A noose hung outside Madison Park Books was discovered by the store’s owner at the end of January, next door to Domicile, an art gallery owned by Marisa Spooner-LeDuff, who is Black. Spooner-LeDuff has experienced other racially biased intimidations since opening her shop in 2022.
Marisa Spooner-LeDuff
Last July, Marisa Spooner-LeDuff opened Domicile, an art gallery and interior-design studio a block from the beach in Madison Park, bookstore on one side, nail spa on the other.
Soon came a Madison Park Times profile, then growing neighborhood buzz and then increasingly crowded openings, where artists mingled with guests and gatherers spoke into each other’s ears and spilled out onto the sidewalk in groups.
Spooner-LeDuff launched Domicile as a post-pandemic project — to bring people together “in tender affection and joy,” as she put it — and her project seemed to be going well, for her and for the community.
But in leafy Madison Park, as in so many neighborhoods of all sorts across the country today, ugliness crept in and managed to surprise people when it did.
Not a timid person
In January, Spooner-LeDuff finished work late at the gallery. She walked two blocks east to the Red Onion, had a snack and a drink. On her way back to the gallery, somebody shouted at her from the edge of the park across the street. Two white men roughly in their 40s, she said.
“We don’t want your business here. Go back to where you’re from,” is what she heard. She said they just stood there watching her.
Spooner-LeDuff is Black and grew up in Louisiana before moving to the Pacific Northwest for the last two decades. She shouted back at the men that she was from Madrona, a neighborhood just a mile south. She shrugged it off.
“I went to all-white schools in Baton Rouge,” she said. “I’m not a timid person. If I let every racially prejudiced remark affect me, I wouldn’t be able to do what I want to do in this world. My kids are from here. They went to St. Joe’s, a mile away.”
But for many months a year in Seattle, it’s dark outside by the time she closes the shop. And she began finding herself anxious each night at closing time.
“That’s the whole point of yelling something like that at someone,” she said. “You don’t take things for granted suddenly. You don’t feel safe. You don’t feel at home.”
A ratty blue noose
It was a few weeks later when James Crossley, manager of Madison Park Books, which shares a wall with Domicile, came upon a ratty blue noose left dangling from the building. It was just days before he planned to set out the store’s Black History Month display.
“Yeah, I guess they were ahead of us on that,” he said, about the threat the noose represented. “We went ahead anyway.”
Crossley took a photo of the noose and then took it down and threw it out. He said his initial reaction was to avoid feeding the incident by giving it any attention.
“I’m the only white person in the building,” he said. “The thought only came later, you know, better to address it by bringing it to light and sharing the information.”
So, he showed Spooner-LeDuff the photo of the noose.
“I’ve experienced a lot of bias. I mean, ridiculous. It’s so common,” she said. “People see me working in the gallery and think I run a cleaning service. They ask me to speak to the owner.
“At first I thought those people shouting at me, people who are against me being here, I just thought that was about me — that they don’t want me here.
“But a noose? Where I come from, that’s a death threat,” she continued. “That’s a hate crime. That means there’s someone right here who hates Black people.
“I admit it, that knocked me back. It was like someone sucked the air from my balloon — the joy, the excitement I wanted to bring. They accomplished that thing — they made me not want to be here as much as they don’t want me to be here. I don’t know, right now I’m at a crossroads.”
The noose for now remains the most overtly threat in a rash of racially motivated public intimidations that has been climbing in number in Madison Park recently and clustered around the throwback five-block center of the neighborhood where Domicile and other shops line Madison Street before it hits the beach.
In February, someone egged Spooner-LeDuff’s car. Then someone sprayed racist graffiti on a nearby sidewalk. Others tore up Black Lives Matter lawn signs a couple of blocks from the shop.
‘Love Happens Here’
Seattle Police officers and local FBI agents investigated the noose incident as a hate/bias crime in the weeks after it occurred. They made no arrests, and SPD told the Madison Park Times it recently closed its case on the incident.
But SPD has remained in touch with community leaders about the rise in racially based threats and is in talks to add Madison Park to the list of city “hot spots” that draw increased attention from its Community Service Unit of non-armed public-service and safety professionals. The same community leaders also are planning to rally business owners and residents to consider bolstering security-camera coverage and outdoor lighting in the retail corridor.
“I knew we needed to do something as a community to respond,” Madison Park resident Gina Purdy said. “The photo of the noose made me sick to my stomach.”
Margie Carter, who serves on Madison Park’s emergency-response committee, said Spooner-LeDuff has brought something special to the community in Domicile and deserves the best kind of support.
“She deserves friendship and safeguarding,” Carter wrote in an email. “And she deserves a commitment from us to engage our community to better understand how racism operates. We must work to ensure no safe harbor here for hate and racism.”
Seattle Police Det. Beth Wareing was the lead investigator on the case. She’s the department’s bias crime coordinator, the only police officer in the state assigned that role.
“I’ve been working the hate crimes assignment since 2015. We get about two nooses a year in Seattle,” she said. “It’s one of the most frightening and ugly and evocative of racially motivated incidents we investigate.”
Wareing said group efforts to combat intimidation and aggression like the ones starting up now in Madison Park will make a difference.
“We know that reported incidents are usually the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “Increasing cooperation and timely reporting gives us the best advantages in these cases.”
Madison Park is planning a “Love Happens Here” safety-awareness event from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. July 11, when community members, business owners and local officials plan to rally around the message that “everyone is welcome” in Madison Park.