Garry Owens

1945 - 2022

ONE NIGHT IN THE LATE 1960S, Garry Owens caught the attention of an English professor at the Coffee Corral, a popular hangout about a block from campus. Owens, who had been drafted during Vietnam, had recently returned from the Deep South to restart his civilian life.

He was drinking in the atmosphere and writing in his journal when the professor approached and asked Owens if he was a student. Though Owens said no, the man wondered if he could look at what he was writing. Then he gave Owens his card and invited him to visit campus. “I was in a daze,” Owens told an interviewer for the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project in 2013. “Here I was fresh out of the service, and I didn’t know