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Dancers on the Hanford Theater Stage Declassified
Dancers on the Hanford Theater Stage Declassified
2005
16.5 h by 30 w inches
Digital Painting
Based on a photo from the “Hanford Historical Photo Declassification Project”.
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When I first began looking through the Hanford Declassified Project, no search results appearing for Nagasaki or Hiroshima, I then looked for photos of people dancing. Why? I don't recollect. Maybe because my husband is a musician and thus music is center in my life and always has been, for my mother was a pianist and I studied violin as a child and teenager. To look for photos related to music and dancing seemed a natural thing to do as music is an important part of the lives of most individuals and I thought it possible there would be music-related photos.
There were a number of music-related photos. Many were of individuals, in costume, performing folk dances in connection with what must have been a club for folk dancers. There were many in clothing suitable for polkas and I remembered that as a child a neighboring friend had a costume made for her folk dance performance, so folk dancing as a hobby in Richland was still going strong in the 60s.
I also came across this picture of dancers performing at a talent show during the war years at what would have been a talent show at the Hanford Theater.
One of my best friends in Richland was black. Her father was a scientist at Hanford and they lived next door to us, but that was during the 60s and she was one of the few black kids in town--in fact, she and her sisters were the only black kids in town that I knew about, though this didn't occur to me as a young child. I learned the Supremes songs and moves on her carport, I slept over at her house, and I never wondered why there were kids on the street with whom she didn't play. Then one day when we were ten I said hey let's go to so-and-so's house, and she said no her mom wouldn't let her inside. I said why not, that's silly, and so we went and knocked on so-and-so's door. Her mother bluntly informed us that I could come inside but that my best friend couldn't because she was a "negro". We left.
The girl whose mother wouldn't let my friend in her house didn't come to my 10th birthday party. I don't recollect if she was invited and didn't come or if she wasn't invited. For my birthday we had gone Saturday morning to the Uptown Theater to see a movie (the theater with the model of the atom sitting on top of it as you'll see elsewhere) and then I'd come home to find a surprise lunch and cake.
But back to Hanford Declassifed.
I was surprised to see this photo of a number of black people dancing on stage with white people in the audience, and other photos found of white people performing at the same event. What did this mean? What were race relations like amongst the workers who built the bomb? With a little research, my understanding is that black individuals who worked at Hanford didn't reside at the trailer city at Hanford where many working construction lived, or in Richland where the white collar employees were housed in a town built expressly for them, but that they lived further away in Pasco.
I did notice in the below picture at Hanford, featuring a girl watering the familial lawn, a black man standing beside a trailer to the rear. So some black individuals may have found housing at Hanford. But photos of happy lawn waterers were preferably white females.
Below are some people performing at Hanford during the WWII years who were not black but were painted up in black face.
The one picture I came across of an individual being arrested was of an apparently intoxicated black woman being put into a paddy wagon. Which was interesting to me, that this was the sole picture of a person being arrested in the archive. At least the sole picture I came across.
I still wonder to what song these people were dancing.
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