A home for black history

If all goes as planned next year, visitors to the Northwest African American Museum's grand opening at the historic Colman School will pass an outdoor sculpture garden on one side of the entrance and see artists working in an outdoor studio on the other.

Inside, at the heart of the museum's 6,500 square feet of gallery space, they'll walk past a resemblance of a slave ship lined with exhibits explaining how blacks who migrated here from the East and South left their mark on the region's business, political and cultural life. They will learn that Seattle's small black population produced one of the greatest rockers of all time, Jimi Hendrix, and that the city embraced its first black mayor, Norm Rice.

Rotating shows will feature works by important black artists such as Jacob Lawrence and James Washington and will re-create the happening scene of local nightclubs such as the Black & Tan, which hosted Ray Charles and Duke Ellington among others.

In short, the long-abandoned schoolhouse located next to the Interstate 90 lid will come back to life as the place learns what it means to be black in the Pacific Northwest and why it matters.

Although fundraising for the renovation of Colman School is still under way — and despite two decades of proposals and dashed hopes — the $20 million museum is closer than ever to becoming a reality.

More than half the money needed for construction is in hand, and a campaign to collect individual donations from major givers is proceeding behind the scenes. Crews plan to break ground in late spring.

"We're moving along at a clip that makes us all smile," said Paul Chiles, board chairman of the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, which is developing the museum, along with 36 apartment units on the upper two floors for people with moderate incomes.

Donald King Architects, a black-owned Seattle firm, is leading the design team. Longtime civic leader Carver Gayton, himself a descendent of one of Seattle's first black families, has been brought on as executive director and the new public face for the project.

"It's going to be quite something when it's all finished," Gayton said during a tour inside the darkened former elementary school, which boasts an enviable panoramic view of downtown, the Central District and on cloudless days, at least, Mount Rainier.

Gayton's enthusiasm for the project is tempered by a clear sense of the challenges ahead. Still, while strolling through the musty building's dilapidated corridors with a flashlight, he couldn't help but take a moment to marvel at the location and its colorful past.

A group of black activists occupied the school for eight years after it was closed in the mid-1980s to bring attention to their dream of establishing a black-heritage center there.

In a classroom on the first floor, a blackboard still holds the "Things to do" list written in chalk years ago by the activists taking turns occupying the building.

In the hallways, it looks like time ground to a halt at some point during the Reagan presidency. A broken vinyl Diana Ross record and a 1986 copy of the African-American newspaper The Facts litter the first-floor corridor.

School locker doors, spray painted with graffiti, hang wide open. On one bench, someone left a copy of the textbook "Black Culture: Reading and Writing Black," open to a poem by Don L. Lee titled: "But He Was Cool, or: he even stopped for green lights."

On the ground floor of the school, which will be remodeled to house the museum, someone wrote on a doorway: "The Who & The Clash in Concert, 7:01 p.m., Kingdome, 1982."

Hanging by thick chains from the basketball goal is a beaten-up Everlast punching bag.

Gayton, spotting the punching bag, joked that the activists may have placed it there to take out their frustrations over the slow pace of developing the museum. He said the chalk board and other memorabilia from the activists' occupation will be preserved in the finished museum.

Today, the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle controls the property. And people are discussing the museum's opening as a matter of when, not if.

Still, more than a year after Gayton was brought on board to ratchet up momentum on the project, the museum has raised about $11.5 million, short of the $16.4 million needed to begin major construction.

There hasn't been a high-profile fundraising campaign to get the general public involved. Museum planners say they're saving that for later and focusing on big donors for now.

Gayton said he's confident his staff and volunteers can raise the $16.4 million and that a number of major grants and government-fund requests are pending.

"I feel as though we've made good progress, but I'd like to see better progress," Gayton said. "I'd like to be beyond schedule."

Grants can be hard to get, though. King County Executive Ron Sims cut an expected contribution of $750,000 to the museum as part of last fall's budget-trimming. The move baffled Gayton, but he said there's a good chance of winning the grant this year.

The museum's steering committee has been holding small, informational gatherings with potential donors for the past year and it has paid off, said member Ruby Smith Love, director of the United Way's Gates Foundation Challenge fund.

Several wealthy contributors have made six-figure donations to the museum, including Bill and Melinda Gates, Paul Allen and an anonymous local family that gave $500,000 last month.

"We're having ongoing conversations with others that will yield similar kinds of gifts," Smith Love said, noting that large donations tend to attract others.

The museum is also raising money by selling the naming rights to different features of the three-story property.

Naming rights to the museum itself will go for $7 million; the central "Middle Passage" exhibit area will go for $1 million. The sculpture garden is $500,000. People with shallower pockets can have their names engraved on a brick at the site for donations of $250 to $999.

Urban League Chairman Paul Chiles said he's encouraged that in a city where only about a 10th of the population is black, overall community support for a black-heritage museum has been strong across racial lines.

As for specific artifacts that will be on display, Gayton and his staff are negotiating a partnership with the Washington State Black Heritage Society, which has an extensive archive of photos, news clippings, vintage clothing and other African-American mementos. An exhibit specialist has been hired, and organizations such as Historylink.org are offering outside advice.

The inaugural exhibit will explore the idea of migration because so many black families moved to the Northwest from other parts of the country, said Barbara Earl Thomas, programs curator.

She's researching the role of passenger trains in the growth of black communities here and plans to illustrate the journey using old letters, photos, oral histories and accounts of a close-knit network of black railroad workers who looked after African-American passengers on their way from the South to the Northwest.

"There are so many stories about people venturing out and bringing the rest of their family once they got here," Thomas said. "That's our Middle Passage, for all intents and purposes."

Black Heritage Society President James Bell said he is "ecstatic" about the African-American museum project and wants his group's collection to serve as a main supplier of exhibit material.

After viewing exhibits on Malcolm X and slave-era Manhattan in New York City recently, Bell said he has no doubt that Seattle has the resources, the backing from other local heritage groups and, finally, the space to design black-history exhibits of equal importance, depth and mainstream appeal here.

"Hopefully," he said, "it'll develop into a museum that everyone will feel comfortable in and get a benefit from."

Tyrone Beason: 206-464-2251 or tbeason@seattletimes.com