This day in history: S-R magazine examined ‘Spokane’s streetwalking scence.’ Robert Bagnell of NAACP spoke to congregations in Spokane

From 1975: The Spokesman-Review’s Sunday Magazine ran a feature about “Spokane’s streetwalking scene,” and what it was like for the working girls.

A reporter interviewed two of them, who said they were working six or seven days a week, and bringing home about $40,000 a year tax free in what they considered “public service work.”

“I personally like working with the public,” one of them told the reporter. “It’s a feeling like helping people in a certain manner.”

They said that if it weren’t for them, “the crime rate would get higher” because there would be more molestation and rape.

They said business was booming during Expo ’74 but was now back to normal.

From 1925: The national director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) spoke at Spokane’s Central Christian Church and also the Cavalry Baptist Church.

“The colored race in the South is the subject of many atrocities at the hands of the white people,” said Robert W. Bagnell of New York. “Our association is turning public attention to the most outstanding of these, such as lynchings, peonage, the tenant system as operated in the South, and disenfranchisement. We are also endeavoring to secure better school privileges for colored children.”

He said that it was not uncommon for a person of color to be “arrested on some pretext,” fined, and then “hired out to a farmer under a sort of penal system to work out the fine.”

The Spokesman-Review noted that his afternoon speech at Central Christian “included nearly as many white as colored people.”