POST-VISIT TimelineRacing to Change: Oregon’s Civil Rights Years

Grades 6 – 12The areas in boxes are civil rights dates and events in Oregon.

Activity:Know these key dates in African American History in Oregon and the U.S.A.(Sources: History Channel, Oregon Encyclopedia - Dr. Darrell Millner - https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/blacks_in_oregon/#.Wmu7qGnwapo)

1) 1619 – Slavery comes to North America. A Dutch ship brings Africans to the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. African slaves are a cheaper labor than indentured European servants and are used for producing important crops such as tobacco and cotton.

2) 1788 - The newly ratified U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to repossess any “person held to service or labor” (an euphemism for slavery).

3) 1788 - The first well-documented black in Oregon is Markus Lopius, a crewmember of the American ship Lady Washington, captained by Robert Gray in 1788. He was added to the crew when the ship stopped at the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic, off the Africa coast. Lopius, described as a young black man, was hired as Gray's "servant," but he also performed the same jobs and duties as other crew members. At Tillamook Bay on the present-day Oregon Coast, Lopius was on shore cutting grass for the ship's stock when a local Native ran off with his cutlass. Lopius caught the thief, upon which other Indians attacked him with knives and spears. He was finally felled by a flight of arrows, as he tried to reach his fellow crew members. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Darrell Millner)

4) 1793 - Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it a federal crime to assist a slave trying to escape. Though it was difficult to enforce from state to state, especially with the growth of abolitionist feeling in the North, the law helped enshrine and legitimize slavery as an enduring American institution.

5) 1830s – The Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman. Helped 40,000 to 100,000 slaves reach freedom.

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POST-VISIT TimelineRacing to Change: Oregon’s Civil Rights Years

6) 1844 - The first black exclusion law in Oregon, adopted in 1844 by the Provisional Government, mandated that blacks attempting to settle in Oregon would be publicly whipped—thirty-nine lashes, repeated every six months—until they departed. There is no documented record of any official whipping—the law was written with a grace period, and it was repealed before it had expired—but the concept was clear. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Millner)

7) 1850 - The most devastating anti-black law passed during this era was the federal Donation Land Act of 1850, which declared that land would only be granted to "every white settler...American half breed Indians included"; the second group was included to make eligible the offspring of early white male settlers and their Indian wives. By removing most Indians to reservations and excluding all but white landownership, the vision of a white homeland in Oregon was embedded in public policy. In subsequent generations, the profits, power, and political influence that flowed from near exclusive white landownership were manifested in the construction of a racially stratified society in which white ascendancy was assured and nonwhite marginalization was profound. To understand later patterns of political, economic, and social inequality in Oregon, it is necessary to be aware of these early examples of race-based public policy that benefited only the state's white population. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Millner)

8) 1857 - The Oregon constitution banned slavery but also excluded blacks from legal residence in Oregon. It made it illegal for blacks to be in Oregon or to own real estate, make contracts, vote, or use the legal system. Like earlier exclusion laws, the constitutional ban, which took effect when Oregon became a state in 1859, was not retroactive, which meant that it did not apply to blacks who were legally in Oregon before the ban was adopted. The greatest impact of the exclusion laws was not in how many blacks were whipped, sent out of the state, or stopped at the state line but in their deterrent effect on potential black immigrants. The laws made it clear that Oregon was a hostile destination for blacks contemplating a move west, and they proved to be remarkably effective. Potential black immigrants who had the means and the motivation to go west simply chose to go elsewhere. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Millner)

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POST-VISIT TimelineRacing to Change: Oregon’s Civil Rights Years

9) 1857 – The Dred Scott v. Sanford Supreme Court decision in 1857, which declared that slave masters had the right to take their slaves anywhere in the country. That ruling compromised all laws about race and slavery in Oregon at the time. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Millner) Dred Scott Case - On March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Scott v. Sanford, delivering a resounding victory to southern supporters of slavery and arousing the ire of northern abolitionists. During the 1830s, the owner of a slave named Dred Scott had taken him from the slave state of Missouri to the Wisconsin territory and Illinois, where slavery was outlawed, according to the terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Upon his return to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom on the basis that his temporary removal to free soil had made him legally free. The case went to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and the majority eventually ruled that Scott was a slave and not a citizen, and thus had no legal rights to sue. According to the Court, Congress had no constitutional power to deprive persons of their property rights when dealing with slaves in the territories. The verdict effectively declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, ruling that all territories were open to slavery and could exclude it only when they became states. While much of the South rejoiced, seeing the verdict as a clear victory for the slave system, antislavery northerners were furious.

10) 1861 – Civil War and Emancipation – U. S. President, Abraham Lincoln. 11 southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America.

11) 1861-1865 - During the Civil War, the Oregon legislature approved additional anti-black prohibitions, including a black poll tax in 1862. The state also prohibited whites from marrying not only blacks but also Chinese, South Pacific Islanders, and any person with more than half Indian parentage. The law, on the books until the 1950s, also punished the person who performed any such marriage ceremonies with a fine and prison. Like the exclusion and land laws, the most powerful effect of such laws was the message they sent that Oregon was a place where only whites were welcome. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Millner)

12) 1865 – 13th Amendment officially abolishes slavery, but the question of freed blacks’ status in the post–war South remained.

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POST-VISIT TimelineRacing to Change: Oregon’s Civil Rights Years

13) 1866 – Act Forbidding Racial Intermarriage (Miscegenation) in Oregon

https://oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-records/act-to-prohibit-the-intermarriage-of-races-1866/#.WnIXwGnwapo

Note: use the online link to zoom in for ease in reading.

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POST-VISIT TimelineRacing to Change: Oregon’s Civil Rights Years

14) 1868 - The 14th Amendment broadened the definition of citizenship, granting “equal protection” of the Constitution to former slaves. This Amendment granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United Stated.” However, as U.S. citizens, black women were still not allowed to vote.

https://oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-records/portland-chapter-naacp-50th-anniversary/#.WnIeW2nwapp

Note: use the online link to zoom in for easy reading.

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POST-VISIT TimelineRacing to Change: Oregon’s Civil Rights Years

15) Grand Emancipation Invitation, Portland, Oregon, 1869

https://oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-records/grand-emancipation-celebration/#.Wn4_ySXwZhF

Note: use the online link to zoom in for easy reading.

16) 1870 – The 15th Amendment guaranteed that a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied on account of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

17) 1870s-1890s As Reconstruction drew to a close and the forces of white supremacy regained control from carpetbaggers (northerners who moved South) and freed blacks, Southern state legislatures began enacting the first segregation laws, known as the “Jim Crow” laws. Taken from a much–copied minstrel routine written by a white actor who performed often in blackface, the name “Jim Crow” came to serve as a general derogatory term for African Americans in the post–Reconstruction South.

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POST-VISIT TimelineRacing to Change: Oregon’s Civil Rights Years

18) By 1885 - most southern states had laws requiring separate schools for blacks and whites, and by 1900, “persons of color” were required to be separated from whites in railroad cars and depots, hotels, theaters, restaurants, barber shops and other establishments.

19) 1896 - The U.S. Supreme Court issued its verdict in Plessy vs. Ferguson, a case that represented the first major test of the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s provision of full and equal citizenship to African Americans. By an 8–1 majority, the Court upheld a Louisiana law that required the segregation of passengers on railroad cars. By asserting that the equal protection clause was not violated as long as reasonably equal conditions were provided to both groups, the Court established the “separate but equal” doctrine that would thereafter be used for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws.

20) 1913 - The first NAACP chapter west of the Mississippi River was organized in Portland in 1913, and it fought KKK propaganda though educational campaigns and protest.

21) 1904 -1953 Oregon had formalized the practice of racial discrimination early in the twentieth century. In 1904, Oliver Taylor sued a theater owner for refusing him a box seat because of his race; the trial judge dismissed the suit. Lawyer McCants Stewart won the case in appeal (Taylor v. Cohn) in the Oregon Supreme Court in 1906. A subsequent discrimination case argued by McCants in 1917, Allen v. People's Amusement Park, was identical in circumstances to Taylor v. Cohn, but lost in the Oregon Supreme Court, confirming and sanctioning the practice of racial segregation in public places and services—a ruling that would remain in place until the legislature passed an anti-discrimination law in 1953.

Kenton Theater, Portland, Oregon, c. 1943 https://oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-records/luncheonette-sign-we-cater-to-white-trade-only/#.WmvGy2nwapo

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POST-VISIT TimelineRacing to Change: Oregon’s Civil Rights Years

22) 1920s - By the 1920s, Oregon had a well-established and well-earned reputation as a hostile and dangerous place for blacks. That reputation was solidified by the presence in the state of the largest Ku Klux Klan chapter west of the Mississippi River…During the 1920s, the primary targets of the KKK in Oregon were Catholics and Jews, not blacks. The decades of exclusionary practices had been so successful in keeping the black population small and isolated that blacks were a secondary target. Still, the Klan was a visible and intimidating force in Oregon politics and society, and it was not uncommon for KKK members to parade through city streets in full regalia—displays that were often followed by torchlight rallies and public cross burnings. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Darrell Millner)

23) 1940s - By 1940, Oregon’s principal black community lived in Portland—small, geographically isolated, and artificially confined by the practices of the city’s white power structure. Yet, it was also a cohesive, viable entity that provided what was needed for a fully functional community… Segregation was most widely and powerfully practiced in the real estate industry. Restrictive covenants, redlining, and prohibitions in the real estate handbook established the inner northeast section of the city for blacks. Outside Portland, many rural towns with small or nonexistent black populations enforced “sundown laws” that required blacks to be out of town by nightfall or face hostile action by the police, private citizens, or both. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Millner)

24) 1945 – 1948 - World War II changed the realities of race in Oregon and brought on the beginning of the modern black experience in the state. Change was both dramatic and swift, as Portland became the center of a wartime shipbuilding industry. Portland’s black population exploded from about 2,000 in 1940 to a high of 22,000 in 1944, as black shipyard workers, many of them with families, were recruited from other parts of the country and moved to Portland. A temporary federal housing project, the largest in the country, was built on the Columbia River to house wartime workers. About a quarter of the residents of the new city, named Vanport for its location between Portland and Vancouver, were black. At the end of the war, many blacks left the state as shipyard jobs disappeared, but many decided to stay. The postwar black population stabilized at about six times the size of the prewar population. Most lived in Vanport, until a devastating flood on the Columbia in 1948 swept that city away. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Millner)

25) Late 1940s - In the North and the West, blacks were not generally in as much danger, but they did suffer from systematic repression. Employment discrimination, racial quota systems in higher education, de facto segregation in schools, discrimination in banking and financial services, real estate prohibitions, police brutality, and policies that forced most blacks to live in segregated circumstances were all routinely a part of black life in the West. Popular culture projected negative racial stereotypes on blacks,

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POST-VISIT TimelineRacing to Change: Oregon’s Civil Rights Years

and then used the stereotypes to justify discriminatory treatment. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Millner)

26) 1953 - Public Accommodation Law in Oregon passed. After World War II… racial and civic reform movements began to gain energy and support from a growing number of whites. In Oregon, this activist element combined with persistent historic efforts by blacks to achieve a series of progressive advances and victories—a fair employment law (1949), a public accommodations law (1953), and a fair housing law (1957). Although the new laws did not automatically change prevailing racist practices, they did represent a counterpoint to Oregon’s and the nation’s anti-black traditions. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Millner) The Portland Chapter of the NAACP, led by Otto and Verdell Rutherford, went to the Oregon Legislature with a civi rights bill to outlaw discrimination at public places, such as hotels, restaurants, and movie theater. The bill, known as the Public Accommodation Law, passed in the Oregon Legislature. This bill allowed admission into public places regardless of race, religion, color, or national origin. Oregon became the 21st state to pass a bill that outlawed discrimination in public places. (History Hub, OHS)

27) 1954 – The U.S. Supreme Court verdict in Brown v. Board of Education reverses Plessy v. Ferguson, which had stood as the overriding judicial precedent in civil rights cases.

28) 1954 - In Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the 14th Amendment’s mandate of equal protection of the laws of the U.S. Constitution to any person within its jurisdiction. Oliver Brown, the lead plaintiff in the case, was one of almost 200 people from five different states who had joined related NAACP cases brought before the Supreme Court since 1938. The landmark verdict reversed the “separate but equal” doctrine the Court had established with Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which it determined that equal protection was not violated as long as reasonably equal conditions were provided to both groups. In the Brown decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren famously declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Though the Court’s ruling applied specifically to public schools, it implied that other segregated facilities were also unconstitutional, thus striking a heavy blow to the Jim Crow South.

29) 1955 – Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus boycott30) 1957 - President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the state’s National Guard and sent

1,000 members of the U.S. Army to enforce the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The nine black students entered the school under heavily armed guard, marking the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops had provided protection for black Americans against racial violence. Not done fighting, Governor Faubus closed all of Little Rock’s high schools in the fall of 1958 rather than permit integration. A federal court struck down this act, and four of the nine students returned, under police protection, after the schools were reopened in 1959.

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POST-VISIT TimelineRacing to Change: Oregon’s Civil Rights Years

31) 1959 - Oregon finally ratified the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which provided that no government may prevent a citizen from voting based on that citizen’s “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” (slavery).

32) Late 1950s – Early 1960s - …The construction of Memorial Coliseum and Interstate 5 removed much of the black community on the Northeast Broadway, Williams Avenue, Vancouver Avenue corridor. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Millner)

33) 1960s – 1980s - By the 1960s, Portland and many other communities in the country were struggling with how to integrate schools in a segregated city—a legacy of the housing restrictions placed on blacks in the past. The NAACP pushed hard for the integration of Portland schools, but stiff resistance from the city’s educational and political elites, including the school board and conservative-leaning politicians and residents, led to the Blanchard Plan, named after the superintendent of Portland schools. The plan, to be implemented in 1970, called for busing black students to white schools and systematically closing schools in black neighborhoods. By the mid-1970s, the school board had voted to close Jefferson High School, which served most of the city’s black community. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Millner)

34) 1963 - 250,000 people—both black and white—participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the largest demonstration in the history of the nation’s capital and the most significant display of the civil rights movement’s growing strength. After marching from the Washington Monument, the demonstrators gathered near the Lincoln Memorial, where a number of civil rights leaders addressed the crowd, calling for voting rights, equal employment opportunities for blacks and an end to racial segregation. The last leader to appear was the Baptist preacher Martin Luther King Jr, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who spoke eloquently of the struggle facing black Americans and the need for continued action and nonviolent resistance. “I have a dream,” King intoned, expressing his faith that one day whites and blacks would stand together as equals, and there would be harmony between the races: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” King’s improvised sermon continued for nine minutes after the end of his prepared remarks, and his stirring words would be remembered as undoubtedly one of the greatest speeches in American history. At its conclusion, King quoted an “old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'” King’s speech served as a defining moment for the civil rights movement, and he emerged as its most prominent figure.

35) 1964 – The Civil Right Act supporting racial equality in America is signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. The act gave the federal government more power to protect citizens against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex or national origin. It mandated the desegregation of most public accommodations, including lunch counters, bus depots, parks and swimming pools, and established the Equal Employment

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POST-VISIT TimelineRacing to Change: Oregon’s Civil Rights Years

Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to ensure equal treatment of minorities in the workplace. The act also guaranteed equal voting rights by removing biased registration requirements and procedures, and authorized the U.S. Office of Education to provide aid to assist with school desegregation.

36) 1967 – 1969 - Many blacks charged the police with brutality and racism. In the summers of 1967 and 1969, race riots exploded along Northeast Union Avenue, the main thoroughfare of the black community at the time. Police and their supporters attributed the riots to "outside agitators" and lawless militants. Many blacks laid the blame on police incitement and the harassment of black youth. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Millner)

37) 1968 – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, is assassinated.

38) 1969 - The Black Panther chapter in Portland opened an office on the southeast corner of Northeast Cook Street and Union Avenue (present-day Martin Luther King Boulevard), the first of four locations. By the end of that year, the Portland Panthers had started a Children´s Breakfast Program at Highland United Church of Christ—where they fed up to 125 children each morning before school—as well as the Fred Hampton Memorial People´s Health Clinic, extending free medical care five evenings a week at 109 North Russell to anyone of any race. In February 1970, the BPP opened a dental clinic at 2341 North Williams. When their medical clinic was condemned and razed to accommodate a planned expansion of Emanuel Hospital, the chapter moved their Monday and Tuesday night dental practice to the Kaiser dental clinic at 214 N Russell and their medical clinic to the former dental clinic space on North Williams. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Millner)

39) 1970s - The expansion of Emmanuel Hospital [removed much of the] black residents in the Williams Avenue, Vancouver Avenue, and Russell Street neighborhood. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Millner)

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POST-VISIT TimelineRacing to Change: Oregon’s Civil Rights Years

40) 1970s – 1980s - several high-profile police shootings of young black men in Portland and questionable police practices created intense animosity toward the police. In 1981, two policemen admitted that they had placed four dead possums in front of the Burger Barn, a popular black-owned, late-night hangout at 3962 Northeast Union Avenue. The incident escalated into a major confrontation and had a long-term effect on police community relations. In 1985, when Lloyd Stevenson, a black man, was killed by a policeman using a choke hold. Neither of the two officers involved was disciplined. The case took a bizarre and controversial turn when on the day of Stevenson's funeral, two police officers sold t-shirts to fellow officers bearing the slogan “Don't Choke 'Em, Smoke 'Em.” They were fired but were eventually reinstated with back pay. (Oregon Encyclopedia, Dr. Millner)

Demonstration calling for police reform, Portland, Oregon, 1970 https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/black_panthers_in_portland/#.Wn4-wyXwZhF

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