Richard Brown has been a resident of North Portland since 1976. He is on the board of directors of the Willamette River Keepers and the Black United Front. He has also been an advocate for environmental change in the community surrounding the Columbia Slough. Mr. Brown has been involved with both the effort to put warning signs on the slough and education regarding recreation on the slough.

Oral History

Narrator: Richard Brown
Interviewer: Kirsten Wasche (Portland State University Student)
Place: Portland, Oregon
Date: August 17, 2000

Transcribed by Kirsten Wasche, edited by Donna Sinclair

[Interview Begins]

KW: This is Kirsten Wasche. The date is August 17, 2000 and I’m with the Columbia Slough Oral Histories Project speaking with Richard Brown at his home in Portland, Oregon.

KW: Richard, why did you move to the Portland area?

RB: It wasn’t anything that was intended. I retired from the Air Force and I planned to stay here for a year and then move. I met my wife — that was twenty-four years ago.

KW: Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

RB: I’m 61 years old. I was born in Harlem, New York City. I went to school in Harlem and joined the Air Force in 1956, retired in 1976 and have been here ever since.

KW: Actually, I had a question about your military history. Do you feel that your military exerience affected your activism?

RB: Yeah, Yeah. I think there were a lot of things that went into it. You know, growing up during the 40’s and 50’s. My Mom was active in school and I think because of her involvement in community things it was a natural thing for me to do. That was my model, you know. There were not a lot of alternatives. As you grow up you get involved and in the military it was the same. I was in the service when the service was still going through the changes of integration and those kind of things. I don’t know whether it was so much activism or just having a big mouth, but you know when things were not right I was real vocal about it. In the later years I found myself advocating for younger airmen who had joined who were not happy with the way things were and trying to get them to at least see that you volunteered for this, so you need to figure out a way to do the four years. There were options and there were advantages to the military so I think that just growing up in my household and then being in the military probably had a lot do with my activism here.

KW: And what was your occupational specialty in the military?

RB: For ten years I worked in airborne communications, and for ten years I worked in missiles-airborne guidance systems. . . . I went in at a time I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I went to school for advertising art. The options weren’t very many for African Americans at that time so I became real frustrated and started to get in trouble and just drift and my parents weren’t going to have that. So in rebellion I joined the Air Force. . . Three days after my birthday I was gone and that was not what my mother had expected. She expected this period where we’d say goodbye and three days later I was gone. It was not a hard decision for me because I could see that I was going nowhere fast. I wasn’t ready for the military. I enjoyed it but I wasn’t ready for it. I wasn’t ready for the discipline. I wasn’t ready for calling people sir and my father didn’t expect me to call him sir so nobody else would get it; and for most of my career if I had to say sir to you I just didn’t talk to you. So those were the hardships for the military, but after about eight years I kind of buckled down.

KW: Got used to it.

RB: Yeah and it was fun

KW: Okay, I’m switching the subject a little bit. How did you first become aware of the Columbia Slough?

RB: I think that ever since I relocated here I knew about the existence of the slough and I had heard the stories about the pollution, and that in previous years it was a good place to go fishing and the community used it for recreation. I guess you could go swimming there, you could could go fishing there and boating, but I the one company that I remember hearing a lot about was American Plating. I think it was American Plating or some plating company that really polluted a portion of it and after that people stopped using it, so it just was not a factor in my being here. I had given up fishing for the most part so there was no attraction there. I don’t swim in water that doesn’t have chlorine in it, so there wasn’t any attraction there. It was just there and I knew a little of the history so I knew that if I saw somebody down there they were really taking a risk, but it wasn’t a big thing for me. In later years I went when they were having the big environmental conference in Brazil. I don’t remember the year. There was a side conference. They were having a preparatory conference in New York at the U.N. and there was a side conference of activists also in New York. I went and that began to kind of pique my interest, not so much about the environment but the lack of participation of minorities in this discussion. I went to that conference and came back concerned about the lack of participation and that there were some serious results of pollution impacting our community. There used to be a lot of oil companies in the community so you have the buried tanks. Oil and gas companies. There were a couple of sites that had been shut down because of pollution and they just existed. Nobody knew anything about them other than there used to be a company there, so I began to look at those things. I always knew that asthma and respiratory illnesses were a concern for the community so I began to look into those areas to try to figure out if there were any connections between the environmental things and the high rate of asthma in poor minority communities. The one thing I thought was that if the pollution was causing problems specifically to the community that would show up in health records- specifically deaths. I got the state [records]. I think it was the state that had compiled some information that identified the cause of deaths in the areas, and I was surprised to find that there was nothing. There was not an abundance of deaths in the areas [that] I thought would be based on the pollution that I thought existed. That kind of took the wind out of my sails. I met Don Frances. I don’t remember how we met but it was around the Columbia Slough and the fact that people were fishing and swimming and boating when the river was polluted, especially during the rainy seasons. I got involved with him and we were working- he was working then for some environmental group downtown with Nina Bell. I don’t remember the name of the group but I got involved with the Columbia Slough posting the signs. We went out and posted some signs to let people know the hazards – not just that there was an overflow situation but the hazards of drinking the water. We produced multilingual brochures and I handed some out in the Asian community because they used the slough a lot at that time.

KW: how difficult do you feel it was to put signs up on the slough? How much resistance did you have?

RB: Well, there was no resistance to putting them up. We just went out there and did it.

KW: Right.

RB: The result of that, though, was the city took them down because they didn’t meet city standards. We made ours out of wood, so what the city did was they took ours down and they duplicated or replicated what we had on metal and put them back.

KW: So the signs that the city put back up were pretty much the same thing?

RB: Pretty much, yeah.

KW: Well, how did you feel when the city took those signs down?

RB: Well, we really came about it. I went to see the environmental folks at the city and I think that one of the things that I brought to the table was that in the past there had not been any African Americans involved in this discussion. Because of my history as an activist here people started to listen. We got people to the table. We got some commitments, in fact, we got the commitment to replace the signs to put up another sign. So that was kind of the start of my involvement. It wasn’t long-lasting because after we put the signs up and the city then replaced them I kind of took it as a personal thing to hand out the brochures. The Columbia Slough goes across Vancouver [Avenue] up here, and if I’d see people down there fishing I would go down and give them the signs; or anytime I was along the slough I’d hand people a brochure so at least they’d understand what the risks were.

KW: What kind of responses did you get from those people- were they surprised? Did most of them know about the pollution and the problem?

RB: It’s hard to tell whether they knew about it. There was never any resistance to the information. One guy had just moved here from out of town and he was fishing and one of the things that he said was [the he fished] like two or three times a week, but he didn’t eat the fish. My concern then was — what is he doing with the fish? Is he turning them back? I know at one time people were selling fish out the trunks of their cars. They’d go fishing, ice the fish down and sell them out of the trunk of their car. If he was doing that I’m sure he wasn’t telling people that they came from the Columbia Slough and they were polluted. So I kind of addressed that with him. He assured me that he wasn’t selling them. I didn’t have any reason to doubt him so that was satisfactory to me. There was a bounty on some trash-fish that inhabit the Willamette and I met a couple out there that fished for these just to collect the bounty. I told them- all right you don’t eat them but you handle them so you need to wash your hands. You know they were out there all day so they brought their lunches, and I’d advise them that you need to wash your hands because you’ve got the dirt or whatever’s in the water on your hands or you’ve been handling the fish and now you’re going to eat your lunch so you need to make sure your hands are clean. They were a young couple and I think they were appreciative of that information. I was talking to one guy out there that said he knew it was polluted. So I said, “What are the indications?”

“Well, I was fishing out here and saw a dead horse floating down the slough.”

KW: A dead horse?

RB: A dead horse. I said all right, okay, but he was still out there fishing. He had said he didn’t eat the fish. You give people information you hope that they understand that you’re not dictating, you’re just giving them information. I know one time I went to one of the Asian stores on Killingsworth to give the pamphlet to the owners of the store. When I was talking there was a youngster who must have been six or seven years old and he came in saying, “What do you mean we can’t eat fish?”

Well, that was most of his diet, but he didn’t understand that I was talking about fish in the slough. He just thought I was trying to stop them from eating fish. He was irate about it. . . .

KW: The first time that you remember going out to the slough how did you recall that? What’s your memory of that?

RB: Well, not the first time. The first time I went out to the slough understanding what the problems were, it was striking to me because in the trees were these buzzards. What I know about buzzards is they don’t hang around healthy stuff. They hang around where dying is happening, where death is around. That was indication to me about the condition of the slough, and at times when I was asked to talk about it I’d relate that story and challenge people to get involved before the buzzards were on Portlandia. I saw that as an indication of what was coming.

KW: What connections do you see between the environmental movement and people of color?

RB: Well, I think for most people there isn’t a connection but there needs to be. I think that in the past few years, especially in Portland, there’s been an organization that’s surfaced to kind of address those issues. EJAG- Environmental Justice Advocacy Group. I think generally there is no connection. It’s seen as a white middle class issue. All of the groups that are involved in it fit that category for the most part. There is no attempt to outreach to poor minority communities other than it’s become fashionable now to apply for grants and use affirmative action or environmental justice as a way to get those grants. The minority community may be the subject of what they are doing but a lot of education happens as a result of those grants so I’ve become real critical of grants that are given under the guise of environmental justice and nothing happens. I’ve even asked DEQ that when an organization applies for a grant and says we’re working with this minority group that you need to call that group and find out what the extent of their involvement is. They don’t do it but I think it’s a way to make sure that we integrate the environmental movement for a lot of people. The air that you breathe is something they feel they don’t have any control over and for poor folks keeping a roof over your head may be more important. Keeping food on the table may be more important.

KW: Yeah, it’s definitely a hard situation. Everyone needs to try to get involved in this. So how can minorities become more involved with these environmental issues?

RB: I don’t think the question should be how can minorities become involved because of all the things we just talked about. Minorities are not going to drop putting food on the table to worry about the polluted river that they don’t use. I think that the environmental organizations have to make a concerted effort to involve minorities, involve poor people through education. Going in the schools and giving the kids information so the kids can take information home to their parents. Making the connections between respiratory illnesses and the environment. Making the connection between the lead hazards and paint and the damage it does to young kids.

KW: If the kids bring the information home to the parents and the children see the parents taking an active role maybe the kids will follow suit with that.

RB: Right, and when I say kids I’m talking about little kids, because as kids get older their connection with their parents kind of goes by the wayside. But the young kids especially second, third and fourth grade. Parents are really involved with their kids at that age and when the kids come home with information the parents kind of absorb it also. I think that’s the time it’s got to be done. We’ve got to groom those youngsters and you need to give older kids the information also, but I think that less of it will be passed on to parents.

KW: What organizations are you currently involved with? I know there is a long list.

RB: Around the environment I’m involved with EJAG on the periphery. They can call me anytime they want for information or for my opinion about something. I am the board of directors of the Willamette River Keepers. That is an organization dedicated to bringing the Willamette River and its tributaries to a level that it’s useable for recreation and as a place where people can get fish to eat. . . .

I guess one of the problems in discussing the environment is that you take the Willamette river– we can have all the indicators that is polluted but nobody’s dropping dead from it. I like to use the story of Minimata, the city in Japan where the industries dumped Mercury in the water and it wasn’t until people started dying that people got concerned about it. Well, we don’t want to wait until then, so I think we need to take whatever indicators we get that there is a problem to let people know and hopefully get them involved. I did a video “The Water in our Backyard.” I was part of it and one of the doctors in it talks about the pollution and one of the things she talked about is the undeveloped genitals in panthers and alligators in Florida. Well, when I talk about it I use that as an example you know and, especially for me as we take these pollutants, these are the effects of it. Well you know its tongue-in-cheek but it gets peoples attention. Not too long ago the guy that’s painting the house hired some people to do some preparatory work and they wouldn’t wear the masks so I relayed that story to them and this was a youngster, a young guy. I guess he thought that he was going to live forever, but after that he started wearing the mask. So for men that’s a way to approach it. I don’t know the impact it has on the past hearing the story and whatever action they take but I think those are the things that we need to do. We need to show how the impact of the environment affects your life, and it may not be anything that you can measure. It may not be anything that you can see today but we can look at fish and we find that fish have lesions on them. Well, the only thing fish do is swim in water- that’s the environment. If we find that there’s an extraordinarily high number of fish that have these problems we’ve got to assume that the environment is causing it, and if we’re eating the fish, if we’re swimming in the water, if we’re drinking the water then there’s no reason to think that its not going to affect us in some way. We may not have lesions but we’ve got to realize that it’s going to affect us in some way. . . .

KW: Do you feel that race was a factor in the neglect of the Columbia Slough since the neighborhood surrounding the slough is primarily a minority neighborhood?

RB: I think that that’s probably had a lot to do with not letting it get polluted because most waterways had some level of pollution, but I think it may have had some effect on the decision to start the work on it to clean it up. The fact that nobody’s using it anyway or the people that are using it aren’t important. I think that, and not just race and economics. I think that may have had something to do with the fact that it was allowed to get as bad as it has especially when the Willamette River has come from where it’s come from to where it is today. I think that race and economics probably had a lot to do with it. . . .

One of the things that I understand when you talk to older people about the slough — when they restricted it I guess that caused a lot of pollution. When the water was running by through pretty fast the evidence of pollution wasn’t as evident.

KW: Right, when the water from the Columbia River was flowing, yes. What can we do now to promote education about the environment?

RB: Well, it’s got to be a priority. It’s got to be important. We’ve got to find ways to talk to people about it without threatening them- without the doom and gloom stories. I think one of the things that happens is we talk doom and gloom and people just are fed up with it. Well I can’t do anything about it so I’m not going to worry about it. I think we’ve got to show that things are bad but it can be better, and not enough of that goes on. We continue to try to scare people into being concerned about it and that doesn’t work at all. It works for people who have become ill and know that they have become ill because of it. We look at smoking. We know that smoking kills you but you’ve still got people that continue to smoke so the doom and gloom is not going to be what causes people to be concerned about it.

KW: I agree with you on that actually. Just more education, more giving people the facts about it- Do you think that’s what’s going to make the change because people don’t want to see the facts?

RB: I don’t think it”s so much facts because facts are always tinted with technical language. We talk about or we give the Latin names for all this stuff and who cares? We’ve got to figure out a way to cause people to talk about it like they talk about the latest music or the latest cars- things that affect them everyday and are not really threatening to them. You know you really need to be concerned about it. I think that’s the approach that’s got to be taken. I think that we fail miserably in trying to scare people into making change. We can talk about global warming forever. You’re going to have your skeptics but I think most of the people are not going to care because it spans such a great period of time. Well, it’s been going on for this long- why worry about it now?

KW: I think oftentimes you need to personally see. You need to go out and take a look and that’s really what affects you. The first time I saw the slough I was like- wow look at this. We need to do something about this. What can we do about this?

RB: Well, taking people out to the slough during an overflow situation or even to the Willamette River during the overflow situation has got to impact you. You know we were talking about the impact of the waterways. I remember when I first came here I used to notice that people used to fish near the overflows near the sewer pipes but I didn’t know what they were. I just thought they were some kind of connection from another body of water and then I realized that they were the overflows. Well, fish for the most part are scavengers so where are they going to be? Where the trash gets dumped- in fishing terms that’s called “chumming.” So when I saw that then I became concerned about the people who were fishing there. Not concerned about health, but did you know? People in conversation would mention, “Oh yeah I go fishing down by the big tubes.”

And then I was able to say, “Well, do you know what comes out of those tubes?” Usually they didn’t, so I would tell them and hopefully they chose not to fish there anymore. But again, its one of those things.

[They say] “Well I’ve been eating these fish all my life and nothing is wrong with me. My grandfather ate them and he lived to be ninety years old.” Those are the things that you have to contend with when you are talking about something that’s as abstract as the environment.

KW: I know that you are involved with an organization called Black United Front. What is your relationship with them?

RB: I’m the co-chair and the Black United Front is an organization that deals in a lot of issues of community livability. We’re involved in South African issues and Central America issues. Education here, jobs, those issues.

[END SIDE A, BEGIN SIDE B]

KW: What are the philosophies of the Black United front?

RB: Well its about equality in education, equality in jobs, equality in the quality of life and we pursue that.

KW: Have they had any direct impact on the Columbia River and the problem with the Columbia?

RB: The Front?

KW: Right

RB: Well again you might be able to talk to someone else and get a different perspective of it but as I mentioned eariler we went down to DEQ and the city to talk about the Columbia Slough and as I remember there was not a lot of enthusiasm for the meeting until they found out that I was going to be there. I was there as a representative of the Black United Front so I think that that as we get involved in things because of our reputation people tend to at least want to hear what it is we’re talking about. However small that may have been [in] the impact we’ve had on the slough.

KW: I’m sure you’ve met a lot of different activists through these organizations that you’re involved with. Can you tell me any personal stories about them?

RB: About the activists?

KW: Yeah, any one that stands out.

RB: What I would like to do is tell you about going to New York to that side-conference, to the big environmental conference in Brazil. As we began to try to prioritize issues- the issues that were the concerns of minorities, nobody wanted to talk about. It was not important to talk about these things. There were more important [topics] and it just got into a shouting match where we had to let them know that they were going to listen to these things. If out of this conference came anything it would come out that the issues that we had were just as important as saving the whales — so there was a side conference. The N.G.O.s – non governmental organizations – were having a reception at the U.N. and we asked about invitations for people from our conference to go to that. Well, the woman who was representative from the N.G.O’s to our meeting said, “Well you can take my pass and one of you can go.”

“This a conference of two, three hundred people,” I said and asked “Can’t you get some others?”

[She said] “No, we can’t get any others.”

So I said, “Why don’t we do this- why don’t we take the one that you had.” We go to Pronto Print or some quick place and make some. We made a bunch of them and we took these and marched to the U.N. and held them up and walked right through the gate to the reception. We went into the reception. I had some of their wine and cheese and then we stopped the conference to let them know that they needed to be concerned. We stopped the reception to let them know that they needed to be able to represent the concerns of minorities and poor folks. That was one to me that kind of showed that there was really nationally no effort to be representative of all our citizens. We went on a tour of Harlem and I don’t know whether the press had gotten wind of what had happened at the U.N. but there was a lot of press there and they wanted to talk to some folks from Japan that were there. They wanted to talk to them about the conference and I went in the middle of that conversation.

I said, “Listen we’re standing in front of a funeral home that during the night cremates people. People wake up in the morning to find ash over their cars. The air has been tested and they’ve found levels of Mercury from fillings in peoples teeth in the air. Why are we talking about this stuff that means nothing to these people that don’t live here when these are concerns that should be addressed?”

People weren’t very happy about that but I wouldn’t leave. I was real adamant about it. If you were going to talk about anything I’m sure that they eventually got to talk to these folks about what they wanted to talk about. But I guess to the credit of the people that were there they relinquished the stage to me rather than go on with the conversation.

KW: Did you get press coverage on that?

RB: No, that’s not what they were there for but what I was able to do was make it difficult for them to have the interview that they wanted to have.

KW: It’s obvious from that example that these issues aren’t getting equal coverage.

RB: No. The get coverage when something crazy happens. When things are just so have deteriorated so much that people lives are at stake.

KW: It seems like that’s the only time that you ever hear about any change taking place.

RB: Yeah, right. You know there was a story I heard — just to talk about the reasons people will not get involved in the issues — In some city in New York during the forties and the fifties when they made radium dials for watches so they glow in the dark. There was a company in this city that employed a lot of people to do that work. Well the people, when it was found out that it was a hazardous environment to be in, the people were not supportive of it [recognizing the dangers] because it meant jobs for them. So you have to figure out ways to balance concerns with the environment with jobs, with peoples livelihood. Mining coal-you know people still do that knowing the hazards. People did it when there weren’t the safeguards that there are now knowing what the hazards were. So it’s difficult to tell people that we’re going to close down this plant that that keeps the whole city going.

KW: Do you have anything else you would like to talk about?

RB: Well, other than we need to continue to strive to make these issues that are easy for people to embrace. As long as we continue to talk about these things in technical terms-to talk about doom and gloom it’s going to be difficult to get people involved. As with the cigarette industry when people die and then folks find out well I can sue, then they get interested. Well, I don’t know whom you’re going to sue about the environment. We need to be concerned about it before people start dying.

KW: Yeah, I agree. Well, that’s all the questions I have.

RB: Well that was easy.

KW: Thank you for your time

RB: No problem

[Interview Ends]