James W. Washington, Jr.

James W. Washington Jr. (November 10, 1909 – June 7, 2000) was an African-American painter and sculptor who grew into prominence in the Seattle, Washington, art community.

Washington was born and raised in Gloster, Mississippi, a rural mill town in the Jim Crow South. He was one of six children of Baptist minister James Washington and his wife Lizzie. While he was still a child, his father fled due to threats of violence, and they never met again. He began to draw at the age of 12, and apprenticed at the age of 14 to become a shoemaker, and worked a series of odd jobs (including working with a banana messenger, which gave him the opportunity to travel regularly to bigger towns). By the time he was 17, he had obtained his first Civil Service job; he worked for the federal government intermittently until his late 50s.

In 1938 he became involved with the Federal Works Progress Administration as an assistant art instructor at the Baptist Academy in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Excluded in the South from shows featuring white artists, he created a WPA-sponsored exhibition of Black artists, the first such in Mississippi.

In 1941 Washington moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, where his mother had already taken up residence. He worked there repairing shoes at Camp Robinson. This Civil Service job soon took him to the Pacific Northwest, where he and his wife Janie Rogella Washington,née Miller, arrived in 1944. It was their home for the rest of their lives. Washington did electrical wiring for warships at the Bremerton, Washington Naval Base before transferring to Fort Lawton in Seattle, where he set up and operated a shoe shop.

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