TRI-CITIES, Wash. -Two East Pasco landmarks are listed as national historical parks by The National Park Service, they are also painful reminders of the segregation and discrimination black people faced from the beginning of the Second World War to the civil rights marches of the 1960s and beyond.
During that time Black people were segregated and forced to live in East Pasco if they wanted to live in the Tri-Cities.
Kurtzman Park stands as a reminder of a time when kids in the East Pasco community didn’t have a park nearby to play in according to the NPS.
Vanis Daniels, an East Pasco resident, was a child during that time. He said the lot where the park now sits used to be filled with tumbleweeds and holes.
Daniels and his friends would set up baseball diamonds in areas closer to their home until they moved to that weedy lot that would become Kurtzman Park.
He said one day attorney Rebecca Heidlebaugh walked by while Daniels was playing there with his friends on another makeshift baseball diamond.
“She asked us if we had someplace that we could play. I say, yeah, down here. She said no I mean a park,” Daniels said.
Daniels said she worked with him and the other kids to draft a letter to the owner of the land, whose last name was Kurtzman.
He said the first letter didn’t get a reply, but the second one did, and the landowner offered to donate the lot to the city for use as a park.
According to the NPS website “a sign for Candy Cane Park went up next to newly installed red-and-white playground equipment, but at the request of the land’s former owner, the City of Pasco renamed it Kurtzman Park.”
Daniels said the community came together to help build the park by digging out trenches for water pipes and helping level out the park.
He said the park was full every day once it was finished back when he was a kid.
Morning Star Baptist Church is another National Historical Park from that time period according to the NPS website. The website says Morning Star Baptist church was the center of East Pasco’s African American community.
“Reverend Johnnie Steward founded the church in 1946 to support the growing Black population’s spiritual and social needs,” according to NPS.
Aubrey Johnson moved to East Pasco in 1946, the same year the church was founded.
He said the church acted as a cornerstone for the community, especially for kids.
“During the week we went to church. Our parents, they didn’t send us to church, they took us to church. There was always some type of involvement and that kept us out of trouble, and it kept us close to God,” he said.
