Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia

[KamaAina]

http://gizmodo.com/oregon-was-founded-as-a-racist-utopia-1539567040/

When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859, it was the only state in the Union admitted with a constitution that forbade black people from living, working, or owning property there. It was illegal for black people even to move to the state until 1926. Oregon's founding is part of the forgotten history of racism in the American west.

Waddles Coffee Shop in Portland, Oregon was a popular restaurant in the 1950s for both locals and travelers alike. The drive-in catered to America's postwar obsession with car culture, allowing people to get coffee and a slice of pie without even leaving their vehicle. But if you happened to be black, the owners of Waddles implored you to keep on driving. The restaurant had a sign outside with a very clear message: "White Trade Only — Please."

It's the kind of scene from the 1950s that's so hard for many Americans to imagine happening outside of the Jim Crow South. How could a progressive, northern city like Portland have allowed a restaurant to exclude non-white patrons? This had to be an anomaly, right? In reality it was far too common in Oregon, a state that was explicitly founded as a kind of white utopia....

Racism was generally framed as something that happened in the past and almost always "down there." We learned about the struggles for racial equality in cities like Birmingham and Selma and Montgomery. But what about the racism of Portland, Oregon, a city that is still overwhelmingly white? The struggles there were just as intense — though they are rarely identified in the history books.

[dilby]

1. Yep, it's a dark history of Oregon and one of the reasons to this day Oregon is very White.

It also continued on with blacks not being able to get loans well after they were able to own property in Oregon.

[panader0]

2. I went to Willamette University in Salem Oregon as a 17 year old freshman in1968.

My roommate and friend was black. When we walked the streets together, people would slow down and say n****r lover to me.
I had never experienced this stuff before. A very educational year. There was a story that in the 50's only a certain amount of Blacks were allowed to live in the city of Salem at one time. A Black woman got pregnant and the family had to leave so that they wouldn't go over the limit.
I love Oregon, I think it's much different these days.
IIRC, WWII brought a large influx of blacks to the Northwest, primarily to work in the shipyards around Seattle.

[ND-Dem]

15. Plenty of blacks came to work in war industries in portland as well.

Oregon, in particular the Portland area, experienced many of the general demographic changes brought about by World War II. Nationally, shipyard and factory jobs drew hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to large cities across the country as industry leaders scrambled to fill war production orders at the same time that millions of men were leaving the labor force to enter the armed forces.

The growth of the black population in Portland echoed this trend, skyrocketing from under 2,000 before the war to over 22,000 in 1944. Combined with the concurrent rise in the number of working class whites in the area, the steep total population increase of about 160,000 led to inevitable overcrowding and friction. As a result, existing prejudices grew more pronounced as more African Americans looked for housing, jobs, and access to hotels, restaurants, and other services in the community.(5)

Housing became an early and ongoing problem for newly arriving African American migrants to the Portland area. Many found temporary shelter at local churches or in black-owned businesses but eventually needed to find more permanent housing. The completion of the massive Vanport housing project, together with other projects open to blacks in Guild's Lake, Linnton, Fairview, and East Vanport, as well as several in the Vancouver area, helped ease the crunch. But discrimination came with the package as a Portland Council of Churches report noted in 1945...

The practice of segregating the Negro is followed closely in all the projects. The Portland Housing Authority states that "while we do not discriminate, we do segregate." A Vancouver Housing Authority official stated that "because of the feeling among the white people against living where Negroes are indiscriminately housed, we had to segregate the whites to avoid trouble.&quot 6)

http://arcweb.sos.state.or.us/pages/exhibits/ww2/life/minority.htm

[former9thward]

3. Oregon had a long history of racism.

KKK meeting with Portland Mayor, Police Chief and other leaders in 1921



http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/historical_records/dspDocument.cfm?doc_ID=6BC64F73-1C23-B9D3-6844072A4F31B6AA

This was during a period of time Catholic schools were illegal in Oregon.

http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/kkk_i49.htm

[ND-Dem]

12. Tell me someplace in the US that didn't.

[former9thward]

17. Sure, tell me another state that outlawed Catholic schools.

You have 47 to pick from.

[ND-Dem]

18. whatever that has to do with the price of dentures.

[former9thward]

19. Who do you think was the driver of the legislation?

The KKK. But I guess the KKK has nothing to do with racism...

[ND-Dem]

20. In this case, the KKK had more to do with anti-catholicism.

The Oregon Compulsory Education Bill was initiated not by the Klan, but by the Scottish Rite Masons, an anti-Catholic fraternal organization who hoped its passage would act as a model for other states to follow.[9]

The Oregon School Bill required every child between the ages of eight and sixteen to attend public schools in their districts, assimilating immigrant children into American (and Protestant) institutions. The Klan supported the bill as a legislative tool they could use to promote their hatred of Catholics, and shifted attention away from the fact that the Bill would close all private schools and focused on the perceived threat of Catholicism to Oregon’s public schools.[10]

The Masons shared the Klan’s nativist ethos, and saw the bill as a way to stop immigrants and ethnic communities from forming “foreign” organizations and schools in the United States.[11]

The initial success of anti-Catholic organizing in Oregon motivated the Klan to spread into Washington and see if similar legislation could be passed there. The leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon, Luther Ivan Powell, moved to Washington in order to organize a strong Klan force in the state, declaring himself King Kleagle of Washington and Idaho.[19]

Due to Powell’s efforts, there was an increase in Klan membership in the state and the subsequent drafting of Initiative 49, modeled after Oregon’s School Bill. Unlike in Oregon, in Washington, the Ku Klux Klan themselves drafted the bill and put it on the ballot; the measure was often referred to as the, “K.K.K. Anti-School Bill.”[20]

http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/kkk_i49.htm


There was a good deal of anti-Catholicism around here, even when I was young. An aunt told me stories about nuns and their dead babies in the convents. Thankfully, it's mostly disappeared now.

[LuvNewcastle]

4. There is a history of discrimination in the West,

although most of it is against Indians and Mexicans. I had family members from Albuquerque who would be appalled at the racism against black people when they would visit us here in Mississippi, but we saw just as much racism against Indians and Mexicans when we would visit them out there. It's as simple as people paying so much attention to the faults of others that they're blind to their own.

[Bluenorthwest]

5. Here is a link to a good overview of the local history where I am

Bridging the River: A History of Housing Discrimination in Eugene, Oregon.

https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/2857/Tent%20City%20history.pdf?sequence=1

[dilby]

6. Also Oregon was an Anti-gay Utopia that sterilized homosexuals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_vice_scandal

[ND-Dem]

16. Not surprisingly, you didn't report the full story.

The Oregon state legislature responded to the scandal by clarifying and strengthening the state's sodomy law, and by making sodomy punishable by sterilization.

The sterilization measure was subjected to a referendum, and Oregon voters repealed the law by a vote of 56 percent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_vice_scandal

[dilby]

23. Yeah and they passed a similar law again in 1917. n/t

[ND-Dem]

24. "similar law" = a eugenics law, same as a lot of states had.

The lobbying effort for eugenics regrouped and continued vigorously (Owens-Adair, p. 71), and another law was passed and signed by Governor Withycombe in 1917 that created Oregon's Eugenics Board (Eccleston, p. 2). The law provided for the sterilization of all “feebleminded residents of state prisons and hospitals.”

Public scrutiny was decidedly more muted as proponents tried to reframe the purpose of the law to voters mostly distracted by World War I (Largent, p. 194). The law was amended in 1919 to include an appeals process for patients and their families, and was codified into Oregon statute in 1920.

In 1921, the Marion Circuit Court struck down, in Cline v. Oregon State Board of Eugenics, as unconstitutional Oregon's law as violating the U.S. Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment...

A new law was passed and signed in 1923, bringing eugenics back to Oregon. Supporters stressed the new law as being non-punitive and therapeutic for both the patient and society, and it survived challenges even though the substantive language of the new law was almost entirely the same. The law permitted the sterilization of “persons, male or female, who are feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, habitual criminals, moral degenerates and sexual perverts, who are, or … who are likely to become, a menace to society” (Cruz). Owens-Adair pushed for the inclusion of provisions in the new law to target especially sexual offenses (Paul, p. 457). For the first time it was expanded to include all residents, regardless of institutionalized status. Similar efforts led the push for marriage limits on “deviants” (Laughlin, p. 343). In 1925 the Oregon Legislature passed an amendment to the eugenics law to include all those convicted of rape and sodomy to the statute (Landman, p. 77). Oregon’s laws were further legitimized with the 1927 United States Supreme Court decision, in Buck v. Bell, that upheld the federal constitutionality of eugenics (Largent, p. 195).

Eugenical sterilization created what scholar David Noble called “a paradox of progressive thought”, referring to the inherent contradiction between social reform and the damage caused by eugenics in America. Its development in Oregon followed a national backlash against what was perceived to be a widespread moral and racial decline. Immigration from southern and eastern Europe and the procreation of the “feebleminded” pushed a majority of states to approve sterilization laws in the first half of the twentieth Century. Prominent supporters of eugenics, like Harry Laughlin, were also big supporters of other laws to homogenize the United States racially, like the Immigration Act of 1924 (Largent, p. 189).

http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/OR/OR.html


American eugenics refers inter alia to compulsory sterilization laws adopted by over 30 states that led to more than 60,000 sterilizations of disabled individuals. Many of these individuals were sterilized because of a disability: they were mentally disabled or ill, or belonged to socially disadvantaged groups living on the margins of society. American eugenic laws and practices implemented in the first decades of the twentieth century influenced the much larger National Socialist compulsory sterilization program, which between 1934 and 1945 led to approximately 350,000 compulsory sterilizations and was a stepping stone to the Holocaust. Even after the details of the Nazi sterilization program (as well as its role as a precursor to the "Euthanasia" murders) became more widely known after World War II (and which the New York Times had reported on extensively and in great detail even before its implementation in 1934), sterilizations in some American states did not stop. Some states continued to sterilize residents into the 1970s.

http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/

[dilby]

26. The summary from your link.

Summary

The happenings of these institutions, including a particular fondness for castration and salpingectomy over other less radical forms of sterilization (Laughlin, p. 88), are almost completely ignored only 25 years after the last law‘s repeal. Oregon’s eugenics program affected people from largely from the state’s institutions, institutions whose directors served on the State Eugenics Board. The progam extended to non-institutionalized people, who were the targets of social workers and community complaints. The existences of "vice commissions" in larger cities were also responsible rounding up the periphery of society for the state's actions (Boag, pp. 10-11). Oregon was infamous for targeting largely targeted troubled or simply “misbehaving” youth and homosexual men (Cruz).

They did not just sterilize they castrated and targeted gay men.

[ND-Dem]

28. "Women made up 59 percent of the 509 sterilizations recorded at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem

between 1918 and 1941.

Over 90 percent of them received salpingectomies; the rest were given ovariectomies.

Of the 207 men sterilized, just over 68 percent were castrated, while the rest received vasectomies (p. 203).

The peak year of sterilization was 1937 with 44 sterilizations performed in total.

While vasectomies were common in other states at this time the majority of men sterilized at the Oregon State Hospital received castrations (Largent, p. 205). Sterilization in Oregon was also aimed at ridding the state of homosexuals along with other stigmatized groups (Largent, p. 205). Oregon officially ended state sponsored Sterilization 1983 with the abolishment of the Board of Protection (Largent, p. 206).

In total around 2,500 individuals were sterilized in Oregon (Largent, p. 206).

http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/OR/OR.html

[Maedhros]

7. Oregon was a hotbed of KKK activity in the 20's,

especially in the south around Medford/Grants Pass and on the coast near Tillamook.

In college in the 80's we were driving from Corvallis to the coast. On a whim, we took the little-used Alsea Highway (34) instead of the wider and well-traveled Highway 20. We stopped for fuel at some tiny little gas station/market somewhere in the Coast Range, and noticed a sign over the door that read "No N*****s." We got the hell out of there as quickly as possible.

I'd expect something like that in the 50's or 60's, but 1985? Wow.

People see "Portlandia" and think that all of Oregon is like that. I grew up on the eastern side of the Cascades, and let me tell you: Prineville, Burns, Redmond, Klamath Falls, Lakeview - those ain't Portland.

[F4lconF16]

8. +1

It's a big, big difference from one side of the state and population density to the other.

[oberliner]

9. In Vermont, 97% of the population is white, and less than 1% is African American.

Another ostensibly progressive place with zero diversity. Does anyone know why?

[KamaAina]

10. I can hazard a guess

Never a slave state, and little industry to attract AAs during the Great Migration.

[oberliner]

21. I guess that would explain it

Vermont ought to take steps to encourage more diversity in my opinion.

[glasshouses]

22. Tough job market with low pay and very high cost of living

Vermont is for people with money

[ND-Dem]

25. It's got less than a million people and is a haven for trust fund types.

[ND-Dem]

11. Not unique in that respect. And in the East and South, slave labor was the basis of the economy, so

just as bad, if not worse. Which was the racist utopia?

The exclusion laws were primarily intended to prevent blacks from settling in Oregon, not to kick out those who were already here. The first and only African-American to be expelled from Oregon under the exclusion act was Jacob Vanderpool, the owner of a saloon, restaurant, and boarding house in Salem (some sources say Oregon City). Vanderpool’s neighbor reported him for the crime of being black in Oregon, and Judge Thomas Nelson gave him thirty days to leave the territory.

Despite the exclusion laws, African-Americans continued to settle in Oregon. The 1850 census lists nine blacks or mulattos (an archaic term referring to people of mixed African and European ancestry) living in Marion county, of whom only three were over 18 years old. One of the nine was identified as a “slave,” despite the fact that slavery was illegal in Oregon. In 1860, Marion County had 18 blacks and mulattos, of whom six were adults. By 1870, the number had risen to 61, with 33 adults.

Slavery in the Willamette Valley
Most African-Americans who came to Oregon on the overland trail were free, coming to Oregon hoping to get away from the racial conflict of the east and move to a place where they would have greater opportunities—but some were enslaved, came to Oregon with their owners.

http://www.salemhistory.net/people/african_americans.htm


By strength of numbers they soon passed legislation prohibiting slavery and banning free blacks. And, although the laws were not really enforced, they still sent a message. Thus, while small numbers of blacks were tolerated in Oregon throughout the 1840s and 1850s, they struggled on the margins of society with few friends and fewer rights.

Even with the legislative bans, whites continued to tolerate a small number of slaves and free blacks in Oregon before statehood. Meanwhile, other territories, such as New Mexico and Utah, enacted similar bans. California, with by far the largest population of blacks and mulattoes in the West, tried to pass comparable laws in the 1850s but failed. Still, the goal was to suppress black migration and the message was clear that blacks would be expected to live on the margins of society with virtually no rights. Indeed, in the words of historian Egbert Oliver, "African Americans were essentially illegal aliens in Oregon, without citizenship, without legal rights.&quot 6)

While the common attitudes of both supporters and opponents of slavery were blatantly racist, a small number of white Oregonians championed black equality and abolition. The American Home Missionary Society sent Congregational minister Reverend Obed Dickenson to Salem in 1852. He and his wife, Charlotte, soon challenged conventional thinking in the small community and regularly found themselves in controversies related to the degree to which they welcomed blacks as church members and their advocacy of equality and abolition. Among other blacks they welcomed into their church were the newly freed slaves, Robin and Polly Holmes, who opened a nursery in Salem after gaining their freedom.

http://arcweb.sos.state.or.us/pages/exhibits/1857/before/slavery.htm

[Yavin4]

13. And today, it's a reliable blue state

So, think about that when you decry the red states.

[KamaAina]

14. By contrast, a century ago, Oklahoma was a hotbed of socialism

Go figure.

[Major Nikon]

27. Oklahoma was also very racist back then too

Not that it isn't still.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot

[LWolf]

29. I love my state for many reasons.

Her racist history is not one of them.

I have not forgotten Oregon history. As a teacher, I worked with a group of local history teachers, and this was an important focus of our work.