So if I come to your job / Take your corn on the cob / And take a couple kernels off / Would that be alright with you?
Andre 3000, What a Job (2007)
Re•pair: to restore by replacing a part or putting together what is torn or broken
IMPOSSIBLE
Rep. Shannon Jones Isadore is the only Black woman in the Oregon Legislature. Her grandfather, a Mississippi-bred World War II veteran, returned to the United States from France after being discharged with honors, first to Louisiana—then Portland, Oregon.
He got a job, built a life here, and planted deep roots across several decades.
In 1978, he fell sick with cancer. It was then he learned he had been denied access to a lucrative Veteran Affairs benefits program offering vets the most valuable asset in this country: land.
“During his time in the VA hospital, he learned of more veterans—some of them with lesser ranks—who had received land grants,” Isadore said last year. “The only difference? They were White, and he was Black.”
The freshman lawmaker was testifying in support of a reparations package that would include a task force to study how reparative policies could be issued in Oregon.
“He died that same year without ever receiving the compensation he was owed,” she continued. “This was especially painful because he and my grandmother were farmers—imagine what they could have done with that land if it had been rightfully allocated to them.”
The reparations package failed. It didn’t even pass out of committee.
Juneteenth spends its fifth year in the sun as a federal holiday this June 19th. However, for many Black communities nationwide, it’s been cause for celebration for more than a century-and-a-half. Born from the cotton fields of Galveston, Texas, this holiday marks the day when enslaved Black people there learned they were finally free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Two. Years. Later.
Despite the horrors of such an embarrassing delay, Juneteenth is above all, a joyous occasion—one that calls us to to imagine beyond the confines of impossibility. It was not long ago the abolition of slavery seemed implausible to most.
How we glare at that notion today.
However, questions still persist: “Who?” “what?” “when?” “where?” “why?” and of course, the classic, “How would we pay for it?” are lobbed around like bombs bursting in air when the question of reparations is posed.
America turns 250 this summer. And yet it seems shackled in its ability, as the wealthiest nation on the planet, to imagine how to pay its debts to those who built the place for free.
However, as Juneteenth teaches us, freedom, even delayed, is not less worthy, nor impossible.
But does Oregon owe such a debt to its Black citizens? Not only is the answer glaringly and irrefutably “yes,” but it’s painfully feasible, too.
Oregon, bearing the distinct disgrace of being the only state in America to ban Black people from living in its borders, today carries with that unseasoned legacy the predictable consequence of having a small Black population—two percent to be exact.
These Exclusion Laws stayed on the books until 1926. Oregon barred Black people from doing business or owning land while simultaneously offering White people up to 300 acres of land simply to move here—talk about a government handout.
The rebels who defied did so at the threat of lawful public whippings.
Such truths are not simply facts of an unpleasant past, but roots tilled, maintained, and nurtured across more than a century-and-a-half.
There are of course exceptions of prosperity, just as there were runaways before Emancipation. But even so, the numbers tell a story of a general truth: The success of Black Oregonians is still being stifled at best, and cannoned at worst.
Education. Housing. Health.
But must this be? The groundwork to a new path has already been well-tilled.
THE GROUNDWORK
“I remember Donovan raising HR-40, reparations. I committed to asking if that priority can be part of the City’s legislative agenda,” read an email from the mayor’s office to me, before a window of possibility flung open. “Please see below that reparations is now an explicit part of City Council’s agenda.”
The year was 2021. The mayor was Ted Wheeler.
To my surprise, my request for the city to lobby the feds for reparations was heeded.
HR-40 is legislation that, if enacted, would impose a national study of the lingering impacts of slavery and anti-Black laws to advance a slate of proposals to remedy these continuing legacies. But, despite being introduced to Congress every year since 1989, the bill has never even advanced to a floor vote.
DC’s delays, however, should not run out the clock on homegrown justice.
Cascadian shockwaves rippled through Portland last year when 27 Albina descendants were finally awarded a $8.5 million settlement from the city, more than four decades after local agencies seized their families homes and businesses for an expansion of Emanuel Hospital which never happened. A lawsuit led by an archivist and librarian who goes by “Byrd,” through her Emanuel Displaced Persons Association 2 (EDPA2) initiative, alleged that her family and others had survived a “real estate massacre” when the city took these properties through the power of eminent domain. The settlement was originally slated to award the descendants $2 million, until Councilor Loretta Smith stepped in and petitioned Wheeler’s successor, Mayor Keith Wilson, to increase the final payout.
“[Past] policies deliberately marginalized Black communities and left lasting scars when residents were pushed out of Albina without reparations, leaving an indelible mark on our city’s history. Our response must be deliberate, comprehensive, and rooted in fairness and justice….” Councilor Smith said at the time.
A Portland State University report commissioned in partnership with EDPA2 found displaced residents would control nearly $100 million in property wealth today—before accounting for commercial assets seized at the time. Among other proposals, the report recommended the city start a restitution task force to begin the work of issuing payments to even more descendants of such harms—this has not happened.
An unrelated estimate from EcoNorthwest says that more than a billion dollars in wealth was siphoned out of parts of Albina from the ’50s through the ’70s due to racist urban renewal policies and broken covenants at a time when 80 percent of the city’s Black residents lived there.
These numbers underline that scores of additional Portlanders have inherited the consequence of this systemic theft, and yet still have never been compensated.
The Portland Housing Bureau’s N/NE Preference Policy is an admirable attempt at redressing some of the impacts of this legacy. This policy offers targeted housing opportunities in the core of this neighborhood to those with deep generational ties to the area. But where this brilliant policy falls short (outside of issuing a check) is accounting for the whole of Oregon’s debt.
REPARATIONS NOW (IT’S POSSIBLE)
From sunset laws and property seizures, to school segregation and entire communities reduced to rubble, cities from Eugene to Medford carry the living memory of a one-sided civil war on Black Oregonians.
In 2018, Rep. Julia Fahey stumbled across something buried in the deed of her Eugene home that jarred her: “No member of any race other than the Caucasian race shall use or occupy any building except as domestics in the home of an owner or tenant.”
That clause was written in 1949.
In response, Rep. Fahey attempted to advance legislation that would wipe such language from deeds statewide, but faced legal barriers in doing so.
Not long after, the Central Oregon Black Leadership Assembly created the Good Deeds Program to assist individual homeowners in removing these shockingly common clauses from their deeds. While the 1964 Fair Housing Act voids these racist covenants from being enforced, they remain proof of ever-constricting forces yet to be truly reconciled today.
Time alone does not unbind us from our debts. Some are codified in paper, some persist through culture. Some remain through negligence, or a belief that time heals all wounds. But one must remember, 167 years ago, Oregon itself did not exist.
However, since Oregon has existed, it has had a reflexive habit of blocking and siphoning money and opportunity out of Black communities far more than it invests in them.
Freedom is not simply the releasing of physical chains. It’s the release of the mental shackles that anchor us to the traditions of corroded and predictable outcomes.
If our state can materialize $600 million on a dime to renovate the Moda Center—an entertainment venue built where dozens of Black folks once owned homes—then surely it can find funds to make its Black citizens whole… no?
The makings of a new day live in the EDPA2 settlement. They live in the city’s commitment to lobby for reparations—and actualizing that commitment here, at home. They live in deciding that good governance is possible, and that good governance is not negligent, nor agnostic, towards the past. Good governance stewards the present, recognizing that potholes are no more a natural phenomenon than wealth gaps.
It is time to fill those holes.
It is time to dress those wounds.
It is time to pay those debts.
It is possible.
And now:
It. Is. Time.
Happy Juneteenth.
Donovan Scribes is an award-winning writer, communications consultant, speaker and producer. A former vice president of the Portland NAACP, he writes on culture, place, and politics. Follow him on Instagram @donovanscribes. Want to keep the conversation going? Email him at donovanscribes@gmail.com.
