Enlightened Free Thinking Nubian Kings And Queens

Edward Gardner was born in Birmingham, Alabama in December 1898. Shortly after his birth, his family moved west and eventually settled in Seattle. Gardner returned to Alabama in 1914, to attend Tuskegee Institute, where he learned a trade as a steam engineer and became a star on the school’s track team. By 1921, Gardner was living in Seattle and began competing in the annual Ten Mile Washington State Championship, sponsored by the  Seattle Post Intelligencer .  Gardner won the race three times from 1921-1927, setting course records as he went and beating the best amateur and military runners in the Pacific Northwest.  As he trained, he adopted his trademark outfit, a white towel tied around his head, a white sleeveless shirt and white trunks.  His Seattle fans would call out “oh you Sheik.” The name stuck and Eddie Gardner became known as "the Sheik” of Seattle. In 1928, Gardner entered the first foot race across America, nicknamed the “bunion derby” (A 3,400 m...

Hutchen R. Hutchins, born on June 30, 1903, was part of a small but active cadre of African American Communists operating in the Pacific Northwest during the 1930's. Originally from the East Coast, Hutchins attended the Lenin School in Moscow in the late 1920's. In 1932 he was sent to Seattle by the Communist Party USA's Central Committee in New York to serve on a three-member District Executive Committee. That same year he helped organize one of the largest demonstrations of unemployed workers in the state's history. Hutchins reportedly clashed with Party members in the Northwest who, considered him overbearing and doctrinaire. In 1933 he was replaced, along with the other two members of the Executive Committee, by a new Executive Secretary. Hutchins stayed in Seattle and retained a Marxist political orientation, although it is unclear whether he remained an official member of the Communist Party. Throughout the latter half of the 1930s he served as president of ...