Just after 7:40 p.m., police received reports of shots fired near 27th Avenue and East Spring Street in Seattle's Central District neighborhood. There, officers discovered a teen with a gunshot wound.

Merlin Rainwater was, admittedly, “white, liberal, self-consciously anti-racist” when she moved to Seattle’s Central District in the 1980s and took advantage of the cheap houses for sale.

In a world of beige, shades of white, and a Seattle sky that loves to be gray, one family was tired of conformity. Around an unassuming corner of the Central District, their purple house watches ...