The untold story of Seattle’s racist mayor

by Knute Berger

... meet Beriah Brown, one of Seattle’s most important pioneer citizens. When he came to the young city, he brought the first power press and in 1871 founded Seattle’s first real daily newspaper, the Puget Sound Dispatch, which later merged with a competitor to form an entity that became the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Brown also served as president of the budding territorial University of Washington’s board of regents in the mid 1870s, and was clerk to the U.S. District court here. He was active in politics, too, and in 1878 he was elected to a single term as Seattle’s mayor.

But Beriah Brown was no ordinary frontier newsman. He came to Seattle as a refugee of Civil War and antebellum politics who sought to reinvent himself in fresh country. At one point, Brown fled to the Pacific Northwest from San Francisco to save his neck from an angry lynch mob.

That’s because Brown’s politics were not unlike those of Confederate President Jefferson Davis himself: He believed in white supremacy, defended slavery, wrote harshly about the “malignant” Abraham Lincoln. He was accused of Southern sympathies and suspected of heading a secret society dedicated to extending slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere, including the West Coast.

In short, the city’s onetime mayor was a man with a controversial past and an ideology that was repugnant, even to many of his contemporaries. Yet that aspect of this career is almost entirely forgotten. It’s time, though, to remember what he believed and what he ran from, and why he came here ...

http://crosscut.com/2015/12/best-of-2015-the-untold-story-of-seattles-racist-mayor/