[Before WWII] We were not an organized community. We lived in a great many sections of the city . . . there was no particular place we had to live.
Kathryn Hall Bogle, African American Portland resident
African American Population in Oregon
| 1850 | 54 |
| 1900 | 1,105 |
| 1940 | 2,565 |
| 1950 | 11,529 |
Discriminatory legislation in the 1857 Oregon State Constitution prevented settlement of Blacks, free or slave. The clause was not repealed until 1926. During World War II the Portland area added 160,000 workers, 20,000 of them African American. The Kaiser Company recruited workers from all over the nation, causing a crisis-level housing crush by mid-1942. City leaders throughout the west faced decisions about where war-workers would live. Portland’s solution was the Housing Authority of Portland and the nation’s largest public housing project — Vanport City. Despite national non-discriminatory legislation, only Guilds Lake and Vanport on the Columbia Slough allowed African American residents. The “temporary” Vanport City housed half the migrant Blacks during the war years. Although Blacks comprised only 12% of Vanport’s population during the war, and 25% after, it became Portland’s “Negro Project.”
Local unions also excluded Black workers. One union leader said he would “pull the place down” rather than provide Black people equal rights at the Kaiser Shipyards. Some Black shipyard workers protested:
We, the Negro people employed by the Kaiser Company, maintain that under false pretenses we were brought from east to west to work for defense, and we demand, with due process of law, the following rights: (1) to work at our trades on equal rights with whites; (2) to go to vocational school or take vocational training on equal rights with whites.
Statement of the Shipyard Negro Organization for Victory, November, 1942
Under pressure from the local NAACP and the federal government, Black war-workers formed an auxiliary union. Although the union collected dues, the auxiliary was never chartered and Black exclusion from the local union hall continued. The federal government mandated wage equality and higher wages during the war, but when the war ended in July, 1945 the 11,000 African Americans remaining in Portland lost job security.
- Exclusionary clauses of the Oregon Constitution, 1859
- Statistics – African Americans in Portland and race in Oregon
- Excerpts from 1945 City Club Bulletin – “The Negro in Portland”
- 1946 Vanport Study – “Elements of Tenant Instability in a War Housing Project”
- Oregon Journal article, August 3, 1947 – “There’s Another Vanport”
