A large portrait of Jim Chase, the first black mayor not only of Spokane but of all of Washington state, was unveiled Wednesday by City Council President Betsy Wilkerson, who is now the city’s only elected black politician, during a ceremony in the City Hall art gallery that bears his name.
“In the time he led the city, despite all the challenges, he was a courteous and honorable man and earned the respect of this community,” Wilkerson said. “We are so proud of him and Jim will remind us what we are all talking about today, that we all belong.”
James “Jim” Chase was born in East Texas in 1914, the youngest of seven children. He came to Spokane with two friends in the midst of the Great Depression and worked as a doorman and shoeshine boy at a local hotel. In 1953, he opened an auto repair shop, which he operated with his East Texas friends until it was sold to the Spokane School District in 1981.
Prior to his first candidacy, he served in many important civic roles, including serving as president of the NAACP throughout the 1960s, where he led efforts to combat discrimination in employment, housing and accommodations. He was also elected the 27th Grand Master of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Freemasons.
Chase was considered “arguably the most popular politician to serve in Spokane city government in recent years,” The Spokesman-Review reported the day he left office. From 1973 to 1981, only one city council member won more than one term – Chase, who was re-elected in 1979 by an astonishing three-to-one margin and was elected mayor in 1981 by 24 percentage points, a landslide victory by today’s and then-standards.
In his time, Chase was best known for his commitment to Spokane’s youth: he advocated for free swimming for children in municipal pools, threatened to resign from the Spokane City Council in 1979 when it considered cutting the Spokane Youth Council’s budget, and lobbied vehemently to bring this body, which represents the interests of young people, into the walls of City Hall.
Chase was widely loved for his contributions to Spokane’s youth, and local and state politicians found countless ways to honor him for that service after he took over from his successor, Mayor Vicki McNeill. He left office in early 1986 after deciding not to seek re-election due to health reasons – on January 10, then-Governor Booth Gardner honored Chase at a well-attended dinner at the East Central Community Center.
In 1986, three weeks after Chase left office, the city created the Chase Youth Commission, named in his honor. This organization now serves as the government liaison for the youth of not only the city of Spokane, but also the county.
Sheri Barnard, then a city councilor and later mayor of Spokane, was appointed one of the first six commissioners of the Chase Youth Commission after being interviewed by Chase for the position and asked for help in the selection process.
Thirty-eight years later, Barnard attended Wednesday’s unveiling and recalled her early days on the Spokane City Council.
“The first day I came into the office and there was Mayor Chase,” she recalls. “And he said, ‘Oh, Sheri, I’m so glad you’re here now – we’re going to start bringing youth into this community.'”
Chase was also an advocate for the arts and introduced a 1 percent rule for the arts system, which reserved a portion of the construction costs of major cities for public art.
The Chase Gallery in front of City Hall was named in his honor in 1986, four weeks after he left City Hall, but today relatively few know the history of the man whose name adorns the gallery, the Chase Youth Commission and Chase Middle School in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood.
“All the places bear his name, and I don’t think many people know why or how that name came about,” Wilkerson said.
Chase died in 1987 at age 73 from complications from a battle with cancer. More than 1,000 people filled St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral for his funeral. Three months later, Eastern Washington University endowed the Chase Scholarship. Two years later, the Chase Youth Commission established a scholarship program in his honor, providing funds to county residents age 19 or younger to help them get the last few dollars they needed to go to camp, pay a college application fee or pay for equipment for a school sports league.
