In our part of the country it is not an uncommon belief that the majority of the American struggle for civil rights happened somewhere else in the nation. There is a distinct tendency among those of us living in the Pacific Northwest to place this chapter of history exclusively in the American South — the land of Jim Crow and Rosa Parks.

At least, this is the charge of James Gregory, project director of the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project at the UW.

"As an educator, it became apparent to me sometime ago that people (in Seattle) of all ages think that the civil rights movement happened in Mississippi and Alabama and none of it happened here," Gregory said. "In fact, segregation happened in Seattle, and it was dramatic and important here. Our lost civil rights history is alive and relevant to our region."

Gregory, along with Project Coordinator Trevor Griffey, is seeking to challenge many Seattleites' ignorance about the city's role in the battle for racial equality with a public history project on Seattle's racial history.

The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, which began in 2004, is based at the UW and centers primarily around research done by students in the history and American ethnic studies fields.

The result is an ever-expanding online resource filled with data on Seattle's long history of racial strife, segregation and civil rights activism.

"It includes 80 oral histories from veterans of the civil rights movement, as well as historical essays and streaming videos," said Gregory. "It's an amazing collection."

Griffey said it would be hard to find this sort of historical collection elsewhere.

"Very few books on this topic exist," Griffey said. "A lot of the data comes from these oral histories. These are histories that have not been shared."

These histories — which have been compiled by more than 100 graduate and undergraduate students — may shock some Seattleites, Gregory and Griffey both said.

"There were lots of surprises," said Gregory. "The extent and the dimensions of segregation in Seattle were much greater than even I expected."

One fact that reveals the prevalence of segregation in Seattle is the neighborhood restrictions that were in place until the late 1960s.

According to the research, most of North Seattle was off-limits to blacks up until this period, with de facto racial covenants maintained in some higher-income areas well into the 1980s.

"This was a pattern of legally enforced housing segregation," explained Gregory. "The ship canal was the dividing point. North Seattle wasn't simply all white; it was a deliberately difficult place for African Americans to even visit."

Racial discrimination was prevalent even in everyday life, Griffey said.

"There was one case in which an African American woman was having tea with a white woman in North Seattle in the 1960s, and a crowd, thinking she was attempting to move into the area, gathered in protest of her even being there," he said. "This was segregation that was insidious and deep-down."

According to King County records uncovered by student researchers, Seattle once had 414 different racial covenants enacted, meaning people of color were expressly forbidden to live or sometimes even visit after dark in certain areas in neighborhoods throughout the city.

Segregated housing, however, is just one aspect of racial discrimination in Seattle. According to the research, de jour and de facto segregation existed in local governments, commercial enterprises and nearly all other realms.

Even some of Seattle's major hospitals once refused to treat blacks and Asian-Americans, even in an emergency.

The Web site does not just focus on segregation in regard to blacks.

A recent addition to the site was a research project conducted by a Latino student group on the Chicano Movement in Washington state.

Another project focused on the redress movement for victims of Japanese internment — a political movement that actually originated in Seattle.

Yet another project involved students working with former members of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party in order to compile a comprehensive history of the organization.

"There are two goals," Gregory said. "One is to revive a history that has somehow been forgotten. The other is to be a public education project. Our project is designed to provide resources for this campus, as well as schools and the general public."

The project shows how students can make a difference with their work, Griffey said.

"By making the community our classroom and treating students as scholars, the project shows how academic historians can produce history that actually makes a difference," he said.

Reach reporter Siv Prince at news@thedaily.washington.edu.