[The following is a reprint of a 2017 Mercury feature by the great Santi Elijah Holley that aptly compares the striking similarities between the Portland race riots of the late ’60s with the political climate of 2017—and especially today.—eds.]
Tensions had been building for weeks.
Portland Police, emboldened by the newly established Intelligence Division, had become a regular presence in North/Northeast’s Albina neighborhood, monitoring civil rights activity and “agitators.” Police relations with Portland’s African American community had never been positive, but in the summer of 1967, two years after the devastating Watts Riots, distrust between the police and the Black community ratcheted to new heights. In the opinion of many local residents, in particular young Blacks, Albina had come to resemble a police state.
“Where else but in Albina do cops hang around the streets and parks all day like plantation overseers?” commented one young man to an Oregonian reporter. “Just their presence antagonizes us. We feel like we’re being watched all the time.”
In North Portland, as in the rest of the country, tensions between police and the Black community were at an all-time high, and the city was primed to explode.
The summer of 1967 was racked by nationwide uprisings. The “long hot summer” saw 159 racially motivated riots across the United States, beginning in June with violent events in Atlanta, Boston, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Tampa, followed in July with more outbreaks in Birmingham, Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, and elsewhere. The largest and most extensive riots occurred in Newark, New Jersey (26 dead, 1,500 arrests) and Detroit, Michigan (43 dead, 7,200 arrests).
By the middle of July it seemed as though Portland would escape the violence sweeping the country, but 50 years ago next month, the city’s decades-long practice of discrimination and displacement had finally reached its boiling point.