[News] The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/racist-history-portland/492035/?utm_source=atltw 



  The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America

Alana Semuels - July 22, 2016

PORTLAND, Ore.— Victor Pierce has worked on the assembly line of a 
Daimler Trucks North America plant here since 1994. But he says that in 
recent years he’s experienced things that seem straight out of another 
time. White co-workers have challenged him to fights, mounted “hangman’s 
nooses” around the factory, referred to him as “boy” on a daily basis, 
sabotaged his work station by hiding his tools, carved swastikas in the 
bathroom, and written the word “nigger” on walls in the factory, 
according to allegations filed in a complaint to the Multnomah County 
Circuit Court in February of 2015.

Pierce is one of six African Americans working in the Portland plant 
whom the lawyer Mark Morrell is representing in a series of lawsuits 
against Daimler Trucks North America. The cases have been combined and a 
trial is scheduled for January of 2017.

“They have all complained about being treated poorly because of their 
race,” Morrell told me. “It’s a sad story—it’s pretty ugly on the floor 
there.” (Daimler said it could not comment on pending litigation, but 
spokesman David Giroux said that the company prohibits discrimination 
and investigates any allegations of harassment.)

The allegations may seem at odds with the reputation of this city known 
for its progressivism. But many African Americans in Portland say 
they’re not surprised when they hear about racial incidents in this city 
and state. That’s because racism has been entrenched in Oregon, maybe 
more than any state in the north, for nearly two centuries. When the 
state entered the union in 1859, for example, Oregon explicitly forbade 
black people from living in its borders, the only state 
<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/vanport-oregon-how-countrys-largest-housing-project-vanished-day-180954040/?no-ist> 
to do so. In more recent times, the city repeatedly undertook “urban 
renewal” projects (such as the construction 
<http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2012/09/post_273.html> of 
Legacy Emanuel Hospital) that decimated the small black community that 
existed here. And racism persists today. A 2011 audit 
<http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/05/a_portland_housing_audit_finds.html> 
found that landlords and leasing agents here discriminated against black 
and Latino renters 64 percent of the time, citing them higher rents or 
deposits and adding on additional fees. In area schools, African 
American students aresuspended 
<http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2015/02/portland_expels_suspends_fewer.html> 
and expelled at a rate four to five times higher than that of their 
white peers.

All in all, historians and residents say, Oregon has never been 
particularly welcoming to minorities. Perhaps that’s why there have 
never been very many. Portland is thewhitest big city 
<http://priceonomics.com/how-diverse-is-your-city/> in America, with a 
population that is 72.2 percent white and only 6.3 percent African American.

“I think that Portland has, in many ways, perfected neoliberal racism,” 
Walidah Imarisha, an African American educator and expert on black 
history in Oregon, told me. Yes, the city is politically progressive, 
she said, but its government has facilitated the dominance of whites in 
business, housing, and culture. And white-supremacist sentiment is not 
uncommon in the state. Imarisha travels around Oregon teaching about 
black history, and she says neo-Nazis and others spewing sexually 
explicit comments or death threats frequently protest her events.

Violence is not the only obstacle faced by black people in Oregon. A2014 
report 
<http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5501f6d4e4b0ee23fb3097ff/t/556d3996e4b09da5e9a521df/1433221526152/African-American-report-FINAL-January-2014.pdf> 
by Portland State University and the Coalition of Communities of Color, 
a Portland non-profit, shows black families lag far behind whites in the 
Portland region in employment, health outcomes, and high-school 
graduation rates. They also lag behind black families nationally. While 
annual incomes for whites nationally and in Multnomah County, where 
Portland is located, were around $70,000 in 2009, blacks in Multnomah 
County made just $34,000, compared to $41,000 for blacks nationally. 
Almost two-thirds of black single mothers in Multnomah County with kids 
under five lived in poverty in 2010, compared to half of black single 
mothers with kids under five nationally. And just 32 percent of African 
Americans in Multnomah County owned homes in 2010, compared to 60 
percent of whites in the county and 45 percent of blacks nationally.

“Oregon has been slow to dismantle overtly racist policies,” the report 
concluded. As a result, “African Americans in Multnomah County continue 
to live with the effects of racialized policies, practices, and 
decision-making.”

Whether this history can be overcome is another matter. Because Oregon, 
and specifically Portland, its biggest city, are not very diverse, many 
white people may not even begin to think about, let alone understand, 
the inequalities. A blog <http://browninpdx.tumblr.com/>, “Shit White 
People Say to Black and Brown Folks in PDX,” details how racist Portland 
residents can be to people of color. “Most of the people who live here 
in Portland have never had to directly, physically and/or emotionally 
interact with PoC in their life cycle,” one post begins.

As the city becomesmore popular 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/the-real-roots-of-portlands-housing-crisis/482988/> 
and real-estate prices rise, it is Portland’s tiny African American 
population that is being displaced to the far-off fringes of the city, 
leading to even less diversity in the city’s center. There are around 
38,000 African Americans in the city in Portland, according to Lisa K. 
Bates of Portland State University; in recent years, 10,000 of those 
38,000 have had tomove 
<http://www.opb.org/radio/programs/thinkoutloud/segment/oregon-portland-african-americans/> 
from the center city to its fringes because of rising prices. The 
gentrification of the historically black neighborhood in central 
Portland, Albina, has led to conflicts between white Portlanders and 
long-time black residents over things like widening bicycle lanes and 
the construction of a newTrader Joe’s 
<https://www.yahoo.com/news/trader-joe-39-drops-black-neighborhood-store-plan-224732374.html?ref=gs>. 
And the spate of alleged incidents at Daimler Trucks is evidence of 
tensions that are far less subtle.

“Portland's tactic when it comes to race up until now, has been to 
ignore it,” said Zev Nicholson, an African American resident who was, 
until recently, the Organizing Director of the Urban League of Portland. 
But can it continue to do so?

* * *

 From its very beginning, Oregon was an inhospitable place for black 
people. In 1844, the provisional government of the territory passed a 
law banning slavery, and at the same time required any African American 
in Oregon leave the territory. Any black person remaining would be 
flogged publicly every six months until he left. Five years later, 
another law was passed that forbade free African Americans from entering 
into Oregon, according to theCommunities of Color 
<http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5501f6d4e4b0ee23fb3097ff/t/556d3996e4b09da5e9a521df/1433221526152/African-American-report-FINAL-January-2014.pdf> 
report.

In 1857, Oregon adopted a state constitution that banned black people 
from coming to the state, residing in the state, or holding property in 
the state. During this time, any white male settler could receive 650 
acres of land and another 650 if he was married. This, of course, was 
land taken from native people who had been living here for centuries.

This early history proves, to Imarisha, that “the founding idea of the 
state was as a racist white utopia. The idea was to come to Oregon 
territory and build the perfect white society you dreamed of.” (Matt 
Novak detailed Oregon’s heritage as a white utopia in this 2015 
/Gizmodo/ 
<http://gizmodo.com/oregon-was-founded-as-a-racist-utopia-1539567040>essay.)

With the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, Oregon’s laws 
preventing black people from living in the state and owning property 
were superseded by national law. But Oregon itself didn’t ratify the 
14th Amendment—the Equal Protection Clause—until 1973. (Or, more 
exactly, the state ratified the amendment in 1866, rescinded its 
ratification in 1868, and then finally ratified it for good in 1973.) It 
didn’t ratify the 15th Amendment, which gave black people the right to 
vote, until 1959, making it one of onlysix states 
<http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEEDING-ALBINA_-A-HISTORY-OF-COMMUNITY-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf> 
that refused to ratify that amendment when it passed.

This history resulted in a very white state. Technically, after 1868, 
black people could come to Oregon. But the black-exclusion laws had sent 
a very clear message nationwide, says Darrell Millner, a professor of 
black studies at Portland State University. “What those exclusion laws 
did was broadcast very broadly and loudly was that Oregon wasn’t a place 
where blacks would be welcome or comfortable,” he told me. By 1890, 
there were slightly more than 1,000 black people in the whole state of 
Oregon. By 1920, there were about 2,000.

The rise of the Ku Klux Klan made Oregon even more inhospitable for 
black people. The state had the highest per capita Klan membership in 
the country, according to Imarisha. Democrat Walter M. Pierce was 
elected to the governorship of the state in 1922 with the vocal support 
of the Klan, and photos in the local paper show the Portland chief of 
police, sheriff, district attorney, U.S. attorney, and mayor posing with 
Klansmen, accompanied by an article saying the men were taking advice 
from the Klan. Some of the laws passed during that time includedliteracy 
tests 
<http://newsregister.com/article?articleTitle=corruption-hypocrisy-brought-down-ku-klux-klan-in-1920s--1370536750--8079--home%20column%203> 
for anyone who wanted to vote in the state and compulsory public school 
for Oregonians, a measure targeted at Catholics.

It wasn’t until World War II that a sizable black population moved to 
Oregon, lured by jobs in the shipyards, Millner said. The black 
population grew from 2,000 to20,000 
<http://southeastexaminer.com/2014/02/a-brief-history-of-african-americans-in-portland/> 
during the war, and the majority of the new residents lived in a place 
called Vanport, a city of houses nestled between Portland and Vancouver, 
Washington, constructed for the new residents. Yet after the war, blacks 
were encouraged to leave Oregon, Millner said, with the mayor of 
Portland commenting in a newspaper article that black people were not 
welcome. The Housing Authority of Portland mulleddismantling Vanport 
<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/vanport-oregon-how-countrys-largest-housing-project-vanished-day-180954040/?no-ist>, 
and jobs for black people disappeared as white soldiers returned from 
war and displaced the men and women who had found jobs in the shipyards.

Dismantling Vanport proved unnecessary. In May of 1948, the Columbia 
River flooded, wiping out 
<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/vanport-oregon-how-countrys-largest-housing-project-vanished-day-180954040/?no-ist> 
Vanport in a single day. Residents had been assured that the dikes 
protecting the housing were safe, and some lost everything in the flood. 
  At least 15 residents 
<http://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/vanport/#.V4kCOWQrKyA> died, 
though some locals formulated a theory 
<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/vanport-oregon-how-countrys-largest-housing-project-vanished-day-180954040/> 
that the housing authority had quietly disposed of hundreds more bodies 
to cover up its slow response. The 18,500 residents of Vanport—6,300 of 
whom were black—had to find somewhere else to live.

For black residents, the only choice, if they wanted to stay in 
Portland, was a neighborhood called Albina that had emerged as a popular 
place to live for the black porters who worked in nearby Union Station. 
It was the only place black people were allowed to buy homes, after, in 
1919, the Realty Board of Portland had approved a Code of Ethics 
forbidding realtors and bankers from selling or giving loans to 
minorities for properties located in white neighborhoods.

As black people moved into Albina, whites moved out; by the end of the 
1950s, there were 23,000 fewer white residents and 7,000 more black 
residents than therehad been 
<http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEEDING-ALBINA_-A-HISTORY-OF-COMMUNITY-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf> 
at the beginning of the decade.

The neighborhood of Albina began to be the center of black life in 
Portland. But for outsiders, it was something else: a blighted slum in 
need of repair.

* * *

Today, North Williams Avenue, which cuts through the heart of what was 
once Albina, is emblematic of the “new” Portland. Fancy condos with 
balconies line the street, next to juice stores and hipster bars with 
shuffleboard courts. Ed Washington remembers when this was a majority 
black neighborhood more than a half a century ago, when his parents 
moved their family to Portland during the war in order to get jobs in 
the shipyard. He says every house on his street, save one, was owned by 
black families.

“All these people on the streets, they used to be black people,” he told 
me, gesturing at a couple with sleeve tattoos, white people pushing baby 
strollers up the street.

Since the postwar population boom, Albina has been the target of a 
decades of “renewal” and redevelopment plans, like many black 
neighborhoods 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/syracuse-slums/416892/>across 
the country.

In 1956, voters approved the construction of an arena in the area, which 
destroyed 476 homes, half of them inhabited by black people, according 
to “Bleeding Albina: A History of Community Disinvestment, 1940-2000, 
<http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEEDING-ALBINA_-A-HISTORY-OF-COMMUNITY-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf>” 
a paper by the Portland State scholar Karen J. Gibson. This forced many 
people to move from what was considered “lower Albina” to “upper 
Albina.” But upper Albina was soon targeted for development, too, first 
when the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 provided funds for Portland to 
build Interstate 5 and Highway 99. Then a local hospital expansion was 
approved, clearing 76 acres, including 300 African American-owned homes 
and businesses and many shops at the junction of North Williams Avenue 
and Russell Street, the black “Main Street.”

The urban-renewal efforts made it difficult for black residents to 
maintain a close-knit community; the institutions that they frequented 
kept getting displaced. In Portland, according to Gibson, a generation 
of black people had grown up hearing about the “wicked white people who 
took away their neighborhoods.” In the meantime, displaced African 
Americans couldn’t acquire new property or land. Redlining, the process 
of denying loans to people who lived in certain areas, flourished in 
Portland in the 1970s and 1980s. An investigation by /The Oregonian/ 
published in 1990 
<http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/08/bank_redlining_creates_bluepri.html> 
revealed that all the banks in Portland together had made just 10 
mortgage loans in a four-census-tract area in the heart of Albina in the 
course of a year. That was one-tenth the average number of loans in 
similarly-sized census tracts in the rest of the city. The lack of 
available capital gave way to scams: A predatory lending institution 
called Dominion Capital, /The Oregonian /alleged, also “sold” 
dilapidated homes to buyers in Albina, though the text of the contracts 
revealed that Dominion actually kept ownership of the properties, and 
most of the contracts were structured as balloon mortgages that allowed 
Dominion to evict buyers shortly after they’d moved in. Other lenders 
simply refused to give loans on properties worth less than $40,000. (The 
state's attorney general sued Dominion’s owners after T/he Oregonian/'s 
story ran; the AP reported that the parties reached a settlement in 1993 
in which Dominion’s owners agreed to pay fines and to limit their 
business activity in the state. The company filed for bankruptcy a few 
days after the state lawsuit was filed; U.S. bankruptcy court handed 
control of the company to a trustee in 1991.)

The inability of blacks to get mortgages to buy homes in Albina led, 
once again, to the further decimation of the black community, Gibson 
argues. Homes were abandoned, and residents couldn’t get mortgages to 
buy them and fix them up. As more and more houses fell into decay, 
values plummeted, and those who could left the neighborhood. By the 
1980s, the value of homes in Albina reached 58 percent of the city’s median.

“In Portland, there is evidence supporting the notion that housing 
market actors helped sections of the Albina District reach an advanced 
stage of decay, making the area ripe for reinvestment,” she writes.

By 1988, Albina was a neighborhood known for its housing abandonment, 
crack-cocaine activity, and gang warfare. Absentee landlordism was 
rampant, with just 44 percent of homes in the neighborhood owner-occupied.

It was then, when real estate prices were at rock bottom, that white 
people moved in and started buying up homes and businesses, kicking off 
a process that would make Albina one of the more valuable neighborhoods 
in Portland. The city finally began to invest in Albina then, chasing 
out absentee landlords and working to redevelop abandoned and foreclosed 
homes.

Much of Albina’s African American population would not benefit from this 
process, though. Some could not afford to pay for upkeep and taxes on 
their homes when values started to rise again; others who rented slowly 
saw prices reach levels they could not afford. Even those who owned 
started to leave; by 1999, blacks owned 36 percent fewer homes than they 
had a decade earlier, while whites owned 43 percent more.

This gave rise to racial tensions once again. Black residents felt they 
had been shouting for decades for better city policy in Albina, but it 
wasn’t until white residents moved in that the city started to pay 
attention.

“We fought like mad to keep crime out of the area,” Gibson quotes one 
long-time resident, Charles Ford, as saying. “But the newcomers haven’t 
given us credit for it...We never envisioned the government would come 
in and mainly assist whites...I didn’t envision that those young people 
would come in with what I perceived as an attitude. They didn’t come in 
[saying] ‘We want to be a part of you.’ They came in with this idea, 
‘we’re here and we’re in charge’...It’s like the revitalization of racism.”

* * *

Many might think that, as a progressive city known for its 
hyper-consciousness about its own problems, Portland would be addressing 
its racial history or at least its current problems with racial 
inequality and displacement. But Portland only recently became a 
progressive city, said Millner, the professor, and its past still 
dominates some parts of government and society.

Until the 1980s, “Portland was firmly in the hands of the status quo—the 
old, conservative, scratch-my-back, old-boys white network,” he said. 
The city had a series of police shootings of black men in the 1970s, and 
in the 1980s, the police department was investigated after officers ran 
over possums 
<https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1891&dat=19810328&id=5Z4fAAAAIBAJ&sjid=-9UEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4247,4641890&hl=en> 
and then put the dead animals in front of black-owned restaurants.

Yet as the city became more progressive and “weird,” full of artists and 
techies and bikers, it did not have a conversation about its racist 
past. It still tends not to, even as gentrification and displacement 
continue in Albina and other neighborhoods.

“If you were living here and you decided you wanted to have a 
conversation about race, you'd get the shock of your life,” Ed 
Washington, the longtime Portland resident, told me. “Because people in 
Oregon just don't like to talk about it.”

The overt racism of the past has abated, residents say, but it can still 
be uncomfortable to traverse the city as a minority. Paul Knauls, who is 
African American, moved to Portland to open a nightclub in the 1960s. He 
used to face the specter of “whites-only” signs in stores, prohibitions 
on buying real estate and once, even a bomb threat in his jazz club 
because of its black patrons. Now, he says he notices racial tensions 
when he walks into a restaurant full of white people and it goes silent, 
or when he tries to visit friends who once lived in Albina and who have 
now been displaced to “the numbers,” which is what Portlanders call the 
low-income far-off neighborhoods on the outskirts of town.

“Everything is kind of under the carpet,” he said. “The racism is still 
very, very subtle.”

Ignoring the issue of race can mean that the legacies of Oregon’s racial 
history aren’t addressed. Nicholson, of the Urban League of Portland, 
says that when the black community has tried to organize meetings on 
racial issues, community members haven’t been able to fit into the room 
because “60 white environmental activists” have showed up, too, hoping 
to speak about something marginally related.

If the city talked about race, though, it might acknowledge that it’s 
mostly minorities who get displaced and would put in place mechanisms 
for addressing gentrification, Imarisha said. Instead, said Bates, the 
city celebrated when, in the early 2000s, census data showed it had a 
decline in black-white segregation. The reason? Black people in Albina 
were being displaced to far-off neighborhoods that had traditionally 
been white.

One incident captures how residents are failing to hear one another or 
have any sympathy for one another: In 2014, Trader Joe’s was in 
negotiations to open a new store in Albina. The Portland Development 
Commission, the city’s urban-renewal agency, offered the company a steep 
discount 
<https://www.yahoo.com/news/trader-joe-39-drops-black-neighborhood-store-plan-224732374.html?ref=gs>on 
a patch of land to entice them to seal the deal. But the Portland 
African American Leadership Forum wrote a letter 
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/929379-paalf-letter-regarding-trader-joes.html> 
protesting the development, arguing that the Trader Joe’s was the latest 
attempt to profit from the displacement of African Americans in the 
city. By spending money incentivizing Trader Joe’s to locate in the 
area, the city was creating further gentrification without working to 
help locals stay in the neighborhood, the group argued. Trader Joe’s 
pulled out of the plan, and people in Portland and across the country 
scorned 
<http://www.thewire.com/national/2014/02/trader-joes-racism-scandal-no-one-talking-about/357969/> 
the black community for opposing the retailer.

Imarisha, Bates, and others say that during that incident, critics of 
the African American community failed to take into account the history 
of Albina, which saw black families and businesses displaced again and 
again when whites wanted to move in. That history was an important and 
ignored part of the story. “People are like, ‘Why do you bring up this 
history? It’s gone, it’s in the past, it’s dead.” Imarisha said. “While 
the mechanisms may have changed, if the outcome is the same, then 
actually has anything changed? Obviously that ideology of a racist white 
utopia is still very much in effect.”

Talking constructively about race can be hard, especially in a place 
like Portland where residents have so little exposure to people who look 
differently than they do. Perhaps as a result, Portland, and indeed 
Oregon, have failed to come to terms with their ugly past. This isn’t 
the sole reason for incidents like the alleged racial abuse at Daimler 
Trucks, or for the threats Imarisha faces when she traverses the state. 
But it may be part of it.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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