Yes. Oregon was a big Klan state. You can still see the results in how few black people there are here. The high school I went to in the 70’s had only two black kids in over a thousand students.

Yeah, there's a really ugly history of racism here and the remnants of that remain very real problems.

Not that long after that law was struck down, there was a large migration of black families to Portland to work in the shipyards during WW2. Kaiser et all built a factory town a bit north of Portland proper named Vanport. This place is a fascinating bit of history because it was racially integrated with no real tensions. After the war was over most of the families decided to stay.

Then some years later a flood destroyed Vanport. It was clear rebuilding it would result in the same thing in the future. So the wonderful leaders of Portland asked themselves "where can we put these black people?"

They decided on my neighborhood, Albina. At the time it was mostly germanic people here, because they had been forced into this area in the same way decades before in a prior immigration wave. One interesting sign of this is if you check out all of the now black baptist churches, you'll find cornerstones written in german memorializing their construction.

That said, the black community here thrived. They built a flourishing downtown with lots of business, banks that would not discriminate, etc. Note that this was the only neighborhood black people could live in. Overt redlining continued here until the 1970s.

Flash forward to that time and two different projects were deliberately used to destroy that downtown as well as steal a portion of the neighborhood. Building a freeway interchange for one, and the construction of a hospital as the second.

The hospital is particularly galling as they used eminent domain to take people's businesses and houses, paying far below market value, and even worse stole vastly more land than the hospital needed. At the time they justified it as needed for "future expansion."

Just about 15 years ago in this neighborhood you'd find the hospital surrounded by several blocks of either nothing but grass, or grass and just one or two small buildings.

And then Portland got hit with the massive migration wave creating our housing crisis. So the hospital started selling the land to developers to build apartment and condo buildings.

While we definitely needed more housing, it's revolting that black businesses and homes were stolen and destroyed under a lie, only for the hospital to profit off selling the land to developers building housing for upper income folks a few decades later.

We're definitely on the trajectory of progress, but there is still so far to go, and the fight over it is very real.

I hope this helps give people here some context as to why the BLM protests here were so intense. There's real anger and it is justified. Many of the people at those protests either experienced this directly, or are the children of people who did.