[Editor's Note: The following article is part of BlackOut: A Five-Year Retrospective on Portland’s Racial Justice Movement, a joint publication from Donovan Scribes and the Portland Mercury. Written exclusively by Black Portlanders, the purpose of BlackOut is to remember and reflect on the May 25, 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of police, and the 100+ days of protests in Portland that same year. You can find BlackOut in print at more than 500 locales citywide, inserted inside the Mercury's Food Issue. You can read all the BlackOut articles here.]

When you think of resistance in Oregon, Teressa Raiford’s name stands out. As the founder of Don’t Shoot Portland, she has led one of the most active Black Lives Matter movements in the state since the 2014 police-killing of Mike Brown, using art and education to mobilize community action. Her mentee, rapper and activist Glenn Waco, entered the movement around the same time, blending sharp lyricism with street-level organizing. I brought them together at Don’t Shoot Portland’s The BLACK gallery in the Pearl District to reflect on the timeline from Ferguson to George Floyd, and how their work continues to evolve.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Scribes: Most people in Northeast Portland know about the “possum incident.” You were a kid when that happened. What do you remember in that moment, and how did that change for you? How did your views change as you became an adult?

Raiford: On March 13, 1981, seven police officers, or seven cars of police, rolled up to my grandmother's restaurant—the Burger Barn on Martin Luther King—and discarded some carcasses of possums they had shot.

My grandpa was really good friends with the police commissioner at the time, Charles Jordan… because Jordan was the Black police commissioner; the first and last Black police commissioner we’ve had in Portland.

So he calls Jordan, and the commissioner put the cops on leave and started this whole investigation, and the entire Portland Police Bureau went on strike. They literally stopped working, and protested against the community because they didn't want accountability. 

What I learned in my research is that the groups who were organizing against the violence that was happening with the police, started fighting each other because of all their different biases, and because you know, at the time, we didn't know about COINTELPRO. But you had all these different things triggering these eruptions of people organizing and really building a front against violence and racism, and that just kind of stayed with me.

Can you say more about how [your nephew] helped lead you into activism?

Raiford: I was raised here, and was raising my children here, but, I believe it was 2007, my cousin Deonte got killed right after my grandmother died, and I got out of here with my kids. I was like, “I'm not going to let them think this is normal,” because… up until that time, so many friends, relatives, and people I knew were dying, and there weren't any investigations. It was being ignored as “Black on Black crime” or gangs, and [all these reactionary programs] just popped up as soon as funding came with it.

When I first came home, I’d been working for a CPA in Texas for 15 years, so I saw [the funding mechanisms] as racketeering. I was like, “Oh, wait a minute, y'all making money off dead children.” Like, what's going on here? 

That's when I realized there was a problem. After my nephew’s death [in 2010], I was like, “It's not just the kids being mad at each other. It's not just this inherent violence that exists in places where there's poverty.” It is a systemic mechanism for funding. We're not spending money on education, housing, and you know, jobs. We're spending money on funerals, police.

2014—that's when Mike Brown gets killed in Ferguson, and when Don't Shoot Portland also forms.

Raiford: We had already been organizing, but people were like, “Y'all need to do something.” I didn't want to protest. I was like, “That's not going to do anything.” But then I was like, “Well, shoot, you know, somebody has to say there's a problem.” And when I realized that not only could we organize people to show up, or get those people to go to City Hall, we can get them to go to the state capitol. We could go to Multnomah County. They would go to their school board. When we realized we could help people learn how to assert their experience… that's when I felt that functioning as an activist made sense. Just the protests didn't make sense, but if we were protesting in a way to deliberately break these systems of inequity, then that was worth the time and effort. But I knew we had to educate people on what was going on, and I think—like what me and Glenn are doing now, discussing our thoughts about things—that was one of the first things we started doing as a community.

Glenn, around that same time, you had just released your first album NorthBound, and I know Teressa was part of how you ended up in the streets.

Waco: Yeah, I was just seeing, like everybody, what was going on with police brutality and Mike Brown. It was the day when [Officer Daren Wilson] got acquitted, and I quit my job. I knew that Teressa was having something downtown, and I went searching for her, and lo-and-behold, ran into Mac Smiff, and off we went. On that day, Teressa handed me a bullhorn, and I just stuck by her side ever since. 

Your music was already speaking to the struggle—not just in North Portland, but what's going on for Black folks. So how did your view on music as a tool for activism change when you started protesting?

Waco: It's a form of communication… whether you rapping, whether you’ve got a bullhorn in your hand… it's a message. My favorite rappers are storytellers, like Tupac, Lupe Fiasco, Nas…. It's all people that actually talk about something. And I felt like, “Okay, we could talk about it all day, but you could actually get the experience by being right there. 

Raiford: Those statements, those feelings, go further than my protest chant. I can say, “Hands up, don't shoot!” all day. But when he drops a verse that's connecting to the humanity, or to the loss, or to the community, that takes it further—that connects to somebody, and then they start responding.

Don't Shoot has been rooted in art. Why do you think art is so important to movement building? 

Raiford: Because I figured if I'm hanging out with a kid and they’re talking about their ideas, I could show ‘em how their goals could become a reality. Like you could be 15 years old, and be a millionaire selling bow ties. I can give you hope. Here's some canvas, some paint, some studio time. We have an art gallery. We got a Black cultural library, we do archives. We're doing things to document our expressions in art, so that we can have a place to land with our trauma and not have to take it with us everywhere we go—because we are no longer tolerating that.

How did you organize when you first learned about George Floyd’s death? 

Raiford: I'm getting calls. My inbox is wild. My friend Danielle, who was like my daughter, is pregnant, and these officers are tear gassing us. And I was like, “Wait a minute, we have a pandemic.” Why would they be using tear gas if we're not supposed to exacerbate COVID. Why would they use tear gas, or any kind of force against us? So then I started calling health administrators, and I was like, “Hey, can you give me a report? I need to be able to show up in a way that creates a barrier against this violence.” So instead of being down there with the bullhorn and all that other stuff, the banner we used was science. 

I was happy to be able to work on that alongside Arya Mormon, ZaDora Williams, and Dr. Anita Randolph. Mayor Ted Wheeler took a minute, but eventually, after the wildfires, he banned the use of tear gas, and y'all ended up winning your lawsuit, right?

Raiford: Our injunction was approved. We had an injunction against the city [for tear gas], and what was he going to do—violate the injunction like the Trump administration did? So he kind of took credit for it in a way, because CBS News, The Atlantic, Washington Post, all these people are talking about [our] tear gas report. And then he went out one night and got tear gassed, and from that point on, everybody was like, “Portland's mayor stopped the tear gas,” and I was like, “That's wild.” Like, “He's out here, and he's so bold and strong, and he's taking care of us.” The erasure is real.

Watch the full interview and stream a special live performance of Glenn Waco’s 2020 single “Willie Lynchings.”

Teressa Raiford is the founder of Don’t Shoot Portland. A human rights activist, artist, consultant and philanthropist, she also owns The BLACK Gallery. 

Glenn Waco, is a community organizer, human rights advocate and hip-hop artist. Glenn began his path in 2014 in activism with Don’t Shoot Portland.