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href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/06/07/when-portland-banned-blacks-oregons-shameful-history-as-an-all-white-state/?tid=ss_fb&utm_term=.14d4f99cd7d3">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/06/07/when-portland-banned-blacks-oregons-shameful-history-as-an-all-white-state/?tid=ss_fb&utm_term=.3a6533d7b1d0</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">When Portland banned blacks: Oregon’s
shameful history as an ‘all-white’ state</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.facebook.com/deneen.l.brown">https://www.facebook.com/deneen.l.brown</a></div>
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<div id="reader-estimated-time"><span class="pb-byline"
itemprop="author" itemscope=""
itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">By <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/deneen-l-brown/"><span
itemprop="name">DeNeen L. Brown</span></a></span> <span
class="pb-timestamp" itemprop="datePublished"
content="2017-06-07T10:23-500">June 7</span></div>
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<p>In 1844, all black people were ordered to get out of
Oregon Country, the expansive territory under American
rule that stretched from the Pacific coast to the Rocky
Mountains.</p>
<p>Those who refused to leave could be severely whipped,
the provisional government law declared, by “not less
than twenty or more than thirty-nine stripes” to be
repeated every six months until they left.</p>
<p>Oregon Country’s provisional government, which was led
by Peter Burnett, a former slaver holder who came west
from Missouri by wagon train, passed the law in 1844 —
15 years before Oregon became a state. The law allowed
slave holders to keep their slaves for a maximum of
three years. After the grace period, all black people —
those considered freed or enslaved — were required to
leave Oregon Country. Black women were given three years
to get out; black men were required to leave in two.</p>
<p>The law became known as the “Peter Burnett Lash Law.”
Burnett, who also opposed Chinese migration to Oregon
Country, would later become the first American governor
of California.</p>
<p>The “Lash Law” was quickly amended and then repealed.
No black people were ever lashed under the law.</p>
<p>But the act would become the first of three “exclusion
laws” that shaped the Pacific Northwest, banning any
additional black people from coming to Oregon Country.
Those laws created what one African American professor
calls “a very hostile environment” that has long made
Oregon and its largest city,<a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/portland-often-seen-as-a-progressive-playground-now-deals-with-murderous-hate/2017/05/30/184d3072-456f-11e7-98cd-af64b4fe2dfc_story.html?utm_term=.c0dff46d2b6c">
Portland,</a> a stronghold for white supremacists like
<a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/05/27/suspected-attacker-jeremy-joseph-christian-stood-out-amid-rising-tensions-in-portland/?utm_term=.ce358b27ec6a">Jeremy
Joseph Christian</a>, the man accused of killing two
men and severely wounding another on a light-rail train
last month.</p>
<p>Few people are aware of <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-hate-crime-in-super-progressive-portland-should-surprise-no-one/2017/06/01/d3b99782-46d8-11e7-a196-a1bb629f64cb_story.html?utm_term=.5537a32fe863">Oregon’s
history of blatant racism</a>, including its refusal
to ratify the 14th and 15th Amendments of the
Constitution.</p>
<p class="interstitial-link"> <i> [<a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/04/11/hunting-down-runaway-slaves-the-cruel-ads-of-andrew-jackson-and-the-master-class/?utm_term=.f6dd825fc5b1">Hunting
down runaway slaves: The cruel ads of Andrew Jackson
and ‘the master class’</a>] </i> </p>
<p>In 1848, the territorial government passed a law making
it illegal for any “Negro or Mullatto” to live in Oregon
Country. In 1850, under the Oregon Donation Land Act,
“whites and half breed Indians” were granted 650 acres
of land from the government. But any other person of
color was excluded from claiming land in Oregon. In
1851, Jacob Vanderpool, the black owner of a saloon,
restaurant and boarding home, was actually expelled from
Oregon territory.</p>
<p>“The exclusion laws were primarily intended to prevent
blacks from settling in Oregon, not to kick out those
who were already here,” according to Salem Public
Library records. But Vanderpool’s neighbor “reported him
for the crime of being black in Oregon, and Judge Thomas
Nelson gave him thirty days to leave the territory.”</p>
<p>In 1857, as Oregon sought to become a state, it wrote
the exclusion of blacks into its constitution: “No free
negro or mulatto, not residing in this State at the time
of the adoption of this constitution, shall ever come,
reside, or be within this State, or hold any real
estate, or make any contract, or maintain any suit
therein; and the Legislative Assembly shall provide by
penal laws for the removal by public officers of all
such free negroes and mulattoes, and for their effectual
exclusion from the State, and for the punishment of
persons who shall bring them into the State, or employ
or harbor them therein.”</p>
<p>When Oregon entered the Union in 1859 — it did so as a
“whites-only” state. The original state constitution
banned slavery, but also excluded nonwhites from living
there.</p>
<p>“Oregon is the only state in the United States that
actually began as literally whites-only,” said Winston
Grady-Willis, director of Portland State University’s
School of Gender, Race and Nations. “Even though there
was subsequent legislation that challenged those
statutes, the statutes were not removed from the books
until 1922.”</p>
<p>Grady-Willis added: “It’s really important for folks to
understand this notion of Oregon as this lily-white
state sets the tone and is important structurally for
the remainder of history of not only the state, but
cities like Portland as well.”</p>
<p class="interstitial-link"> <i> [<a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/06/01/life-or-death-for-black-travelers-how-fear-led-to-the-negro-motorist-green-book/?utm_term=.29871ab15e98">‘Life
or death for black travelers’: How fear led to ‘The
Negro Motorist Green-Book’</a>] </i> </p>
<p>Portland’s reputation as a progressive city is largely
a myth, he said. Portland remains the whitest, large
city in United States. According to a July 2015 Census
report, the city of 612,206 people, was 77.6 percent
white; and 5.8 percent black. Grady-Willis called it “a
key site for Klan activity.”</p>
<p>This is the historical backdrop for the charges against
Christian, 35, who allegedly verbally abused two women
on the train, including one wearing a hijab, and then
attacked the men who came to their aid.</p>
<p>During <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/man-indicted-in-double-fatal-portland-oregon-train-attack/2017/06/06/a1b7e870-4b05-11e7-987c-42ab5745db2e_story.html?utm_term=.932ff970c0a0">a
brief court hearing</a> Tuesday, Christian was
unapologetic:</p>
<p>“You call it terrorism,” Christian said in court. “I
call it patriotism.”</p>
<div class="inline-content inline-video">
<div
id="powa-cc80ca66-4594-11e7-8de1-cec59a9bf4b1-powa-blurb"
class="powa-blurb inline-video-caption">
<p class="wpv-caption pb-caption"
data-breakpoint="large"> <span class="wpv-blurb">The
man accused of murdering two men who tried to stop
him from shouting religious slurs on a Portland
train, appeared in court on May 30. Jeremy
Christian shouted "free speech or die, Portland"
during his arraignment.</span> <span
class="wpv-tease">The man accused of murdering two
men who tried to stop him from shouting religious
slurs on a Portland train, appeared in court on
May 30.</span> (Reuters) </p>
</div>
<p class="inline-video-caption"> <span
class="pb-caption">The man accused of murdering two
men who tried to stop him from shouting religious
slurs on a Portland train, appeared in court on May
30. Jeremy Christian shouted "free speech or die,
Portland" during his arraignment. (Reuters)</span> </p>
</div>
<p>Oregon has a defiant history of resisting federal laws
that gave black people rights.</p>
<p>Karen Gibson, associate professor in Portland State’s
Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, said Oregon
rescinded its initial ratification of the 14th Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution, which granted citizenship to
“all persons born or naturalized in the United States,”
including former slaves.</p>
<p>Oregon was one of just six states that refused to
ratify the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the
right to vote.</p>
<p>Oregon did not ratify the 15th amendment until 1959 —
one hundred years after the state joined the Union. It
was a symbolic adoption as part of its centennial
celebration. It did not re-ratify the 14th amendment
until 1973.</p>
<p>“Many of the white settlers who came here came for the
Oregon Land Donation Act. This place was intentionally
settled by whites for whites,” Gibson said.</p>
<p>“They did not want slavery here. They didn’t want land
taken over by large plantations so they didn’t have to
compete with bonded labor. But they also thought blacks
were inferior. That is still here. White supremacy is
about that: the beliefs that whites were supreme.”</p>
<p>Darrell Millner, professor emeritus in Portland State’s
Black Studies Department, said many early Oregon
settlers were opposed to slavery “not because of what it
did to blacks but because of what it did to them.
Slavery represented a competition they did not wish to
work against.”</p>
<p>Millner said Oregon became a place where “many
practices we associate with the Jim Crow South were
legal here.” In the 1920s, Oregon had the largest Ku
Klux Klan organization west of the Mississippi River. In
1922, Walter Pierce, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, was
elected governor of Oregon. Pierce served as a member of
the U.S. House of Representatives from 1932 to 1942.</p>
<p>Oregon’s hostility toward blacks remains part of the
state’s culture.</p>
<p>“In the 1980s and ’90s, Oregon became a destination for
the largest skinhead movement in the country,” Millner
said. “Their objective was to achieve something pioneers
tried to achieve here and that was to create a white
homeland.”</p>
<p>Millner said that in the 1980s and 1990s, “in Oregon
and especially in Portland, it was very dangerous to be
a person of color.</p>
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<p>An infamous racial attack occurred in Portland in 1988,
when an Ethiopian immigrant was fatally beaten by three
white supremacists skinheads on the streets of Portland.
Mulugeta Seraw was a student at Portland State
University. He was killed by three <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/10/14/white-supremacists-fight-civil-suit/f74342d1-9c2b-401c-b287-112b442ab6e6/?utm_term=.92d67cedded0">white
supremacists</a> who were members of the White Aryan
Resistance who beat him with a baseball bat.</p>
<p>In 1990, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the
Anti-Defamation League won a lawsuit against the White
Aryan Resistance on behalf of Seraw’s family.</p>
<p>Millner said he has lived in Oregon 47 years. When he
heard about the stabbings on the train last month he
said he was disturbed but not surprised.</p>
<p>“It reinforced the subterranean awareness all people of
color in Oregon have that something like that could
happen to them at any time and in place,” he said. “That
is reflective of what people of color in Oregon live
with. It is on a subconscious level daily. You are
constantly aware that is a possibility.”</p>
<p>___________________________________</p>
<h1 class="watch-title-container"><span id="eow-title"
class="watch-title" dir="ltr" title="Oregon Black
History Timeline - Audio Commentary">Oregon Black
History Timeline - Audio Commentary </span></h1>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2RVOunsZ8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2RVOunsZ8</a></p>
<p>This is a 50 slide timeline and audio commentary
created by Walidah Imarisha for a program called "Why
Aren't There More Black People in Oregon?: A Hidden
History," which looks at the history of race, identity
and power in Oregon and the larger nation. Oregon has a
history not only of Black exclusion and discrimination,
but also of a vibrant Black culture that helped sustain
many communities throughout the state—a history that is
not taught in schools. Oregon as a state was explicitly
founded on the idea of creating a white nationalist
utopia, and in that way is a useful case study to see
the mentality that nationally shaped the institutions
that govern our lives.<br>
<br>
There is also a version of the timeline available with
no audio commentary here: <a
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3NuDne8q78"
class="yt-uix-sessionlink "
data-sessionlink="itct=CDQQ6TgYACITCNaC_N2LsdQCFccFfwodIQEFbSj4HQ"
data-url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3NuDne8q78">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3NuDn...</a><br>
<br>
You can find out about interactive public programs using
this timeline by going to <a
href="http://www.walidah.com/event"
class="yt-uix-servicelink "
data-target-new-window="True"
data-servicelink="CDQQ6TgYACITCNaC_N2LsdQCFccFfwodIQEFbSj4HQ"
data-url="http://www.walidah.com/event"
target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">http://www.walidah.com/event</a>.</p>
<p><br>
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