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Early attempts to rid the program of discrimination failed
On a Thursday morning in late May of 1934, Washington State Parks Superintendent William G. Weigle drove from his Seattle office to Millersylvania State Park in Thurston County, about 14 miles south of Olympia. It was the day after Memorial Day, which had seen a grand parade downtown that featured aging Civil War veterans who rode through the streets on floats.
Memories of the conflict may have been fading by this point, but even decades after the defeat of the Confederacy ended legal slavery, Black Americans continued to experience pervasive racism. This was true both legally — through Jim Crow laws in the South and other forms of state-sponsored segregation in the North — and in racist attitudes that persisted, even among self-proclaimed progressives.
Washington, despite being far from the Civil War battlefields and having aligned with the Union before gaining statehood, was no exception.
Weigle appeared to carry those attitudes with him into Millersylvania State Park, where he was dismayed to find dozens of young Black men. “Although they appear to be above the average in intelligence,” he wrote in a memo afterwards, “it is unfortunate that we must have them at any park.”
The Black men in question were not picnickers or campers. In fact, a recreational gathering of that many African Americans at Millersylvania would have been virtually unthinkable at that time — the 1930 census had recorded only 32 African Americans living in all of Thurston County, where the park is located.
Rather, the men were Weigle's own employees, members of Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Company 1232. They had been brought in to help develop the swampy, forested lands along Deep Lake, which had been donated to the agency a decade earlier, into a modern recreational paradise. They had been at the park for one week.
Later that morning, during a previously scheduled meeting, the State Parks Committee discussed Weigle's findings. The Committee, the relatively new agency's governing body at that time, was made up of three high-level state government cabinet members: Ernest N. Hutchinson, the Secretary of State; A.C. Martin, the Commissioner of Public Lands; and Otto A. Case, the State Treasurer.
Hutchinson and Martin formulated a plan to address the...