Dick Wallace Examines Artifacts

Yesterday’s 2016 Community Historian class was everything a culminating event should be – lively discussion, more questions than answers, laughter, and even food!   (Make-your-own deli sandwiches, chips, lemonade and cookies!  What could be better?)

The day’s main activity centered on the contents of black storage bags – items in the museum’s collection that await cataloging and/or placement in the permanent storage area.  People worked singly or in pairs examining, analyzing, and using their powers of deduction to identify a variety of items.  Great fun!

But, it was the discussion at the top of the day that I enjoyed the most.  Instead of a “homework discussion” (there had been no assignment) I asked what the group thought about yesterday’s Chinook Observer headline story: “JIM SAULES, NOT JIM CROW –Effort underway to change racist names in Wahkiakum County.”   No one had yet seen the newspaper, although at least one class member had read elsewhere that State Senator Pramila Jayapal, D-Seattle, recently proposed changing 36 Washington place names that contain racial slurs. (“Oh,” was one remark, “another, urban do-gooding outsider…”).

April 20, 2016

Commentary ran the gamut. One woman, brought up in the south, said the present Jim Crow name conjured up the days of her childhood when, as a white child, she wasn’t allowed to ride in the back of the bus “where all the fun was.”  She was definite that the name should be changed.  At the other extreme were several folks who thought we risk losing our history by obliterating names from the past.  “Our attitudes change as our culture changes, but we shouldn’t erase the story of how we got here,” someone said.

Ann Lefors Sets Up a Portable Clothes Dryer

Mostly, though, the group felt there were many questions that need answering before a final decision is made.  Why was that name given to that particular point of land?  Does it commemorate something that happened there or, perhaps, an individual who lived there?  And why substitute ‘Saules’ for ‘Crow’?  What connection did Jim Saules have with that area of the river?  (He is known to have ‘squatted’ for several years at Cape Disappointment, but association with the areas upriver are a bit vague.)  And, if Jim Saules does not have an historical association with the area, why choose his name as a replacement?  Because he’s black?

There was commentary about the changes to school names and boulevards after the JFK and MLK assassinations  as well as about the recent announcement of replacing Andrew Jackson’s likeness on the twenty-dollar bill. What do we gain by such replacements?  And what do we lose?  Is it true that one of the factors in making the Jim Crow decision is pure economics – that potential tourists are scared away from our area because of the name?

Bottom line:  everyone agreed that more research was needed to find out why Jim Crow Point was so named in the first place.  Even more importantly, whether the name stays the same or is changed, the Community Historians said over and over that “interpretation is the most important ingredient of all.  It’s all about putting the story back in history.  Without the story, why bother?”