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<h1 id="reader-title">The Racist History of Portland, the
Whitest City in America</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Alana Semuels - July
22, 2016<br>
</div>
</div>
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<section id="article-section-1">
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“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.)</p>
</section>
<section id="article-section-2">
<p dir="ltr">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 <a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'492035'"
href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/vanport-oregon-how-countrys-largest-housing-project-vanished-day-180954040/?no-ist">only
state</a> to do so. In more recent times, the city
repeatedly undertook “urban renewal” projects (such as
<a data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'1',r'492035'"
href="http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2012/09/post_273.html">the
construction</a> of Legacy Emanuel Hospital) that
decimated the small black community that existed here.
And racism persists today. A <a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'2',r'492035'"
href="http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/05/a_portland_housing_audit_finds.html">2011
audit</a> 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 are<a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'3',r'492035'"
href="http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2015/02/portland_expels_suspends_fewer.html">
suspended</a> and expelled at a rate four to five
times higher than that of their white peers.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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 the<a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'4',r'492035'"
href="http://priceonomics.com/how-diverse-is-your-city/"> whitest big
city</a> in America, with a population that is 72.2
percent white and only 6.3 percent African American.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Violence is not the only obstacle faced by
black people in Oregon. A<a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'5',r'492035'"
href="http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5501f6d4e4b0ee23fb3097ff/t/556d3996e4b09da5e9a521df/1433221526152/African-American-report-FINAL-January-2014.pdf">
2014 report</a> 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.</p>
</section>
<section id="article-section-3">
<p dir="ltr">“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.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">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 <a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'6',r'492035'"
href="http://browninpdx.tumblr.com/">blog</a>, “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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">As the city becomes<a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'7',r'492035'"
href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/the-real-roots-of-portlands-housing-crisis/482988/">
more popular</a> 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 to<a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'8',r'492035'"
href="http://www.opb.org/radio/programs/thinkoutloud/segment/oregon-portland-african-americans/">
move</a> 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 new<a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'9',r'492035'"
href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/trader-joe-39-drops-black-neighborhood-store-plan-224732374.html?ref=gs">
Trader Joe’s</a>. And the spate of alleged incidents
at Daimler Trucks is evidence of tensions that are far
less subtle.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“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?</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p dir="ltr">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 the<a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'10',r'492035'"
href="http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5501f6d4e4b0ee23fb3097ff/t/556d3996e4b09da5e9a521df/1433221526152/African-American-report-FINAL-January-2014.pdf">
Communities of Color</a> report.</p>
</section>
<section id="article-section-4">
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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 <a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'11',r'492035'"
href="http://gizmodo.com/oregon-was-founded-as-a-racist-utopia-1539567040">this
2015 <em>Gizmodo</em> </a>essay.)</p>
<p dir="ltr">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 only<a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'12',r'492035'"
href="http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEEDING-ALBINA_-A-HISTORY-OF-COMMUNITY-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf">
six states</a> that refused to ratify that amendment
when it passed.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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 included<a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'13',r'492035'"
href="http://newsregister.com/article?articleTitle=corruption-hypocrisy-brought-down-ku-klux-klan-in-1920s--1370536750--8079--home%20column%203">
literacy tests</a> for anyone who wanted to vote in
the state and compulsory public school for Oregonians,
a measure targeted at Catholics. </p>
</section>
<section id="article-section-5">
<p dir="ltr">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 to<a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'14',r'492035'"
href="http://southeastexaminer.com/2014/02/a-brief-history-of-african-americans-in-portland/">
20,000</a> 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 mulled<a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'15',r'492035'"
href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/vanport-oregon-how-countrys-largest-housing-project-vanished-day-180954040/?no-ist">
dismantling Vanport</a>, 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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Dismantling Vanport proved unnecessary. In
May of 1948, the Columbia River flooded, <a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'16',r'492035'"
href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/vanport-oregon-how-countrys-largest-housing-project-vanished-day-180954040/?no-ist">wiping
out</a> 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
<a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'17',r'492035'"
href="http://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/vanport/#.V4kCOWQrKyA">15
residents</a> died, though some locals formulated a
<a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'18',r'492035'"
href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/vanport-oregon-how-countrys-largest-housing-project-vanished-day-180954040/">theory</a>
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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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 there<a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'19',r'492035'"
href="http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEEDING-ALBINA_-A-HISTORY-OF-COMMUNITY-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf">
had been</a> at the beginning of the decade.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
</section>
<section id="article-section-6">
<p>* * *</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Since the postwar population boom, Albina
has been the target of a decades of “renewal” and
redevelopment plans, like many <a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'20',r'492035'"
href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/syracuse-slums/416892/">black
neighborhoods </a>across the country.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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 “<a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'21',r'492035'"
href="http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEEDING-ALBINA_-A-HISTORY-OF-COMMUNITY-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf">Bleeding
Albina: A History of Community Disinvestment,
1940-2000,</a>” 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.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">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 <a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'22',r'492035'"
href="http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/08/bank_redlining_creates_bluepri.html"><em>The
Oregonian</em> published in 1990</a> 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,
<em>The Oregonian </em>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<em>he
Oregonian</em>'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.)</p>
</section>
<section id="article-section-7">
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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. </p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“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.”</p>
</section>
<section id="article-section-8">
<p>* * *</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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 <a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'23',r'492035'"
href="https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1891&dat=19810328&id=5Z4fAAAAIBAJ&sjid=-9UEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4247,4641890&hl=en">ran
over possums</a> and then put the dead animals in
front of black-owned restaurants.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“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.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“Everything is kind of under the carpet,”
he said. “The racism is still very, very subtle.”</p>
</section>
<section id="article-section-9">
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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 <a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'24',r'492035'"
href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/trader-joe-39-drops-black-neighborhood-store-plan-224732374.html?ref=gs">steep
discount </a>on a patch of land to entice them to
seal the deal. But the Portland African American
Leadership Forum <a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'25',r'492035'"
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/929379-paalf-letter-regarding-trader-joes.html">wrote
a letter</a> 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 <a
data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'26',r'492035'"
href="http://www.thewire.com/national/2014/02/trader-joes-racism-scandal-no-one-talking-about/357969/">scorned</a>
the black community for opposing the retailer.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
</section>
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