Seattle’s DeCharlene Williams started the local Juneteenth Celebration at Pratt Park 36 years ago, at a time when few people outside of Texas knew what Juneteenth was. Juneteenth or Freedom Day celebrates the anniversary of the date the last enslaved people in the United States were freed. Although the Emancipation Proclamation, came into effect on January 1, 1863, the more than 200,000 enslaved people in Texas weren’t notified until June 19, 1865 when the Union Army arrived in Galveston, Texas, and informed the people of Texas that “all slaves are free.”
More than 2,500 people attended this year’s BAAMFest (Rainier Beach Arts and Music Fest) on Aug. 19th at the Rainier Beach Community Center Plaza. The annual event featured more than 40 acts on four stages, four pop-up museums and 40 booths.
As a single person living on a non-profit salary, homeownership in Seattle seemed an impossible dream. With rents steadily rising, I went through the motions of finding a realtor and getting prequalified for a home loan anyway, just in case I got lucky and could lock in a place to live at a fixed rate.Continue reading Brad and Becky From Bellevue Are Coming to Rainier Beach→
Spend a few minutes talking with Rainier Beach residents Yvette Dinish Kenney and Tyrone Kenney and it’s nearly impossible not to feel inspired.
She’s a Seattle native, retired after a career as a network engineer for the City of Seattle. He’s a transplant from Georgia who worked as a radio disc jockey, now hoping to re-start the cleaning business he put on hold after a near-fatal car accident. Both spend much of their free time volunteering here in the neighborhood. I’m pretty convinced they have super powers.Continue reading Locally Grown: A Rainier Beach Power Couple→
Local news doesn’t stop just because of the near constant stream of attention-grabbing headlines spewing from Washington D.C.
South Seattle, like other parts of this city, is full of neighborhoods in flux as economics and demographics continue to shift. What do the residents of Rainier Beach think of what’s happening here in their own neighborhood?Continue reading People in Your Neighborhood: A Guy Walks into a Bar→
