Jack Fake
2017-11-09 13:13:40 UTC
Its known as a modern-day hub of progressivism, but its past is
one of exclusion.
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 hes experienced things that seem
straight out of another time. White co-workers have challenged
him to fights, mounted hangmans 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. Its a sad storyits 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 theyre not surprised when they hear about racial
incidents in this city and state. Thats 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 to do so. In more recent
times, the city repeatedly undertook urban renewal projects
(such as the construction of Legacy Emanuel Hospital) that
decimated the small black community that existed here. And
racism persists today. A 2011 audit 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 suspended 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 thats why there
have never been very many. Portland is the whitest big 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. A 2014 report 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, 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 becomes more popular and real-estate prices rise, it
is Portlands tiny African American population that is being
displaced to the far-off fringes of the city, leading to even
less diversity in the citys 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 move 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 Trader Joes. 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?
* * *
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 Communities of Color 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 Oregons heritage as a white
utopia in this 2015 Gizmodo essay.)
With the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments,
Oregons laws preventing black people from living in the state
and owning property were superseded by national law. But Oregon
itself didnt ratify the 14th Amendmentthe Equal Protection
Clauseuntil 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 didnt ratify the 15th
Amendment, which gave black people the right to vote, until
1959, making it one of only six states 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 wasnt 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 included
literacy tests for anyone who wanted to vote in the state and
compulsory public school for Oregonians, a measure targeted at
Catholics.
It wasnt 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 20,000 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 dismantling Vanport, 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 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 died, though some locals formulated a theory that the
housing authority had quietly disposed of hundreds more bodies
to cover up its slow response. The 18,500 residents of
Vanport6,300 of whom were blackhad 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 there had been 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 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, 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 couldnt 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 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 theyd moved in. Other
lenders simply refused to give loans on properties worth less
than $40,000. (The state's attorney general sued Dominions
owners after The Oregonian's story ran; the AP reported that the
parties reached a settlement in 1993 in which Dominions 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
couldnt 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 citys 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 Albinas 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 wasnt 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 havent given us credit for it...We never envisioned
the government would come in and mainly assist whites...I didnt
envision that those young people would come in with what I
perceived as an attitude. They didnt come in [saying] We want
to be a part of you. They came in with this idea, were here
and were in charge...Its 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
quothe 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 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
Oregons racial history arent addressed. Nicholson, of the
Urban League of Portland, says that when the black community has
tried to organize meetings on racial issues, community members
havent 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
its 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
Joes was in negotiations to open a new store in Albina. The
Portland Development Commission, the citys urban-renewal
agency, offered the company a steep discount on a patch of land
to entice them to seal the deal. But the Portland African
American Leadership Forum wrote a letter protesting the
development, arguing that the Trader Joes was the latest
attempt to profit from the displacement of African Americans in
the city. By spending money incentivizing Trader Joes to locate
in the area, the city was creating further gentrification
without working to help locals stay in the neighborhood, the
group argued. Trader Joes pulled out of the plan, and people in
Portland and across the country scorned 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? Its gone,
its in the past, its 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 isnt 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.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/racist-
history-portland/492035/
one of exclusion.
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 hes experienced things that seem
straight out of another time. White co-workers have challenged
him to fights, mounted hangmans 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. Its a sad storyits 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 theyre not surprised when they hear about racial
incidents in this city and state. Thats 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 to do so. In more recent
times, the city repeatedly undertook urban renewal projects
(such as the construction of Legacy Emanuel Hospital) that
decimated the small black community that existed here. And
racism persists today. A 2011 audit 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 suspended 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 thats why there
have never been very many. Portland is the whitest big 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. A 2014 report 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, 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 becomes more popular and real-estate prices rise, it
is Portlands tiny African American population that is being
displaced to the far-off fringes of the city, leading to even
less diversity in the citys 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 move 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 Trader Joes. 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 theterritory 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 Communities of Color 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 Oregons heritage as a white
utopia in this 2015 Gizmodo essay.)
With the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments,
Oregons laws preventing black people from living in the state
and owning property were superseded by national law. But Oregon
itself didnt ratify the 14th Amendmentthe Equal Protection
Clauseuntil 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 didnt ratify the 15th
Amendment, which gave black people the right to vote, until
1959, making it one of only six states 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 wasnt 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 included
literacy tests for anyone who wanted to vote in the state and
compulsory public school for Oregonians, a measure targeted at
Catholics.
It wasnt 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 20,000 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 dismantling Vanport, 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 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 died, though some locals formulated a theory that the
housing authority had quietly disposed of hundreds more bodies
to cover up its slow response. The 18,500 residents of
Vanport6,300 of whom were blackhad 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 there had been 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 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, 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 couldnt 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 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 theyd moved in. Other
lenders simply refused to give loans on properties worth less
than $40,000. (The state's attorney general sued Dominions
owners after The Oregonian's story ran; the AP reported that the
parties reached a settlement in 1993 in which Dominions 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
couldnt 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 citys 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 Albinas 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 wasnt 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 havent given us credit for it...We never envisioned
the government would come in and mainly assist whites...I didnt
envision that those young people would come in with what I
perceived as an attitude. They didnt come in [saying] We want
to be a part of you. They came in with this idea, were here
and were in charge...Its 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
quothe 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 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
Oregons racial history arent addressed. Nicholson, of the
Urban League of Portland, says that when the black community has
tried to organize meetings on racial issues, community members
havent 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
its 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
Joes was in negotiations to open a new store in Albina. The
Portland Development Commission, the citys urban-renewal
agency, offered the company a steep discount on a patch of land
to entice them to seal the deal. But the Portland African
American Leadership Forum wrote a letter protesting the
development, arguing that the Trader Joes was the latest
attempt to profit from the displacement of African Americans in
the city. By spending money incentivizing Trader Joes to locate
in the area, the city was creating further gentrification
without working to help locals stay in the neighborhood, the
group argued. Trader Joes pulled out of the plan, and people in
Portland and across the country scorned 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? Its gone,
its in the past, its 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 isnt 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.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/racist-
history-portland/492035/