t alive to experience the neighborhood prior to urban renewal, he grew up steeped in the culture and traditions of the families who remained.

“There used to be a Juneteenth parade every year, and we would either be in the parade or standing outside my grandma’s house, catching candy from the floats,” he said. “That’s a big memory for me.”

Like many of his relatives, he even worked at Hanford after graduating from Pasco High School in 2008.

For the exhibit, Nunn-Sparks incorporated interpretive touches to the photos and artifacts on display, including overlaid fragments of painted plywood and other found materials — a partial nod to the makeshift structures once common in East Pasco.

“It’s really making something out of nothing,” he said.

In addition to the photos, essays, and original artwork adorning the cafe walls, a digital component lets visitors access audio and video stories via phone app. Taken as a whole, Canion-Brewer said, the exhibit represents the collective efforts of many contributors.

“We have students who have contributed essays. Those essays are foundational in what’s displayed on the wall. We have local business owners who have contributed interviews with us,” Canion-Brewer said. “This is a labor of love, but it’s very collaborative.”

The map of old East Pasco is an artistic rendering by Joel Nunn-Sparks based on a community workshop led by ���سԹ� faculty last summer.

Other partners who supported the “Eastside Temporalities” exhibit include the African American Community, Cultural, and Educational Society of Pasco, as well as the Eastern Washington Institute of Black Heritage and Culture.

Canion-Brewer says that if funding allows, the team would like to turn the results of the community mapping event into an interactive web application. For now, an artistic representation of that map is featured in the current exhibit.