Seattle in Coalition

In the fall of 1999, the World Trade Organization (WTO) prepared to hold its biennial Ministerial Conference in Seattle. The event culminated in five days of chaotic political protest that would later be known as the Battle in Seattle. The convergence represented the pinnacle of decades of organizing among workers of color in the Pacific Northwest, yet the images and memory of what happened centered around assertive black bloc protest tactics deployed by a largely white core of activists whose message and goals were painted by media coverage as disorganized and incoherent.

This insightful history takes readers beyond the Battle in Seattle and offers a wider view of the organizing campaigns that marked the last half of the twentieth century. Narrating the rise of multiracial coalition building in the Pacific Northwest from the 1970s to the 1990s, Diana K. Johnson shows how activists from Seattle’s Black, Indigenous, Chicano, and Asian American communities traversed racial, regional, and national boundaries to counter racism, economic inequality, and perceptions of invisibility. In a city where more than eighty-five percent of the residents were white, they linked far-flung and historically segregated neighborhoods while also crafting urban-rural, multiregional, and transnational links to other populations of color. The activists at the center of this book challenged economic and racial inequality, the globalization of capitalism, and the white dominance of Seattle itself long before the WTO protest.