PLACE - HISTORY OF RACISM IN PORTLAND

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We reside on the stolen lands of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, and Clackamas Bands of Chinook Indian Nation, Tualatin Kalapuya; Molalla; and many others along the Columbia River.

  • This country is built on stolen Indigenous land, built by stolen African people, not by ambiguous entities and actors, rather, white settlers who had government support. 

  • We honor the people of over 400 Tribes who live in here. Many of these People and their cultures still survive and resist despite the intentional and ongoing attempts to destroy them.

  • Let’s take a moment to acknowledge the history of how we are here in this place and to honor the People.

An aerial photograph of NE Portland taken in 1938. Multnomah County Library. See source below for details.

An aerial photograph of NE Portland taken in 1938. Multnomah County Library. See source below for details.

 Portland is known for so many things and most of those things actively ignore or hide the history of Black people in Portland and Oregon. When we talk about dismantling racism and systemic reform, we need to be transparent and honest about where we have come from if our goal is to heal.

On the one hand, Oregon has a dark and hateful history that most people willfully choose never to know. While racism for all non-white people has been documented, the racism against Black people was and is particularly intense – and in fact, Portland is a hotbed for urban studies research into the racism of gentrification because it was executed so perfectly here. There would be no BIPOC history in Oregon without Black history. Black folks that came here in spite of not being welcome paved the way for other people of color to join. Yet the dominant historical narrative white-washes out Black history in all senses of the word.

Black people in Portland are resilient, and there is great joy in the contributions made to Portland history by Black people, and that needs to be known and celebrated too.  Read on to learn more about the unknown Black history of Portland, Oregon.

1804-1806 York Travels to the PNW 1804-06

It is little known history that Lewis and Clark traveled with an enslaved Black man named York, who from Clark’s own journals, “played a key role in diplomatic relations” with the Native Americans, who respected York. Rather than reward him for his role with his freedom, Clark instead had York beaten and jailed back in New York City at the end of the mission.  No one knows what happened to York, but some historians believe he escaped and went to live with the Crow Nation in Wyoming.

1844-1926  Exclusion laws against Blacks 

Edward Freeman ran a second-hand store on Union Avenue (now NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd). This photo was taken in 1920. Multnomah County Library. See source below for details.

Edward Freeman ran a second-hand store on Union Avenue (now NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd). This photo was taken in 1920. Multnomah County Library. See source below for details.

The state of Oregon enacted a series of laws making it illegal for Black people to live in the state – and was the ONLY state in the United States to do so.  Starting in 1844 with “the lash laws,” where it was decreed all Blacks, free or enslaved, should be whipped twice a year until they left the state (this was later changed to “enforced labor”). When railroad workers of all races, including Black and Chinese workers, flowed into Oregon in the 1880s, many towns made it sometimes illegal (and always dangerous) for said workers to be above ground after dark (Pendleton still has tunnels where Chinese railroad workers were forced to live underground, which they strangely market as a tour and something to be proud of today). The last laws, where it was declared illegal to be Black and free in Oregon, were not repealed until 1926, and the racist language was not removed from the state constitution until 2001.

1870-1959 Black Suffrage Squashed in Oregon When the US federal government ratified the 15th amendment outlawing voting discrimination by race, both Oregon and California voted against the measure. The amendment superseded a law in the Oregon State constitution banning black suffrage, which was not removed until 1927.  In fact, Oregon did not vote to ratify the 15th amendment for another 89 years (1959).

1906 The first Black-owned hotel opens in what later became known as the Pearl District 

W.D. Allen, a Black entrepreneur opens the Golden West Hotel in what is now the Pearl District (named after a Black woman, read on below for more information) from 1906-1931, the largest Black-owned hotel west of the Mississippi.  Black workers on the railroad, denied housing elsewhere, not only had a place to stay but could also get a haircut and shave, get meals and buy sweets, and hang out at a Turkish bath and gym. The Depression eventually forced the hotel to shut down. It eventually reopened as the Broadmoor Hotel, serving as affordable housing until the 1980s.  

1912-1938 Beatrice Cannady Brings her Civil Rights Activism to Portland

Beatrice Cannady is remarkable on many fronts:  when she married the owner of the Advocate – Edward Daniel Cannady - in 1912, the state’s largest Black newspaper, she joined the paper as its Associate Editor. In 1913 she helped found the NAACP in Oregon and was a tireless advocate for Black voting and civil rights. She graduated from law school in 1922, making her the first Black woman to graduate law school and then practice law in Oregon, and then run for state representative. She paved the way for many future activists.

Les Femmes serving youth and community since 1951. 

Les Femmes serving youth and community since 1951. 

1867-1990s School segregation

Black people have always had to fight hard in Oregon to get an education. When William Johnson spearheaded an effort in the black community of Salem to build a school for Black children, the neighboring Portland City Schools district used it to officially institutionalize segregation. In 1922, the state passed the Compulsory Education Act requiring all students to attend public school, with the intended effect of shutting down any private or charter schools who catered to Black and other BIPOC communities (and Catholics). The law was fortunately struck down by the state supreme court before it was enacted in 1925. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Portland Public Schools introduced bussing as a way to desegregate, and even that initiative put the burden more unfairly on BIPOC folks, who were two-thirds as likely to be bussed to far neighborhoods as the white children. The Black United Front organized a large boycott in 1982 to protest this discriminatory policy.


Black United Front School Board protest, 1982. See source below for details.

Black United Front School Board protest, 1982. See source below for details.

1979  Black United Front (BUF), a National Civil Rights Group, Founds its Portland Chapter 

Started by Ronald Herndon and the Reverend John Jackson, the Portland BUF chapter was a branch organization of a group based in Chicago, which pressed forward a civil rights agenda during the 1980s.  The BUF took on local issues from the earlier mid-century movement such as school desegregation and police brutality, as well as global ones like the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Notable accomplishments of the Portland BUF involved education and the group was instrumental for attracting local activists, including – among many others – lawyer and administrative law judge Charlotte Rutherford, educators Deborah Cochrane and Dennis Payne, and Avel Gordly (see more on her below – the first Black woman elected to the Oregon State Senate).

1902-present Lynching was and is Alive and Well Here

The only officially recorded lynching in Oregon happened in Coos Bay, when 200 armed men hunted, shot and hung Alonzo Tucker for the alleged, unproven crime of raping a white woman.  In fact, the local newspapers trumpeted the event as giving the victim “what he deserved.” Many other lynching reports were never recorded or investigated.  Black and other BIPOC people continue to fear for their lives today in Portland, from the murder of Mulugeta Seraw In 1988 by skinheads up to the harassment of two young Muslim girls by Jeremy Joseph Christian in 2017 on a Portland Max Train, which led to Christian murdering two men who stood up for the girls. Recent Black Lives Matter Protests in 2020 have been inflamed by known white supremacist leaders, and in some places, like Salem, police were actively working with right-wing militia groups to control protests.

1920s The KKK Influence in Oregon The Klu Klux Klan had an epic rise in Oregon, culminating in the 1920s, when they managed to unseat an incumbent Oregon governor, Ben Olcott, who was opposed to the white supremacist group. At this time, the klan’s influence was legendary and quite public. In one 1921 newspaper photo, the Portland Police chief, a district attorney, a US attorney, the Multnomah County Sheriff and the Portland Mayor are proudly posing next to hooded klan members, under an article that says the klan is advising all these political leaders.  

June 20, 1948, looking eastward on Vanport, Oregon. Multnomah County Library. See source below for details.

June 20, 1948, looking eastward on Vanport, Oregon. Multnomah County Library. See source below for details.

Discriminatory Housing Policies Against Black People
Portland leaders have always made it extremely difficult for Black people to live in Portland. The policies of redlining, where real estate agents were officially exhorted to refuse to sell property in Portland to Black people, continued well into the 20th century, and banks only rarely gave mortgages or loans.  Yet still, with the opening of the Broadway Bridge in 1912, Black families began to move to the Albina district, one of the few Portland neighborhoods open to them. 

By 1920, 62% of Portland’s Black Community and 80% of Black families lived there. Even in WWII, when armies relied on Black soldiers and factory workers and federal money was given out to build housing for all, Portland was officially slow to act, refusing to invest money in public housing for Black workers pouring into the city to work for a big shipyard in North Portland. Instead, shipyard owner JW Kaiser took federal money to build housing for mostly Black folk to live while they worked in his shipyards during the war. The resulting VanPort city exploded with workers to run the shipyards, at its heyday reaching 100,000 population and boasting schools and its own police force – a bustling example of functioning integrated neighborhoods in action.  But the houses were shoddily built in a flood plain, and when the war was over, VanPort was physically swept away in a flood on May 30, 1948.

Those few neighborhoods Black people were allowed to lived were often decimated by gentrification when deemed inconvenient to city – the construction of Memorial Coliseum in the 1950s and Emmanuel Hospital in the 1970s are recent examples. Even more recently, a 2011 audit showed that landlords and leasing agents discriminated against Black and Latino renters 64% of the time, citing higher rents, deposits and adding additional fees.

1940s-1970s North Williams Avenue (AKA “The Black Broadway”) Becomes a Bustling Musical Hub

Local jazz singer Sweet Baby James Benton – who would throw concerts in his backyard which became a gathering place for all musicians – has described the North Williams music scene as the secret best place for jazz musicians to “get down and jam” in the 1950s and 1960s. A lively club scene lined the streets and you could hear live music 24/7.    Wilson Smith Jr. and Fitzgerald “Eager” Beaver opened Bop City Records, the first Black-owned record shop in Portland in 1958. The pool hall Underneath Acme was where you could always find Ed Slaughter – a jazz historian and honorary mayor of Williams Avenue. He was most remembered for his jukebox, upon which many Black musicians heard their first jazz record.  

1985 The Pearl District is named after a Black woman

First coined by late gallerist Thomas Augustine in 1985, the industrial downtown westside neighborhood is named after the beautiful, worldly Black woman Pearl Marie Amhara. Pearl was born in Ethiopia in 1936.  She was orphaned by Mussolini collaborators and taken in by a missionary to London, where she got a PhD at 19 in world cultures, studying 21 different languages. She never settled in Portland, permanently – or anywhere, she traveled all over world - but she loved Oregon and visited frequently – which was the reason that Augustine moved there in 1983.  In 1985, he called the neighborhood the “Pearl District” secretly for his best friend to a writer for Alaskan Air magazine, and it just stuck. He credited Pearl with seeing that the gritty neighborhood would eventually house so many creatives, and shows in this district have highlighted talented artists like the legendary master painter Arvie Smith, as well as rising star BIPOC artists like Jeremy Okai Davis, Victor Moldanado and Samantha Wall, among many others.

In 1996, Avel Louise Gordly became the first African American woman to be elected to the Oregon State Senate. See source below for details.

In 1996, Avel Louise Gordly became the first African American woman to be elected to the Oregon State Senate. See source below for details.

1996 Avel Louise Gordly is the first black woman elected to the Oregon State Senate. 

A counselor, teacher and writer, Gordly cut her teeth in politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the Black United Front, coordinating the Front’s Saturday School, whose African American history program was tied to curriculum reform in the public education system, and the Urban League of Portland. Her formal political career began in 1991, when she was appointed to the Oregon House of Representatives  to replace Ron Cease, and later elected to the seat, ultimately serving three terms, representing parts of north and northeast Portland. In 1996, she won election to the Oregon State Senate, the first Black woman to do so; she served in the Senate from 1997 to 2009, when she retired, declining to run again. Her legislative record includes an array of initiatives that focus on cultural competency in education, mental health, and the administration of justice and she was known for making normally private hearings open to the public and the press. During that time, OHSU opened the Avel Gordly Center for Healing, which provides mental health and psychiatric services.


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