Back when I was a youngin living in Portland, Oregon, almost my whole block was Black. There was the old woman across the street, whose blinds were forever cracked, the easier to spy on us juveniles and snitch to our parents or guardians. There was the lil patna Poobear, who lived a couple houses down and whose front porch could’ve doubled as a junkyard. There was Ms. Mary in the middle of the block, whose cherry tree was the most fertile in the land but who would chase you off her lawn with a switch should you dare to pick a single sweet orb. There were the Mayfields at the end of the block, a family with huge Doberman pinschers stalking behind a fence too short to keep them from bounding it and turning canine-petrified me into doggie grub.
In a shabby duplex across from the Mayfields lived a Native American family (foolish me, I called them Indians in those days), whose yard always featured a dismantled car on cinder blocks. Back then, us neighborhood kids would build go-carts and race them down a hill, or we would stage concerts using upturned coffee cans, or on special summer days, we would chase down the ice cream truck and cop frozen treats—ice cream sandwiches were my fave—and lounge in someone’s front yard and hold tacit speed-licking contests. As far as I can recall, there was but one white person on the block, an old woman who didn’t much engage with the rest of us. This was the 1980s, and my block was situated in Northeast Portland, what us denizens came to call the NEP.
The NEP was one of the few mostly Black neighborhoods in the city. Because of that fact, because I didn’t venture much outside my neighborhood as a kid, and because I was ignorant of my state and city’s racial history, I knew not that I was living in a white man’s land, that it had been intended as one from its founding, and that Black folks had long been an unwanted presence.
The lone person, on record, to be expelled from Oregon was a fair-skinned Black man named Jacob Vanderpool, purportedly a sailor from the West Indies. Vanderpool had arrived by ship in what was then the Oregon Territory (Oregon didn’t achieve statehood until 1859) and settled in Oregon City, where he opened a boardinghouse/saloon. Vanderpool must’ve been one helluva businessman because the following year, August 1851, a man named Theophilus Magruder, himself the owner of a hostelry, complained that Vanderpool’s presence in Oregon City was a violation of the territory’s exclusion law, passed in 1844.
The case went to trial later that month. Vanderpool’s lawyer claimed the law violated several provisions of the U.S. Constitution, that the Oregon legislature hadn’t owned the jurisdiction to create it in the first place, and also that the charge itself had not been executed properly. But strong defense be damned, the very next day, August 26, 1851, the judge ruled Vanderpool guilty of violating the exclusion law and ordered him “removed from said territory within thirty days.”
Another expulsion order on Oregon’s historical ledgers occurred in September 1851 and involved brothers O. B. Francis and Abner Hunt Francis, free Blacks who owned a mercantile store in downtown Portland. Abner was also an abolitionist and friend of Frederick Douglass. Historians theorize that the brothers’ business and antislavery ties aroused the concerns of racist whites, and therefore while Abner was away, O.B. (and his wife) were ordered to leave the territory within six months. On appeal to the Oregon supreme court in September 1851, that judgment was shortened to four months. Abner, implicating himself in the expulsion, published a letter about his and his brother’s plight in Douglass’s newspaper, The North Star: “even in the so-called free territory of Oregon, the colored American citizen, though he may possess all the qualities and qualifications which make a man a good citizen, is driven out like a beast in the forest.” Fortunately for the Francis brothers, 225 local citizens signed a petition that allowed them to remain in Oregon on an exception. Though lawmakers spent beaucoup time debating said petition, in the end, they tabled it and never revisited it.
A third expulsion order targeted a man named Morris Thomas, who was married to a woman named Jane Snowdon. Like those targeted for ousting before him, he was an entrepreneur, his business a barbershop. As in the case of the Francis brothers, local citizens, 128 of them, filed a petition asking that Thomas and his family be spared expulsion.
About the time I reached the era of double-digit birthdays, folks who never had to worry one bit about being kicked out of the state or the city (most often white men in shabby suits) were roaming our neighborhood. They weren’t door-to-door salesmen hawking encyclopedias or water purifiers, but door-to-door home buyers. And they were offering residents, some of them our grand- and great-grandparents, cash for abodes some had owned for decades. Those deals must’ve seemed sweet or else the best of an inevitable swindle, because people started selling.
By the mid-1990s, many of the neighborhood’s residents were white. By the early 2000s, forget about it, almost all the families from the old neighborhood were gone, which is also to say, Northeast Portland had become what most of Portland is, what most of Oregon is, a place that nurtures whiteness. While the tactics for its whitening, for the most part, didn’t involve foreclosures or blatant evictions, its transformation featured racialized expulsion nonetheless.
Though it was amended in 1849, the legal means to expel Vanderpool, the Francis brothers, and Thomas, as well as the ethos of Oregon as a white monolith, had been established in 1844 via the Oregon Territory’s exclusion law. Of the numerous people responsible for the racist writ, the lion’s share of onus belongs to a certain few: a Native surnamed Cockstock, a free Black man named James Saules, and white men named Elijah White and Peter Burnett.
So it goes, Saules had been beefing with Cockstock in a land dispute. In the resulting confrontation, two white men, along with Cockstock, were killed. A few weeks later Saules was involved in another dispute, and this time he threatened a white settler that he’d incite the Natives to violence against him. For making that threat, Saules was arrested and, in time, handed over to Elijah White, an Indian subagent. White wrote a letter to the secretary of war in D.C., calling Blacks “dangerous subjects” and arguing that Saules and every other negro “ought to be transported” and their “immigration prohibited.”
As one might guess, the secretary of war was the wrong contact for White to complain to. However, White’s cause was soon taken up by an Oregon politician named Peter Burnett. It was Burnett who had written the 1844 exclusion law and its revision, who had proposed it to Oregon’s territorial government, who had convinced the white men who composed that government to pass his racist legislation—the lone law of its kind passed by states admitted into the union.
And now, what do we have all these decades hence? The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) 2016 statistics (for the year 2015) note that the population of whites in the state of Oregon is 84.89 percent and the percentage of Blacks is 1.90 percent. In Portland, the figures are 77.37 percent for whites and 5.7 percent for Blacks. Compare those numbers to the 2016 national statistics, where whites comprise between 61.3 and 76.9 percent of the population depending on whether Hispanics and Latinos identifying as white are included (which is an essay in itself), and Blacks are 12.7 percent. You needn’t be an analyst to glean that in my fair state, in my beloved city, my people are scant, scant by design.
As it turns out, white folks, the ones who made us scarce in the NEP and who compose a majority everywhere in Oregon, love them some ice cream just as much as my old neighborhood crew did. In the new NEP, there’s a famous ice cream parlor named Salt & Straw, so famous that people sometimes line up for a block for the chance to taste its artisanal flavors. (Anyone for Mummy’s Pumpkin Spice Potion, or Black Cat Licorice and Lavender, or Cinnamon Snickerdoodle?)
Back in 2015, during a street fair just a few blocks from where I grew up that now attracts thousands, a sixteen-year-old Black boy fired a gun into a crowd, wounding two teenage boys and a twenty-five-year-old woman. Per protocol, the police taped off the crime scene. They also ordered Salt & Straw closed. One would think the would-be customers would’ve respected the gravity of the incident and set aside their ice cream hopes for the day. But on the contrary, before it was closed, two dozen or so more people approached the crime scene tape not to inquire about victims but to beseech the police to let them past to cop their frozen treats. Others snapped selfies using the crime scene as a backdrop, some cracking jokes about dessert-fueled motives. Others dined at restaurants just a few feet from where police searched for shell casings. It’s oh so obvious to me that the people who transmuted that crime scene into a collective case of blatant, damn near parodic insouciance were reflecting the ethos of that long-ago territorial government, one set on nixing eternal the presence of my people for the supposed safety, privilege, and prosperity of a great white monolith.