Roslyn is a town in the Cascade Mountains about 80 miles southeast of Seattle. It was founded in 1886 by a subsidiary of the Northern Pacific Railroad as a coal mining town. In 1888 the miners went on strike and the company responded by bringing in strikebreakers, including about 300 Black miners, most of whom did not know they were hired to break a strike. Most of the Black miners brought their families, creating the largest increase in Washington’s Black population up to that time. The white residents resented the Black miners and their families, whom they forced to live outside of Roslyn until 1890. However, in time tensions eased as the shared hardships and dangers of coal mining forged bonds between Black and white miners. Roslyn’s Black population began dwindling in the 1920s and by 1970 the only Black family left in town was the Cravens. In 1976, William Craven was elected mayor of Roslyn, becoming the first Black mayor in Washington’s history.
The Roslyn Black Pioneers Picnic has roots going back to 1889, when the Black families in Roslyn began holding picnics to celebrate the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The picnic faded as Roslyn’s Black population shrank, but in 1978 members of the Craven family revived it as a celebration of the history of Roslyn’s Black community. Many of the attendees are descendants of the original Black miners, including Isabel "Izzy" Smith, the wife of the photographer Al Smith, who took this image.
This photograph shows a multigenerational group enjoying themselves at the Roslyn Black Pioneers Picnic in 1983, with a toddler and an older man dancing to music from a boombox.
Caption information source: “Roslyn, Washington,” by Trevor Goodloe, BlackPast, retrieved from https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/roslyn-washington/. Caption information source: “Roslyn Black Pioneer Picnic Family Roots Run Deep,” by Mike Johnston, Ellensburg Daily Record, August 10, 2004, retrieved from https://www.dailyrecordnews.com/bsection/roslyn-black-pioneer-picnicfamily-roots-run-deep/article_50e34654-8043-5ee3-a924-8356bba14682.html.
