EP 109: The Racist History of the State of Oregon

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the racist History of the State of Oregon. While many states across the United States have incredible racist History, Oregon is the only state in the country to enter the Union with a Black exclusion law, quite literally banning Black people within its borders. When they became a State in 1859, they entered as a Free State - meaning that slavery would not be permitted within its borders - but that’s not because these people were on the right side of History. No, Oregon was so deeply racist that they didn’t even want to look at Black people; enslaved or not.

Oregon would not ratify the Fourteenth Amendment - the Amendment that provided equal protection of the law and gave citizenship to all Black people, including those formerly enslaved - until 1973! They also didn’t ratify the Fifteenth Amendment - which gave Black men the right to vote - until 1959!

And although Portland, Oregon’s most populous city, has long had the reputation of being very liberal and progressive, it continues to rank as one of the whitest big cities in America. According to the most recent national census, Oregon’s demographics show that nearly 83% of the state population is white with less than 2% Black. For Portland specifically, about 75% of the city is white and less than 6% is Black.

We are going to be diving into all the things this week: How Oregon was quite literally established as a White Utopia from the onset, how white surpremacy hate groups (particularly the Ku Klux Klan) thrived - and continue to thrive - there, the gentrification and displacement of Black Americans (particularly in Portland), and what the State has done to combat this dark History.

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