OREGON’S AFRICAN AMERICAN history isn’t a sidebar; it’s not something that can be easily compartmentalized away from the rest of the state’s narrative. Oregon has had African American history as long as, well, Oregon has existed. This isn’t to say the state has been a sterling example of integration throughout its history; it hasn’t at all. Instead, it’s worth noting that Oregon grappled with issues like race and slavery just like the rest of the US did in the mid-1800s. This remote frontier area that would eventually attract dysentery-prone wagon trains wasn’t immune or exempt from America’s obsession with race.
THE UNKNOWN CREWMEN
According to Darrell Millner, a Portland State University professor and an expert on African American history during Western expansion, various Spanish and English voyages to Oregon almost certainly had black crewmen. “We’ll probably never know their names,” says Millner, who contends that the vessels of world-spanning empires like Britain and Spain almost certainly included sailors of African descent.
The first American voyage to what would be called Oregon also brought the first black to the region. In 1788 Robert Gray’s ship, Columbia Rediviva, explored the area that would eventually be known as Oregon, and his vessel lent the Columbia River its name. Markus Lopius was a black crew member on Gray’s ship, and while several blacks on various European vessels probably preceded him, he’s the first documented black person to visit Oregon.
YORK
The most well-known American expedition to Oregon also brought along probably the single most visible of Oregon’s historical black people. William Clark (of Lewis and…) hailed from a prominent Virginia family, and when it came time to explore an uncharted section of continent, he took his slave, York, with him.
Most of what we know about York comes from Lewis and Clark’s journals, and historical scholarship on him has tended to follow the racial attitudes of the time. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, depictions of the expedition portrayed York in a stereotypical fashion, ignoring the historical record in favor of prevailing prejudices. Later on, revisionist historians fashioned him into something of a larger-than-life figure, as scholars looked for paragons of African American achievement. What we know for sure is that he was good at communicating with the Native Americans.
“York became a very important diplomatic person,” says Millner. “At a number of points he was probably responsible for the survival of the expedition because he engaged in trading activities [between] the expedition and the Indians when they were otherwise in great danger.”
Unfortunately for York, though, he was not compensated for his efforts. Every member of the Corps of Discovery was paid except him, and Clark would keep him as a slave for another decade.
Today York is portrayed in all manner of monuments and memorials. Most notably, his image looms over pedestrians as they pass the Oregon Historical Society. However, York’s participation in the Corps of Discovery existed in a broader context of exploration, migration, and eventual settlement. His participation in the expedition was certainly significant, but it wasn’t singular. Others followed.
THE FUR TRADE
After the Corps of Discovery returned back East, American and British settlers alit on Oregon in search of fur. Oregon was jointly occupied by both Britain and the US, and Fort Vancouver was the economic center of the territory. Nearly all of Oregon’s economy at that time centered on the acquisition of beaver and otter pelts: a massive global infrastructure all about turning small animals into hats.
“Fur trading was a very dangerous business,” says Millner. “In the fur-trading generation many blacks participated, sometimes as free men and sometimes as slaves. That was the foundation on which the pioneer generation was founded.”
Most of the workingmen, hunters, and laborers who trapped beavers and otters toiled in obscurity. Like the crews of so many ships that came to Oregon, their names and origins are lost to us. One prominent black resident of Fort Vancouver, though, was far from obscure. “[James Douglas] was of mixed racial ancestry, which meant that as far as his generation was concerned he was a black person,” says Millner. After John McLoughlin (the white-haired guy known as the “Father of Oregon” and all that) retired his position as the chief factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Douglas took the job. He’d later become the governor of Vancouver Island and then British Columbia.
That was on the British side of things, though. Up in Canada, a man with African ancestry successfully became governor of a future Canadian province. This is not to say that race relations in British territory were ideal, but things were certainly worse in America.
OREGON’S SLAVES, AND THE CASE OF ROBIN HOLMES
America was swelling west in the years before the Civil War. Most of the early pioneers were poor, working white laborers, but a very small population of those pioneers did, in fact, own slaves. And they took them along into the expanse that would become Oregon.
“Most of [the slaves] were brought to the Willamette Valley, virtually all of them from Missouri in a very early period of immigration beginning in 1843 and ending in 1850,” says R. Gregory Nokes, who outlined the experience of Oregon’s slaves in his book Breaking Chains.
Slavery was not technically legal in the Oregon Territory, and neither was the presence of free African Americans. As of 1844, the territory excluded blacks—slave or not. According to Nokes, slaveholders in Oregon reported holding slaves all the way up until the 1860 census, one year after Oregon became a state.
“To me that shows how little concern there was that anybody was going to enforce this antislavery law. There were so few slaves [by then], maybe 50 at the most, that even if most people were against slavery, it didn’t trouble them that maybe the neighbor down the road had a couple of slaves,” Nokes says.
The most dramatic and personal episode in the Oregon Territory’s history of slavery was the case of Holmes v. Ford—the only slavery case to be tried in Oregon. Like several other slaves, Robin Holmes had been transported by his owner from Missouri to Oregon. For six years he worked (illegally) as a slave in Oregon before finally being freed by his owner, Nathaniel Ford. However, Ford hung onto Holmes’ children.
“Ford held the children for an additional three years,” says Nokes. “There was a law against slavery, but it wasn’t enforced, and really not enforceable. But it was on the book.”
In an unprecedented move, Holmes took legal action against his former master. With the help of Ruben Boise, an abolitionist lawyer, Holmes sued the man who once held him as property. George Williams, a circuit judge who had just recently arrived in the Oregon Territory, ruled in Holmes’ favor. The children, Williams ruled, were being kept as slaves, and Ford was in clear violation of territorial law. The Holmes children, after living in Oregon as slaves for nearly a decade, were finally free.
The case had fallout, though. Holmes won his battle, but it was not without reprisals in Oregon’s larger legal world. After the Holmes case—in which a former slave successfully sued his master—Oregon law was changed to disallow testimony by blacks, making it so African Americans would not be allowed to testify against whites in state courts.
THE FREE-STATE LETTER AND STATEHOOD
When Oregon voters ratified the state constitution in 1857, they did so in a piecemeal fashion. The basic body of the state’s founding document (things like the structure of the legislature, the powers of the governor, etc.) was voted on with a simple up and down vote. However, two issues had not been settled during the constitution’s drafting, and those would be voted on separately from the main body of the document.
The first issue was whether or not Oregon would have slavery at all. The second was whether or not Oregon would allow free blacks to settle in the new state.
Despite the comparatively small population of African Americans in Oregon at the time, race and slavery dominated the political conversation regarding Oregon’s identity. George Williams (the same judge who ruled in the Holmes case) published a vociferous editorial on the front page of the Oregon Statesman just prior to the vote. Called “The Free-State Letter,” Williams’ editorial was indeed a denunciation of slavery—but it’s also a jarring and disorienting document for the modern reader.
In the letter, Williams made it perfectly clear that he was fine with slavery in the South, but that Oregon was another matter. Williams, like many other abolitionists, was against slavery because he saw it as competition with white labor. If anything, Williams’ dislike of African Americans contributed to his rejection of slavery. His “Free-State Letter” didn’t advocate a free Oregon so much as it advocated a white one.
In an integrated society he wrote that “the white men will go down and the negroes will go up, till they come to resemble each other in the habits, tastes, and actions of their lives.” For the race-obsessed, fearful white audience that Williams was writing for in 1857, that was a nightmare.
Williams’ opinions and attitudes carried the day. Oregon voters said yes to the constitution, no to slavery, and no to any future settlement by free blacks. Millner estimates that in 1857 there were probably fewer than 100 African Americans living in Oregon. New black settlers would be barred from joining them. Oregon was not so much free as it was isolated.
LEGACY
There’s no way of knowing how many people Oregon’s exclusion clauses kept out of the territory, and later the state. Trying to imagine a different, more welcome, more diverse Northwest is merely an exercise in academic speculation. But both Nokes and Millner agree that Oregon very probably missed out on a more diverse population.
“The law on the books, enforced or not, prohibited free blacks from living in Oregon,” says Nokes. “That is a statement of local attitudes that say ‘you are not welcome.'”
Millner agrees: “Oregon was visualized as a white homeland. That’s been a racial vision that’s part of Oregon’s from the pioneer period until [now]. We’re still grappling with the consequences of that. The real effect of the exclusion laws is not how many blacks were kicked out of the state, but how many chose not to come to Oregon in the first place.”
Millner later adds, “I see a pretty direct connection between our founding racial policies and the kind of racial realities that we see in Oregon today.”
Oregon would not get any kind of major African American settlement until much later. The transcontinental railroad brought in small, discrete pockets of black workers, but it wasn’t until 1943 that a black community of any real size cropped up in Oregon. Vanport, a town on the site of present-day Delta Park, was the largest housing development in the US during WWII, and home to the first substantial black population in Oregon.
Vanport’s construction was of the cheap and temporary kind (the locals called the prefabricated dwellings “cracker-box houses”), and for much of the 1940s, Portland’s first sizable black population was separated from the town proper by economics, administration, and the river. The town was destroyed by a flood in 1948, and many refugees from the disaster settled in the Albina neighborhood. More than 100 years after initial settlement, Portland finally had an African American population of appreciable size. The influx of that population didn’t come about, though, because Portland had liberalized or become more open. Portland’s first large black neighborhood materialized because a force of nature destroyed an industrial ghetto.
Oregon’s (and Portland’s) current demographics were not shaped purely by accidents of migration or economics. Portland did not simply happen to become an anomalously white city. It was made that way. As far away as this place is (culturally or geographically), it’s still apparent that retrograde attitudes about slavery and race left their mark here and that Oregon did not escape the peculiar institution. It’s not absolved of America’s original sin.
White Guilt!
I do believe this uhh article just did create some racism right there! well dung.
Very interesting article. Tell me anything about the past and I’m hooked. I always get sick when I hear another example of America’s “way ahead of the pack” bigotry. Our ground should be fertile with “White Guilt.” Even as recent as the 2008 election, the white remarks were, “Hell He’s not black” or “Notice how much darker he looks when he campaigns in South Carolina.” It’s so embedded, I doubt it will ever go away.
Revisionist, White Guilt, Racist…maybe…but is the article accurate in historical details and how it links those details to the present?
Interesting article. Thank you.
Additional facts I would be interested in knowing would be numbers of blacks as the population grew. Sounds like it was very small at the time of statehood, but as it grew in the 1900’s, how did that look in terms of numbers.
The other analysis I would be interested in, though it may be impossible to know, is to what extent blacks would have migrated here sooner had it the state been more welcoming and not openly exclusionary. Would there have been a cultural or economic impetus for blacks to move out here from the East? I could see the migration still being low because Oregon was still a long way from anything at that point, but then they would have been drawn by the timber jobs like white migrants.
The exclusionary policies were a sad legacy of Oregon’s earlier history (and in part were a result of the number of immigrants from Midwestern states like Illinois and Indiana that had similar exclusion laws at the time). There was just as much racism in “free states” of the period that didn’t want to deal with a free black population.
At the same time, even without the exclusion laws, I’m not sure how many blacks would’ve migrated to Oregon earlier on, considering most of our neighboring states that didn’t have such laws didn’t end up with much of a black population either. Washington historically has never had that large of a black population outside of a few parts of Seattle and Tacoma areas (which was post-1940s migration mostly), Idaho has much less than even Oregon, and even California didn’t have much of a black urban population until the 40s. There are various reasons for the lack of much of black population in the Pacific Northwest–racist policies of the past could be one, but location a long ways from The South and the nature of the historical economy here is another…
Informative article. Thank you
Great. Once again the white folks of this fair city have decided to remind me that I’m Mr Devil McHonky Motherfucker just for being shot out of momma’s vag with a particular combination of hereditary genes.
Black people are only one slice of the diversity pie. If every Asian packed up and left I don’t think anybody would notice or even lament on the subject with a featured article.
I appreciate this article for mentioning anything about race. That takes a lot of courage. Though, as a black man, I feel speaking of race primarily through a historical lense is distractionary, if not distancing us in the present from culpability. America’s oppressive history is a part of us all, so speaking of a slave-master love affair between whites and blacks really excludes at least these three groups that continue to be underexposed: Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans. So in the future, stray from villifying ancient institutions, because it’s a rhetorical gimme. From our media sources, I want to see more celebration of contemporary individuals INCLUDING those outlying the circle of white privilege. Let me reiterate, though, that this a great step in the right direction. Thank you!
See! Case-in-point, “Ill Paxton” is all mad now, and we are already distracted from the point of this educational article. Folks forget that even in a time of studying history, we’re supposed to be making it.
No ill paxton, you’re not a racist devil for being born white. You might be a racist devil for treating an article talking about Oregon history as a personal attack and resenting any sort of talk about black people or racism.
And thanks for the article Joe. I grew up hearing the history mostly of “Racist South vs. Not Racist (but definitely still racist) North”, with references to Bleeding Kansas and other struggles in the Midwest, but the West Coast was unheard of in history.
And though ill paxton’s comment was remarkably stupid – I think I will go read look for more information on Portland’s Asian population. It seems quite small for a West Coast city, especially the Chinese population.
Aestro- yeah, maybe it was dumb. However, it doesn’t exactly make me a racist. Throwing that kind of nonsense at me is part of the reason why I find the White perspective of this issue so tiresome- it’s been told a hundred times before and there is never any room for debate. I grew up here and until around 1999 I saw Black people everywhere. Now I only see Black people deep in East Multnomah County, a phenomenon created largely by an influx of young creative types aka mostly White people. However, acknowledging hits too close to home for a lot of people, so instead you blame the policies of the 19th century. THAT is what I’m starting to resent. I’m sure you are a nice person, Aestro. You can call me what you want, just don’t call me late for dinner.
Back in the ’60s there were lots more Blacks downtown than there are today. Now, it’s mostly all White Trash and Honored Undocumented Brown Guests from the far South.
Tillamook Indian Chief Kilchis was said to be a black man, a sailor who came ashore and stayed. He is portrayed in the historical novel Trask.
It’s interesting to me how this article left out the modern redlining and gentrification of neighborhoods in Portland. Please consider reading Bleeding Albina: A History of Community Disinvestment (1940-2000), by Karen J. Gibson. There are free copies online.
Here is the abstract:
Portland, Oregon, is celebrated in the planning literature as one of the nation’s most livable cities, yet there is very little scholarship on its small Black community. Using census data, oral histories, archival documents, and newspaper accounts, this study analyzes residential segregation and neighborhood disinvestment over a 60-year period. Without access to capital, housing conditions worsened to the point that abandonment became a major problem. By 1980, many of the conditions typically associated with large cities were present: high unemployment, poor schooling, and an underground economy that evolved into crack cocaine, gangs, and crime. Yet some neighborhood activists argued that the redlining, predatory lending, and housing speculation were worse threats to community viability. In the early 1990s, the combination of low property values, renewed access to capital, and neighborhood reinvestment resulted in gentrification, displacement, and racial transition. Portland is an exemplar of an urban real estate phenomenon impacting Black communities across the nation.
Shoddy journalism…because, it’s easy to blame history and claim modern uninvolvement.
paxton – I throw the “racist” label around to comments like your first one because attempting to silence any acknowledgement of historical (or modern) racism is a common tactic for racists. It ends up sounding like the “Well why isn’t there a WHITE history month?” bullshit.
I’ve only been here six years but that’s been plenty of time to have watched gentrification happen on Mississippi and Alberta. I don’t know why you or “OnlySanePerson” thinks that an article on Oregon’s history doubles as a denial that racial displacement has happened and is happening.
The rest of Oregon is even whiter than Portland, and that’s with consistent growth in Oregon’s black population since WWII (0.2% in 1940, 0.8% in 1950, 1.8% in 2010). Gentrification does partially explain Portland’s lack of racial diversity, but it’s not like yuppies and hipsters have been pushing up real estate prices in Molalla or Elgin. Oregon’s history IS a major factor in its lack of diversity today. It’s not the ONLY reason, but to get into what’s happened to Albina is likely a much bigger, murkier article.
We have done some writing on the more recent history of gentrification in Portland – here’s a piece about North Williams from last year:
http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/it…
Oh and anybody interested in the subject should check out The Residue Years, by Mitchell S Jackson, who grew up in NE in the 1990s. It’s great.
http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/pa…
Joe, thanks for this great piece. Like many others, I had simply assumed Oregon’s black people hatched from thunder eggs.
Jarhead, I said what I had to say, not what YOU would have me say. I support the statements of ill paxton, but go further by pointing out the obvious, as politically correct (culturally Marxist) as possible with the notable exception of being honest.
Aestro, the demographics have decidedly shifted. Back in the ’60s there was a disproportionately larger number of Blacks downtown, relative to the general population, then there are today. Of course, that was back before the Lloyd Center and other Malls were constructed. Downtown was the only place in Portland where anyone could shop at department stores. Not that all Blacks went downtown to shop. I had a friend in highschool, who used to like to walk around inside the department stores, just to act suspicious and get the security guards to harass him. He took satisfaction in baiting them, because they would prejudicially stalk him when he was actually in fact, shopping.
He was just a kid, but highly proficient in Kenpo and was quite willing to defend himself.
Diversity for diversity’s sake is bullshit. Slavery was an early attempt at forced integration; to get some Blacks for the Injins and Anglos to hang out with.
When I was in high school, they bussed kids from Northeast Portland to Jackson and Wilson high schools. For the most part, everybody got along fine together, but still, the Blacks mostly hung out with the Blacks and the Whites mostly hung out with the Whites.
Today, there is a public housing project near Hillsdale, and it’s still a enclave for Blacks in a predominately White neighborhood. When it was first built, it was refereed to as, “Little Africa”. Is that anymore racist that “Chinatown”?
“I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination. [..] Government should not break up a neighborhood on a numerical basis. As soon as the Government does, the white folks flee.” –Jiminy Carter
Speech in April 1976. It was intended that Carter opposed forced housing quota.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter
Assuming historical accuracy, this a great account of the racial situation in Oregon up to 1940. 1940 to the present, however, should be a follow-up article for the Mercury. The negligence towards Vanport and the flood that wiped it out, the horrible relocation efforts, and the intentional destruction of communities in the Albina neighborhood show how close this issue is with us. Karen J. Gibson outlines the blatant actions taken against blacks in the Albina neighborhood in her article, “Bleeding Albina”. This part of the story needs to be told because it provides perspective on where Portland is with this issue and what we can do to move forward.
Commenty Colin!
hard CHUCKLE 🙂
Portland State University takes up too much space downtown, and the PSU Safety Patrollers spend too much time, abusing the street people. The city core is a stupid place to put a college in the first place. Usually, good universities are located in bucolic, suburban settings. PSU ought to relocate to some quiet, open area, adjacent to the City, and closer to the Black community, such as Jantzen Beach.
Very, very insulting and condescending to present day persons of any color…as though from a raging feminist who hates man of any sort. And…there was never a point except the irony of stating ‘race obsessed’ multiple times and providing little context. Amateur shit-stirrer lib wannabe.