Renée Watson Collection - I See My Light Shining

Oregon is not usually the first place people imagine when they think of Black history. Portland, the state’s largest city, is often called the “whitest big city in America”, shaped in part by its history as a sundown town. As the only free state in the Union with discriminatory clauses in its constitution, Oregon prohibited Black people from entering, owning property, and making contracts. Laws forbidding entry lasted until 1926 and fueled Ku Klux Klan activity, perpetuating systemic racism and leaving impacts on Black Oregonian life that last to this day.

In this collection, Renée Watson journeys through the lives and experiences of Black elders from in and around Portland, Oregon. Shaped by success, sorrow, discrimination, and kinship, their lives are set in a rocky, hardened landscape whose edges are softened by the communities they inhabit.

In the 20th century, three major events decentralized Portland’s Black community: the Vanport flood, school desegregation and bussing, and gentrification. 

At the onset of World War II, Portland city officials developed Vanport, the largest public housing project in the United States, to house a growing population of shipyard workers. Built on low-lying land on the edge of the Columbia River and protected by dikes, Vanport housed over 40,000 residents at its peak, one-fourth of whom were Black. Despite underinvestment, Vanport’s Black community flourished.

Velynn Brown, the granddaughter of a Vanport flood survivor remembers generational effects. “I grew up with over two hundred family members, again, so I had this very unique experience, because it was like, this Black, little Black utopia in the whitest city, later I found out, in the country. And I felt that later growing up and going out, when, in dominant culture settings, honors classes, you know, as I later went into high school, college, and different things, and so my orientation to who I was, was very much steeped in Black history, poetry, church, so I kind of always stood out, [laughs] in those settings, because I had a lot of confidence because I was affirmed where I was. And later, that began to erode as I had to meet up against, you know, being the only all the time, that was exhausting at times, but I could always come back to this nucleus.”

Vanport was meant to serve as a temporary solution for wartime overcrowding, but at the close of the war, Black residents couldn’t legally move to other parts of the region. Neglect led to Vanport’s deterioration, including the dikes that protected the project from the Columbia River. Heavy rains raised concerns among residents. Mariah Taylor recalls an episode on Memorial Day, 1948:

At 4 PM that same day, the dikes broke and water rushed into the city, destroying homes and displacing residents. In the span of two hours, flooding destroyed Vanport, and displayed 18,500 residents. Taylor, a Vanport flood survivor, recalls the harrowing images she saw that day: “The memories I have of those people on the rooftops, floating on the water, women holding babies in their arms that had drowned. That is a memory that I hold today, and I thank God that our family made it out alive.”

Even as legally mandated integration advanced throughout the mid century, resettlement was not simple or easy. Implemented in 1970, the “Schools for the Seventies” Plan called for Black students to be bussed to white schools and many schools in Black neighborhoods to be closed. One of these schools was Jefferson High School, a former stalwart of the city’s Black community. Narrator Charnetta Hutson recalls her time at Jefferson High School: “I remember walking in that [Jefferson High School] building and seeing me, seeing Harriet Tubman, seeing Sojourner Truth, I was seeing these Black faces. Oh my God, and the art. And I remember walking into the counselor office and seeing all these Black counselors. I remembered Black teachers, … So, it felt like home, you know what I’m saying? That’s the best way to describe it. I felt like it was an extended family from home. … I felt my experience there was where I really, really learned more about my history, my Black history, where I really found my own identity and confidence of who I was.”

In practice, bussing uprooted students from their communities and took them to unfamiliar districts, where the racist legacies of Portland shaped their school life. Kim Black recalls visiting other parts of Oregon on a school trip. “In those areas, the rural areas, the white people were known to continue their prejudice. They were very vocal, very violent. In some of those places, they might have been doing hangings [and] they were running Black people out of their city, … with their guns and their trucks and following behind you, making sure you leave…. And here it was, our school was gearing to take this tour. We had one Black chaperone. Our bus driver was Black. And it was funny, all of our parents ganged up on them as, like, ‘Listen, we’re going to trust you with our children. And don’t let nothing happen to our kids. Keep watch over our kids’”

Bookstore owner and wellness practitioner, Michelle Lewis also recounts how bussing alienated Portland’s Black children. “At the time, Madison [High School] wasn’t prepared for the influx of Black students that got bussed from North Portland, so when we got there … It was just—it was horrible. … You’ve got bunches of Black students being pulled from different areas of Northeast Portland, from different zip codes, being bussed in, and white folks just couldn’t deal with that. And so, what that caused was more racial tension, so now you’ve got Black folks fighting, fighting pretty much—first, we’re fighting with each other, and then we’re fighting white folks. So, I got kicked out of Madison, because I was a fighter. I still carried that from my experience, that nobody is putting their hands on me, and I just was doing a lot of fighting.”

Discussed by Richard Pettiford in his interview, gentrification further signaled an end to a way of life for the Black community in Portland:

That gentrification bomb, it destroyed the Black community in Portland. It doesn’t exist anymore. You knew that was going on. We talked about even when we were younger that the neighborhood was going to get gentrified. We knew it. The value of the land was just too valuable.

Between flooding, desegregation, and gentrification across the Portland area, the Black community was slowly pushed towards fracture. Raina Evans describes her family’s displacement throughout her oral history: “And you know the African American population is so small in Oregon, small in Portland, and for us to be also displaced, just does make it a lot harder to connect.”