WALLA WALLA — Fort Walla Walla Museum, 755 NE Myra Road, will host historian and author Robert Franklin’s presentation “As Long as There’s Blood in This Body: Black History at the Hanford Site and Tri-Cities” on Thursday, Feb. 29, 4 p.m.

Admission is free.

Franklin will speak of the experiences of Black emigrants who came to the Tri-Cities starting in the 1940s when the chance to build Hanford offered decent wages, drawing blue-collar workers to the region from across the country and from the south in particular.

Franklin spent hundreds of hours creating an oral history project based on interviews with Black people who worked at Hanford.

During construction in the 1940s, barracks housed workers on the construction site. Black workers lived and played in separate facilities — they had their own quarters, mess halls and baseball teams.

Franklin is a historian and archivist at Washington State University’s Tri-Cities campus. He has interviewed and reviewed oral histories with more than 40 now-retired Black workers, recording their memories and helping digitize the oral history program, which is now accessible online at hanfordhistory.com.

Franklin explains that Black labor was critical to the Manhattan Project and the Cold War, yet has been paid “little attention.”

“I am privileged to have the trust of those in the African American Community Cultural and Educational Society based in Pasco,” Franklin said. “The Black experience here is illustrative of larger civil rights histories like the Great Migration and movements toward equity and equality like many of the struggles and events we think of as being more in the southern states, such as Birmingham, Alabama. But there are direct comparisons here in the inland Northwest.”

Franklin’s research focuses on the 20th-century United States. With his mentor, Robert Bauman, they have produced two books in the Hanford Histories series, the most recent being “Echoes of Exclusion and Resistance: Voices from the Hanford Region.”

Among his other related activities, he is the assistant director of the Hanford History Project at Washington State University in the Tri-Cities, where he manages the Department of Energy’s Hanford Collection, an archive including archeological artifacts documenting the Hanford Site from 1945 to 1990.

Franklin earned his master’s degree in public history in 2014 from WSU and holds a bachelor’s from the University of Hawaii Hilo.

About

Fort Walla Walla Museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Regular admission is $12 adults, $10 seniors and students, $6 for children ages 6-12, and free for children under 6. Visit fwwm.org to see a calendar with upcoming events.