Local Color

[Beep] This is my home. I was born in Portland. I went to high school and college here. And I worked as a television reporter in this market for 20 years before I came across this story. By then, it was almost too late to tell it. The problem is we should have been doing this 15 or 20 years ago because all of those who really could contribute, they're dead now. And I'm damn near dead, so when I'm gone I don't know who you're gonna do, who you're going to talk to... Almost 80 years old, Otto Rutherford knows a history of Portland and Oregon most people, black or white, have never heard. "It is sad because as I say the young people think that everything has been just like it is now and it's a far cry from being right but it isn't. It isn't. There was a time when Portland had a reputation as the most openly racist city

outside the South, a time in Portland Oregon when theaters, restaurants and hotels were segregated or off limits to African-Americans, when discrimination in jobs in housing was practiced openly, and Black people knew better than to apply. Portland became, after the war years, known as the worst place on the Pacific Coast to be black and unemployed, looking for work. I do remember the signs downtown, "We don't serve Negroes, Jews or dogs". Oh yeah, right downtown Portland. Yeah. Most all of the properties in Portland, particularly those under development, all stated, "No Blacks. No Filipino. No Orientals, and so forth. And your titled insurance stated that you could not sell

because they were not supposed to own property. We were an extreme minority and minorities were just almost like non-people. Non-people. Um-hmm. You were hands, and that was it. You could, be as smart as the next man and still you wouldn't be employed as a teacher. Grade school, high school, they wouldn't employ you to be a janitor. This is history still alive in the memories of the city's oldest African-Americans. And this next hour is an introduction to what they endured, how it was in Portland and Oregon and how it began to change. You listen to all the

noise here, and you think well what it would be like with trolleys and horse drawn vehicles, and I think would be a little better. Much better. It smelled better too. I used to like the smell of the stables, the hay. The fire department you know they had all horses and then that was quite a sight, and that pump came in, that smoke billowing out of that big (unintelligible). Otto Rutherford was a child in the years before World War One, a time when the center of Portland's small Black community was here in the shadow of Union Station, and Black-owned businesses lined Northwest Broadway. Dad used to have his barber shop on that corner where it says "parking". Barber shop on the Broadway side and confectionary and men's haberdashery on the Flanders Street side. Well down on on Glisan there was a grocery store right across from the post office,

a very, very busy little store. And then across the street from the post office on the Broadway side there was a shoemaker. And he'd had that business for a long time. And these are all Black businesses, yeah. Then of course you had your, uh, billiard parlor here and there, one across from the post office, and one over on 6th Street. Then they had, before Prohibition, you had one or two saloons too. The census of 1920 counted more than a quarter of a million people in what was virtually a white city. Through Otto Rutherford's youth, for every Black person in Portland, there were 150 white people. The local gathering place for Blacks was the Golden West Hotel. The hotel catered to the porters and dining car waiters who came in from nearby Union Station. But the Golden West was more than that.

This was a community center. People would come down here on a Sunday. They had a ice cream parlor here too, you see, on the Broadway side, on the corner and after church, the Baptist church next door so to speak...it was a chance to see your friends who, that we lived all over the city, and the only time we saw one another was at church. Of course if you were fraternally inclined you might be a lodge brother or sister. But this was a Mecca for them. Eat the ice cream and go about their business because you wouldn't see another until next Sunday unless there was a funeral. Portland was not the South, but growing up in a white Portland, Otto Rutherford knew the rules imposed by the White majority. His father for example was a Black barber. White men would get haircuts and shaves in a Black shop, but a white barber wouldn't cut a black man's hair.

Unlike the South, Blacks could vote and there were no segregated buses or trolleys, no segregated drinking fountains or restrooms. Black and white children went to school together in Portland, though Portland refused to hire any Black teachers. In hospitals, Blacks were only admitted in emergencies, and then they were kept separate from the White patients. Local skating rinks had a day set aside for Black skaters only. Public swimming pools like the one at Jantzen Beach refused to admit blacks. The theaters, like the Broadway Theater, they had a rope across the steps going to the balcony and you could go to the matinee for a quarter and they would drop the rope and send me and my friend upstairs. "Get up there." We'd be the only ones up there. (Unintelligible.) They just didn't even want you in there. The Egyptian Theater on the corner of Union Avenue and Russell,

that's a little ole nickel (unintelligible) show. Didn't want you in there...If you did go, send you up in the balcony. I never had my foot in the place. And always there was the problem of restaurants. In Portland, white restaurants wouldn't serve Black people. No. Go to a Chinese restaurant. I grew up on Chinese food, as far as restaurants were concerned and the Greeks down on, uh, Second, they had ice cream parlors. They would cater to you. But the first class restaurants, no they would not. What did that mean? That'd mean you didn't go. LaGrande, in eastern Oregon, like almost every railroad town across the state, had a few Black families. Her father worked on a railroad section gang and Ellen Torrance Law (?) remembers traveling across Oregon.

Some of the towns had signs: "Do not let the sun catch you". You couldn't stay in town overnight. Throughout Eastern Oregon, southern Oregon you were refused service in most of the restaurants. You could not stay in the motels. So when you travel across the state then you slept in your car, took a little bit of time off the side of the road and slept in your car, or kept driving on through. You'd gas up and drive on through 'til you got to somebody's house. And these words were passed on through the years: Well, you can stay at the Torrance's. They'll let you stay overnight or you can stay at the Smith's in Baker. They'll keep you. Now these weren't hotels and so on, and we talk about sanitation, and this and that and the other terms of stayin'...You just stayed in somebody's house because you had to cross country. Catherine Bogle's son grew up to be a Portland city commissioner, but as a Black child, Mrs. Bogle's introduction to Oregon prejudice was at the south end of the

state. I went to school in Coos Bay because my father was transferred to that area, and that was a period of time when not anybody spoke to me on the playground. And for one solid year I didn't have any companionship. In classes I would wave my hand and I was never called on. I think maybe two or three times I was able to recite in class. This is a conspiracy of students and teachers. And I was nine years old, and that's tough, and at, uh, exercise time on the playground I played alone. The other girls played jump rope. The other girls played jacks. My mother bought me a ball and jacks. And I sat in a corner and I played by myself. And that's hard. I didn't know until later that we were there the same year that the Coos Bay area

that they had hanged a Black man. They lynched him. That was in that same period of time. And that was the reason for a intense way of treating me at a distance. No one wanted to be associated with someone who had been of the same color. I don't know what the reason was but he didn't have a trial, I understand. Catherine Bogel was growing up at a time when Oregon's Ku Klux Klan was at its peak. The Klan elected a governor in 1922. And in Portland this photo survives. Mayor George Baker, the chief of police and sheriff posing with local leaders of the KKK. "Portland had a very bad reputation around the racial issues.

Portland, and probably deservedly so because..." Darrell Milnor, head of the Black History Department at Portland State University: "Oregon had the worst of the reputations, and a lot of that goes back to the 1840s and 50s when. When Oregon adopted Black exclusion laws and set kind of an environment and a mentality that was going to let Blacks know from the start that the intention was to make Oregon a homeland for whites. Early Oregon pioneers had adopted exclusion laws. All slaves in Oregon were declared free. But the exclusion laws said all Blacks had to leave. The penalty for staying in Oregon was a whipping. With statehood in 1859, Oregon adopted a Constitution. The original document, kept in a vault in Salem, includes a Bill of Rights. And Article 1 section 35 of the Oregon Bill of Rights says free Blacks and mulattoes cannot come to Oregon or make contracts

or own property. But there had been free blacks in Oregon from its earliest days, and more came by wagon and ship. After 1883 they came by rail, including some 75 Black men hired to work at the Portland hotel. Yet Oregon voters waited until 1926 before repealing the anti-Black section of the Oregon Constitution. In 1931 this restaurant opened on northeast Sandy Boulevard. "Coon" is a synonym for "nigger". At the Coon Chicken, customers entered through the mouth of what the management called a giant coon head. Local blacks who protested the name, the entryway, and the whole premise of the restaurant were ignored and the Coon Chicken Inn thrived through the Depression. The great depression of the 1930s destroyed local Black businesses. Black business people depended on Black customers for their trade and when the Depression hit,

Blacks were squeezed out. Blacks who had traditionally been in positions like, you know, busboys or cooks or waiters, waitresses, elevator operators, those jobs that whites would not touch in generations before and pretty much left to the hands of Blacks, now whites were moving into those jobs and Blacks were being moved out. So the economic realities of the 30s really had a very damaging effect on that kind of stability that we had in the Black community, economically speaking. Now a grocer, he would cater to you. Go to department stores over town, they would take your business but they wouldn't employ you. Oh, they'd employ you to be a janitor or the maid but as a salesperson, no. They'd hire you to mop out and wash the windows, but salesmen, no. What kind of jobs were available? As I said, janitors, bootblacks,

waiters, domestics, and red caps, porters at the depot. A legend in Portland's black history is the number of college graduates who found careers carrying bags at Union Station. Catherine Bogle remembers the opportunity she saw as a job hunter. A high school graduate, a young woman looking for work in Portland in the late 1930s. Everyone who saw us looked at us as if we were demented, in the first place, to think that we might even work there. What did they say to you? What did they say? We do not hire colored people or we have no such employment in a very, very, uh method is to say the very idea of your thinking of coming in here looking for work. Eventually Mrs. Bogle took the only job Black women were offered. For women housework, domestic, domestics. They worked for people

who lived, as we called it, the west side. They did housework. Well they weren't babysitters and they didn't call them nannies, but they took care of the children. That's what they did and that was the only thing unless they were to be a maid in a store, or in a theater. They always had a maid in the ladies room in the theaters in those days. But, other than that, nothing. Oh there were Oh yeah I do recall there were two ladies. I guess you would call midwives now. I don't know what they called them then, but assist the mothers having children because the hospitals wouldn't let you come in. While Catherine Bogle was looking for work in Portland, Ellen Torrance Law had graduated from high school in LaGrande and enrolled at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where there were problems too. You couldn't live with white girls. No, not at that time. Not at that time. We're

talkin' about 1936 at our great University of Oregon. How did they explain that? I don't know if there really was any explanation other than you need to be four. University students in Eugene lived four to a room on campus but that year there were only three Black women enrolled. Freshmen weren't supposed to live off the campus. But they made an exception for us. Young women like Ellen law endured segregation and hardship, believing education promised a better life. Our father had stressed education, that he'd brought us from Arkansas to get one. He always said get your education, get it up here, and he'd point to his head, and it can't be taken away from you. That was so ingrained that I was determined that I was going to finish the University of Oregon. Ellen Law got her degree in 1941. Trained as a teacher,

it would be years before she could get a job in the Portland schools. Parents understood the value of education but they also knew what it was worth in Oregon. Oh Lord yes. I should say so. No parent wanted his child to be hampered in progressing in life like he was. No no no no. The mothers worked in a private family and the fathers did whatever they did, you know, waiters or (unintelligible) boarders. But they saw to it that their children were educated. They did like my parents did. When their child got out, uh, graduated from high school, sent 'em east to school or south to school. There was no point in staying here if you wanted to enter a profession, 'cause there was no profession to enter. So you left and went somewhere else and went to college. You went to college and you stayed east or south. The depression had killed most of the Black businesses along Northwest Broadway.

The 2000 Blacks who stayed in Portland were working for the railroads, or they were waiters or janitors or domestics. A gentleman's agreement among whites was pushing to isolate the black population in the Albina neighborhood. It was a low point for Blacks in Portland. And then came the war. Portland, Oregon, and a busy day for Mr. and Mrs. Walter Harris. He's a shipyard janitor, and today, the proudest man in Oregon. In an employee's lottery, Harris won the right to select the christening sponsor for the yard's first completed maritime-commissioned freighter, and Harris picked Mrs. Harris. So there are flowers and all the trimmings for the the first colored women ever to sponsor an American launching. (cheering, and ship whistles) Then, home. Just time for Mr. Harris to get back

in the (unintelligible). And who wouldn't be a little forgetful on such a busy day? Portland built ships by the hundreds during World War Two, and the demand for workers in the Portland shipyards changed the city forever. The war siphoned off young white males onto the battlefields all over the world. And to support that war effort you still needed the employment foundation, and so you turned to non-traditional sources of labor to meet those, to meet those labor needs of wartime industry. You turned to females and you turned to ethnic minorities. Historic photos from the early 1940s focus on the novelty of women working in wartime production. There is far less documentation of the change for African-Americans, but overnight Portland's Black population increased tenfold. Magic Carpet specials carried trainloads of workers to Portland from the east and the south.

The population would grow by 100,000 whites and 25,000 Black people, whites and Blacks and their families recruited to the shipyards of Portland. When America needed those Blacks in different roles and put those Blacks in different roles then that was the process that began this self-examination and it was a very, very difficult time period for America, not only the war but really calling into question those things that had been unquestioned for so many generations on the part of most whites. At the shipyard most Blacks were hired as laborers at the bottom in skills and pay. The money at the shipyards was in the skilled jobs, as ironworkers, electricians and plumbers, the union jobs the new Black Portlanders wanted to apply for. The Boilermakers...I think this article here has a lot union admission refused to worker. Yeah, that was the emphasis. Get rid of 'em! Give them any type of entree into the system, they won't go home after the war.

The, uh, that was the attitude of the unions. That was the attitude of the unions, and some might say the general populace. Yeah. Blacks were not treated equally. In the shipyards, the local boilermakers union took a "whites only" stand, and McKinley Burtt remembers plotting to strike the shipyards. Nobody in this part of the country ever heard of Blacks striking, okay? And we threatened to strike the shipyard. And even though we weren't ,didn't dominate the crafts and trade, laborers were a significant element there. So the FBI would be watching the bridge, Interstate bridge, and this activity's going over, over, going on mainly over at the Vancouver shipyard. That's where I began work. So the FBI watching the bridge, what we did, we got rowboats and at night we would row across the Columbia to the outfitting docks over there, and then we'd hold secret meetings in the, uh (unintelligible) in the bottom depths of the ship. We (unintelligible)

I'd, uh, maybe got 10 or 20 years just for... Yeah! Yeah! For trying to get your rights as a worker? And if you're in a war effort you see there's got to interject. You weren't thinking about a strike? I'm thinking about it, advertising, calling for it! During wartime! In Russia you'd a been shot immediately! There was no strike but the government's anti-discrimination policy was ignored. The boilermakers who controlled most of the shipyard jobs forced blacks into a phony auxiliary union. For as long as the war lasted Blacks might have the jobs and the income. But after the war, inevitably, not being union member, you would be unemployed. The new wartime population, Portland's new labor force, white and Black, needed housing. New public housing went up almost overnight. The largest development was Vanport, in the flood plain south of Jantzen Beach. Through

the war years, Vanport was the second largest city in Oregon, a multi-racial community that today is only a memory. Periodically I have dreams about Vanport, and I can see it as it actually was, vividly, vivid dreams in color. You know I can see the schools, I can see the area just like it was, you see. The population of Port was three quarters white, one quarter Black. Just as in the shipyards, most of the surviving photographs show only whites. Fred and Regina flowers know better. Well I think everybody, I think we are phenomenal because we grew up together as children. (unintelligible) Then we met at Vanport, as kids, at Marshall School in 1945. You know in the sixth grade. Vanport housing was segregated, with neighborhoods that were either all white or all Black. Like Portland, the schools were integrated. The difference at Vanport: the administration would hire black teachers. Basically most of the

Blacks were living in this area here, and the whites had units that were much better constructed and much more like a house in their appearance. Nonetheless, the close proximity of the people living in this area, that was called a city itself, actually brought about social integration. I mean it actually, you know, they shopped together they went to school together. And even though there was separation in the housing itself, they still had to cross each other paths going and coming and therefore people made friends. People learned things about people. Myths were destroyed, you know. It didn't really bother me because our socialization was in school, very well integrated, no problem whatsoever. So it didn't really bother me. We'd go home at night. We played with all Black kids or whatever. It didn't really bother us at all. We, we didn't deal with the racial issue as our parents did because we were kids! But race was an issue.

The war had brought a new and larger Black population. One result in Portland: "white trade only" signs blossomed. They had the audacity to put up a sign: "We cater to white trade only". So you didn't go in there. Do you remember seeing many of those signs? Oh Christ yes, up and down 6th Street, in the neighborhoods and stores. Before the war, Portland's few Blacks knew where they weren't welcome. Newcomers had to be taught. Newcomers, and as always, the children. I would go in some places and they would say things like "We don't serve colored boys at the fountain." And so we'd stay away from those kind of neighborhoods. As a youngster William Hilliard remembers riding bicycles with friends in Southeast Portland. And it was a hot day and we stopped to get a lemon Coke. You probably remember the fountains. You'd have cherry cokes, lemon cokes and all that. And the guy wouldn't serve us. Said he did not

serve, I think he said colored or Negroes or something, at the fountain. We got that same thing. And there was an ice cream man delivering ice cream bars. He sort of heard this, and when we came out he asked us, come over to his truck, said I heard that in there and here you guys have some ice cream so he gave us some ice cream. This was during World War II and we were so upset over that that late that evening we went back and busted this next door's window. Now that was not a nice thing to do, but we were so angry that in our neighborhood, or a neighborhood close to us, we were not allowed to sit at the counter. Hilliard learned early about prejudice. When I was a youngster in Portland I could not carry the Oregonian in my neighborhood because I lived in a predominantly white neighborhood and they just told me the dealer out there said well we can't afford to have a colored boy delivering papers here. You can sell them on the corners but you can't, you can't deliver them. The irony of this story of course is that nearly 50 years later William

Hilliard is the Oregonian's editor. In 1945 the Oregonian saw a serious problem that after the war as many as half of Portland's Negro war workers were planning to stay on, in a city where there were few jobs and restricted housing. Portland's mayor, Earl Riley, had openly declared the city could absorb only a minimum of Negroes without upsetting its regular life. With the war ending the Portland City Club predicted widespread unemployment for Negroes and tensions which are very likely to become explosive. Civil rights worker Russell Payton remembers. Well, the bankers and the business people became very concerned. There were 25,000 who were recruited here, 25,000 Black people in Portland. 15,000, I'm giving general numbers, 15,000 went home.

That left about 10,000 here with no jobs available. Now what do you think the businessmen, the bankers and the rest of them thought, Of what might happen with 10,000 people, without jobs or money? So, they wrote and called the Urban League in New York and asked for help. And Edwin C. Barry, or Bill Barry as we know him, was sent out here. Now nearly forgotten, through the late 40s, Bill Berry would be the leader of Oregon's civil rights movement. And so they had a meeting and he talked to them and they wanted to know how much will it cost us to get these people sent back home. Now as you know Bill Berry was pretty smart. He said,

Well, I'm going home. I'm not interested. He said if you're interested in integrating the community and seeing these people got jobs, then I'm interested. Well, they hashed that around for a while and finally agreed to it. And that was the start of the Urban League in Portland. But they were called originally to get those people out of town. Bill Berry's top priority for Portland's new Urban League was jobs. With peace, the inevitable arrived. A third to a half of the Black population was unemployed. Portland became, after the war years, known as the worst place on the Pacific Coast to be Black and unemployed, looking for work. Nathan Nickerson, who would later lead the local Urban League himself, speaks from personal experience.

Nickerson, with a degree in chemistry, remembers finding work with a crew of Black janitors in North Portland. And I became a member of a custodial crew, some of whom are still alive, only a couple now, which had three master degrees Blacks on it and myself and another bachelor crew, all Black, with a white foreman with a high school education. College degrees were useless for Blacks in Portland until the summer of 1945. And I talked with Bill Berry and that was one of the first things on his agenda was to discuss hiring Black teachers. Well I was almost in at that particular time. To his surprise, Robert Ford got the first teaching job in the Portland system. I applied for the job on a piece of notebook paper, knowing that I wouldn't get it. Later they sent me a form to fill out and I thought it was a formality. And after that they sent me out

to the old Eliot School, to be interviewed. And I had begun feeling that well, there might be a possibility. After the success of the Vanport schools, Portland was ready to risk hiring Black teachers, but taking no chances, it hired only a few and only in elementary schools. It would be years later when Robert Ford would also become the first Black to teach in the Portland high schools. And remember Ellen Law who came out of LaGrande to attend the University of Oregon? She advanced on Ford's success. So we were the first two and I was the first female on the high school level. And see, he started in 1945 so it took him 10 years to get in high school. Took me 13 years to get hired period. And then 15 before I got into the high school, which was 1956. In the late 40s a few job openings in the Portland school system were an exception.

The U. S. Post Office was hiring Blacks too, and so was the Bonneville Power Administration. All three were exceptions. When a grocery chain hired a Black checker, it made the newspapers. In a story for the Oregonian in 1947, writer Stuart Holbrook made a tour with Bill Berry, interviewing employers who wouldn't hire blacks. Their reasons: objections from both customers and white workers. The article described Blacks who had found work in Portland as pioneers. The pictures of exemplary Black job holders included Otto Rutherford, a machine operator for Dehen Knitting Mills. The article argued that the percentage of lazy, worthless or vicious Blacks was probably no greater than among the white population. Lazy, worthless and vicious are an accurate reflection of many white's opinions of Blacks in the 1940s. Bill Berry condemned a state that on one

hand called Blacks shiftless but on the other hand wouldn't let them work. as Belton Hamilton remembers, He would say if you arrange it so that they don't have any jobs then you're going to have to support them. Now, you can, because if they can't work and they have to live, one way of living would be to steal, and if they steal they're going to steal from you because you are the only one who got it, so you'll be supporting them. If they don't steal then they have to beg and they are going to be begging, if it's welfare or charity or other form of charity, it's going to be your money that you're using to support them. So you have a choice either to give them an opportunity to work and support themselves or for you to support them. What Bill Berry did for Portland in particular, and for in a larger sense for Oregon in general, was to give whites an opportunity, who did have good intentions, who did want to see things change, he gave them an opportunity to work in effective ways to bring about those changes.

Black people were out of work and many were isolated, still living outside Portland at Vanport. Then on a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1948, Vanport was gone. (dramatic music) Flood crisis in the Pacific Northwest, from Oregon to British Columbia, from Idaho to the coast, come reports of disaster, the worst of all from Vanport, Oregon. Here flood waters of the swollen Columbia River broke through a railroad (unintelligible) and drowned a city. Almost 19,000 people lost their homes, completely ruined in one tragic hour, cars submerged, houses smashed, people trapped by a twelve foot deluge of muddy water. President Truman declared whole regions of the Pacific Northwest to be disaster areas, as their series of flood tragedies reached its dramatic worst in the death of Vanport.

Now my parents were living right over here. And so my mother said about 4:30 or quarter to five, you know, she had been hearing noise and cars and people moving about. Some people were passing by with suitcases and clothes wrapped in sheets, and she said, "Well we live upstairs. We don't have to worry about anything." So she said about a quarter to five she looked right down there and she saw several two story units floating this way. So she woke my dad up. He's taking an afternoon snooze and she woke him up, said, we have got to get out of here. My mother all of a sudden the kids will come running down Cottonwood Street, coming from the west coming this way and said, "The dike is broken! Run run run!" Now we didn't hear the siren at all. We just heard from word of mouth and everybody started moving, I never seen,

and mother, and we was moving pretty fast. My mother was telling everybody to get out. We come up on, got up on the top of Denver street, and Mama kept saying, "Don't look back! Don't look back!" And of course you know as a 13 year old, you gonna look back. And I looked back. I never seen so much water. You know, you just froze, you just kept looking at those huge, huge waves, and these houses were riding on these waves, and once in a while if I can remember, I think I saw people on top of the roof. They climbed all the way to the top of the roof. You know. I say I don't profess to be a big Christian. But the Lord knew what he was doing when he punched the hole in that dam and flooded Vanport, because you had a most segregated society out there in Vanport. So when the flood came those people had to come someplace, so they came on into the city, and

that kinda helped buoy up our strength a bit, the Black strength. But in Portland there was what one Black leader called a well-organized plan, long in planning, to set aside the Albina district for Negroes. Albina, and nowhere else. I think there was a feeling that the Portland realty board members, the key people on that pretty much were in agreement that this was a good place for Blacks to go. Portland historian Kimbar (?) MacCall (?) : They were prepared, you see, to move all the Blacks out of Vanport and essentially shuffle them into the nearest area which would be the North, North Portland area or Northwest Portland area, Northeast Portland area, you see, and because there was a lot of run down real estate there of, uh, and it was, prices were cheap. And they would do the least amount of damage to the areas where, where prices or property values

had the greatest potential. Article 34 of the code of ethics for Portland realtors pledged never to sell to members of any race or nationality whose presence would hurt property values. In 1949 a local realtor was accused of violating that ethical code, for selling this southeast Portland home to a Pullman car porter in his Cherokee Indian wife. The agent was found guilty of unethical conduct and expelled from the organization of professional realtors. I've forgotten what year that law was taken off the books so that Orientals and Blacks could buy property. However, a real estate agent could refuse to sell. We had one agent here, Frank McGuire. He was notorious for that. But after the war days, and we had all these Black people here from Vanport. He found out he was losing money

so he condescended to start selling houses down around Albina, down in that area. They made all kinds of effort to confine Black people to certain areas, or certain streets, and certain blocks within those streets. Across Greater Portland, so-called "covenants" still haunt property deeds today. The 55-year-old deed to this house in Lake Oswego is typical. It forbade Chinese, Japanese, or Negros except that persons of said races may be employed as servants. Restrictions written for Cedar Hills in 1946 declare, "Only Caucasians shall use or occupy the properties, except in the capacity of domestic servants, chauffeurs, or employees." Civil rights laws have superseded the covenants but they remain in the records, a testament to the times when the houses were built.

All this was done openly. White realtors refused to sell to Blacks. White employers refused to hire them. White restaurants refused to serve them. And at the same time in the Portland Public Schools, young Blacks were being taught to fail. I remember when I was a sophomore at Lincoln High School. We had a white teacher there, English teacher, by the name of- well, I can recall her name, it's been so many years ago. Mrs. Watson. I never forget that name. But Mrs. Watson, we studied about George Washington Carver who was of course a scientist, you know, a great scientist, a Black scientist, and in the course of the study in the book that we had to read, she got up one day and made it very clear to an entire class that George Washington Carver was a rare exception for a Black person, or as they would say then, for a Negro, and that

we could not look to see this happening anytime soon with a Black person or a Negro with a scientific mind excelling like that, she'd say. And she, I never shall forget, she said, "For the most part Negroes are good at dancing and athletics." She said, "That is where they excel." And she looked right at me, you know, as if to say, "Now that's what you ought to go after, that you should be an athlete or a dancer." Well you know, and I was the only Black kid in the class, but you know, she will never know. No one will never know what that did to me on the inside, you see, because every kid in the class turned and looked at me, you know, and I actually thought that she, I actually think that she thought she was doing a service to me. I really believe she felt like she was saying to me something that would help me. You know, "Don't waste your time trying to be a writer, don't waste your time trying to be a scientist, don't waste your time trying to be an author, or a teacher, or a professor,

or or or a banker, you know, or a businessman. You'd do well in athletics and you have rhythm, you can dance, and this is where your people excel," you know. And she named off a few athletes and a few entertainers, you know. And you know, so, but that was, that was not the only incident like that, but that was one of the most crushing that I experienced. Well, it was an attitude that was basically kind of, they didn't, they really didn't think much about it. A lot of these people were probably unaware of their prejudices, you see. That's the thing, you see. It was so built into our society. After the war there were Black people in Portland in numbers that made people notice. Many had fought in the war or made good wages in wartime production. They had new expectations of how they would live and how they would be treated. Pre-war Portland was never coming back. While a generation before as a young Black woman, Catherine Bogle couldn't find a job, by the early

50s when Regina Flowers went looking for work, times had changed. In 1952 when I got out of high school I was hired on the elevator. At Lipman and Wolfe, another major department store. Yes. And in fact they hired a lot of my friends. The first black behind the counter at Lipman's had been hired in 1951. Two years later, Portland's leading department store hired its first Black clerk. Josiah Nunn was a graduate of Lewis and Clark College with a master's degree. Meier and Frank brought him on as a part time clerk. I met the general public every day when I worked at Lipman and Wolfe. But we were told that basically Blacks were not welcome in the tea room up on the tenth floor which was very exclusive, you know, the tea room, and we couldn't figure out why because the same food they served us up in the employee's cafeteria, it was up in the, excuse me, it was up in the tea room! It was slop! (laughter) A little sense of humor there.

But, anyway, that was interesting, but they didn't care. I took 'em up there. I took the old babes up there, boy, money oozin' out of the air, you know, I took them up there and no, we had a little tete a tete but never, I never spoke out, because they backed us. We didn't, I didn't have any problems, you know, and I worked off on there until my second child was born, you know. The greatest turning point, the biggest victory in the early years for Blacks was to create those opportunities for white people to examine their own behavior. That's where the struggle began. And that's where, that's where progress began. As long as they didn't have to examine what was normal, then it was not going to change, but providing opportunities for whites and for the country at large to have to consciously focus on this reality and to examine it and make decisions about it, that's where the civil rights movement began. I think the war did it. All of a sudden there was a large increase in the number of non-whites, especially Blacks, in the state of Oregon and specifically in Portland.

And those people coming from the outside were not willing to take the status quo that they ran into when they came into this community. Whites too were changed by the war years and forced to compare the standards of the community with their own. Mark Hatfield was a college student at Willamette University in Salem, and Hatfield tells a story about a visit by singer, actor and political activist Paul Robeson. Before I went into the war and this would have been in1943, 42, 43 period, Paul Robeson was in recital in Salem and I had my fraternity, I asked my fraternity if we could invite him to dinner, and we did, before the concert, and he came. We had a delightful visit with Paul Robeson. I remember that I was one of those who had been selected to help drive him back to Portland, so he could find a room for the night.

He couldn't stay in Salem, the capital city of Oregon. He was not allowed to register in local hotels. Now that was 42, 43 period, and that just hit me like boom between the eyes. I couldn't believe that was happening in my state of Oregon. Five years after the war the change was coming, not immediate, not dramatic, but underway. In 1950 under reform Mayor Dorothy McCullough Lee, the Portland City Council passed a public accommodations law banning discrimination at restaurants, hotels and motels. Immediately signatures were gathered on a referendum. The ordinance went to the voters and in November the city's public accommodations law was repealed at the polls. That was typical of the 50s. You had steps forward you had steps back and then you worked out that kind of direction that race relations would take through that very tumultuous process. So through the 50s Portland began to take steps that would indicate they wanted to get

where they wanted to be in step with kind of the civil rights direction of the country. In 1945 in the Social Worker's Journal, Portland, Oregon was listed as the most discriminatory city north of the Mason-Dixon line. Civil rights worker E. Shelton Hill: But then if I come back and tell you that in 19 and 51, they were listed as the most improved city in the nation in race relations. But see they had so far to come, you know, so it was already (unintelligible) Blacks began applying pressure at the legislature. Once a joke in Salem, civil rights legislation was now being taken seriously. Ever since 1919, civil rights legislation has been put in the hopper except once. Every legislator we had a bill in the hopper. Nobody got paid!

It was all so-called "volunteer". Take a trip to Salem. Find somebody with an automobile. pile in, and try the halls of the legislature. Try to collar somebody. But that couldn't of happened if we hadn't had, if we hadn't had some good liberal white friends. We couldn't have done it by ourself. We were too few in number. But we had some good friends, good friends. They're the ones we kept prodding and prodding. They helped us get the bill through. In 1949 the bill was a Fair Employment Practices Act. An all white Oregon Legislature started the process that would outlaw discrimination in hiring. It was the first in a series of new civil rights laws in Oregon. There was a, there was a new leadership too, you see, in the legislature at this point. I think there were a number of young legislators who like, Alf Corbett was one for example, there were a whole bunch of people, and Mark Hatfield, they were (?) like I do. It was a bipartisan effort essentially who really felt

strongly. I give Mark a lot of credit. It was a young Mark Hatfield who carried Oregon's first public accommodations bill to passage in the house in 1953. The new law finally opened hotels, motels and restaurants to minorities. Hatfield remembers the doors to the house opening after that vote. Well, when those doors opened, and there was that mass of smiling, joyful African-Americans crying. I mean everybody cried. I mean they came pouring into (unintelligible). They surrounded our desks. We hugged and we kissed. People were weeping, you know, weeping tears of joy. Nobody was self-conscious about it. But I only say that because it, it goes back to the time we were in battle, that that kind of driving spirit and that contagious spirit of those folk

who kept us infected on it and they played an awfully important role, played an an awfully important role. Their numbers weren't great. Perhaps if you would say politically speaking they weren't of great influence, but boy, they were powerful, powerful motivators. In 1957 and 1959 the state legislature followed up with bills attacking discrimination in housing. Housing. Accommodations. Jobs. All of the new laws reflected a recognition of an old wrong. Black people had been held back by barriers imposed by Whites. For life to get better for Blacks in Oregon, we Whites had to change. And this was the beginning. But it took a long time. It was a long time coming. We had to have some funerals. That's the best solution. Some of the old guard...let 'em die. They had to die. You're talking about some of the White people who simply

would not accept Black people. No, they would not. That was the problem. As I say, you have to have funerals to solve some problems. It's an odd thing. Even at that time there were people who could see beyond the skin color and it was to those people that I would give credit in my life, who looked beyond that and opened their eyes, opened their hearts and opened their homes. The stories you've told, if I'm reading you right, you don't, you're not angry. No, I'm not angry. I regret the time loss and the effort that was put in, just trying to survive, but you see, I'm not angry because I felt that I still got a lot out of my experiences in terms of education and the associations I had.

There's a self-confidence, there's a, uh, there's just kind of an aura of accomplishment that these older Black people have, and I think it's well deserved, and certainly was hard earned, but they've endured things that most people could not have endured and that that gives you a feeling of accomplishment, a feeling of contentment to a degree. They can look back at American history and see conditions and circumstances that simply boggle the modern mind, and they lived through those time periods and they survived through those time periods and they created a reality for the next generation that was going to be very drastically different. And I think that they, you know, they sense that and they understand that and they, they know within their minds and within their, within their hearts, that what they've accomplished has been something very remarkable. I have a little problem with my two grandsons that are grown, practically grown. They take everything for granted, you know. Go where you want, when you want, however you want.

They just think things have always been that way. I tell 'em, "No, no, no, there's been many a bitter tear getting to this point." Some of it sinks in. Some of it doesn't. Typically of that age, I guess. But we have made progress. We have made progress. Here in this little two by four town we have made a great deal of progress. Yeah... (music)

I'm not gonna say color's not gonna stand in your way, though, but look! We, we have problems but we still here. hear