Read Melissa Williams’ M.A. thesis, “Those Who Desired Very Much to Stay: African Americans and Vancouver, Washington, 1940 to 1960”, Washington State University, August 2007.

Abstract: This study explores housing conditions for African Americans in Vancouver, Washington during and after the Second World War.

Vancouver’s African American history has been overshadowed by local historians and scholars who study the Portland metropolitan area, as a result, the social conditions and contributions of Vancouver’s black residents have not been fully explored in context of World War II, the Cold War, nor the early Civil Rights Era. This thesis is the author’s attempt to initiate scholarly research about blacks in Southwest Washington State.

Vancouver’s black population boomed from 18 in 1940 to nearly 9,000 in 1945 as war industries drew thousands of African Americans to the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver created a housing authority to accommodate all newcomers, in the process initiating the city’s first public housing, which was racially integrated.

At the war’s end, the Housing Authority sold many of its temporary units to scale down its property management, forcing many residents out of its projects and into private homes or to other cities. The permanent units the Vancouver Housing Authority (VHA) had maintained for returned veterans and low-income tenants fell away in 1958 when the Authority turned over its properties to the City of Vancouver.

Because city officials found public housing undesirable their 1950s urban renewal plan platted suburban communities where VHA housing once stood. This redevelopment impacted those black residents who no longer had access to affordable public housing. Concerned citizens in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), and local churches mobilized during late 1940s and into the 1950s to garner social and municipal support for black homeownership.

Yet despite efforts on the parts of African American individuals and social and civil rights organizations, Vancouver’s black population dropped dramatically as a result of the waning war economy, the loss of affordable public housing, and incidents of racial intolerance. Many African American migrants who had wished to stay in Vancouver after the war’s end found it impossible to settle permanently in the city.

This thesis is posted by permission of Melissa Williams

Melissa Williams earned a B.A. in History from University of Washington and an M.A. in History from Washington State University. For the past ten years, she has contributed her skills and talents to community and academic projects. Williams co-coordinated the Vancouver African American History Project for the Center for Columbia River History, researched African American Civilian Conservation Corps members for the U.S. Forest Service, and examined declassified police files to explore the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party in Portland, Oregon. She has volunteered time as a transcriptionist, digital records assistant, and archivist at the Oregon Historical Society, Nikkei Legacy Center, and Clark County Historical Museum.

Williams is currently a writing instructor and managing editor of Northwest Passage: Journal of Educational Practices in the College of Education at WSU Vancouver. She is also branch historian for Vancouver NAACP #1139 and a coordinator for the First Families of Vancouver’s African American Community project.

On Saturday March 21, 2009, as part of Teaching American History Grant partnership with ESD 112, CCRH presented a teacher workshop, “History on Location: Uncovering Civil Rights History in our Communities” at Pearson Air Museum.

As a “History on Location” workshop, the day focused on identifying the many civil rights histories in our own backyards. The all-day workshop took place on the Vancouver National Historic Reserve, site of a vibrant 19th century multicultural community. Participants discussed ways in which local histories connect to regional and national historical events and how sites connect to the experiences of peoples. Keeping in mind the idea that hidden civil rights histories are all around us, workshop participants also explored ways to work with students to uncover those hidden histories. To get started, teachers were presented with History on Location Mapping and Questioning Exercises and a bibliography of Regional Resources on African American history.

Chief Ranger and Historian, Greg Shine, focused on uncovering Fort Vancouver’s multicultural history through a tour of the site and teachers engaged mapping invisible histories.

These websites familiarized teachers with the rich multicultural history at Fort Vancouver National Historic site: The Village and A Rich Legacy of African American History at Fort Vancouver

Dr. Darrell Millner, professor of Black Studies at Portland State University, discussed the deep African American history in the West, through an 18th and 19th century West more populated by people of color than one can see in the images and textbooks connected to the Oregon Trail. He discussed African Americans and statehood and examined why social and legal systems developed differently north and south of the Columbia River.

Teachers were asked to think about the following questions:

• What forces brought African Americans to the West?
• How did Oregon institutionalize racial exclusion in its constitution?
• How did the experiences of African Americans in various regional communities differ? How were they similar? What structural issues contributed to those similarities and differences?

Dr. Millner provided a packet of materials that includes legal documents, misleading textbook excerpts, newspaper editorials, Klan applications and photos, and photos.

Prior to the workshop, teachers viewed Dr. Quintard Taylor’s presentation at WSU Vancouver on October 8, 2008, “The Other Black Northwest: Beyond Portland and Seattle.”

They also prepared by reading portions of the Center for Columbia River History Columbia Slough Website, with a focus on African American history:

African Americans and Vanport, Oregon. Drawing the Color Line

Where Will They Go?

Extending the Color Line

Warning: Avoid Columbia Slough Fish

Melissa Williams and Donna Sinclair presented Uncovering the Lived Experience: Using Oral History in the Classroom with Belva Jean Griffin and Ed Washington, both of whom lived at Vanport, Oregon in 1944.

Teachers were also introduced to the Center for Columbia River History Vancouver African American History Project, a year-long student project for seniors from Lewis and Clark High School, which focused on research, interviewing, and public presentation.

Next Hyung Nam, a Global Studies and U.S. History teacher at Wilson High School in Portland, discussed “Uncovering Institutional Racism.”

He asked teachers to think about the following questions:

How do segregation and racial disparities persist after the Civil Rights Era?

How does Portland’s history of segregation and environmental racism compare to the national history?

Nam engaged teachers in a Tribunal Role Play exercise

Teachers were asked to read, Where Race Lives.

The day concluded with consideration of the present “post-Civil Rights era.” Nam presented evidence of institutional racism all around. See, for example, Communities of Color Bear Heaviest Burden in Recession, Wealth, Income, and Power, How Does Wealth Vary According to Race?, Racial Segregation in Education.

Next, Nam focused specifically on environmental racism.

Teachers worked through the tribunal and discussed both its advantages (it actively engages students and gets them thinking about a multi-faceted problem) and its limitations (students spend their time pointing fingers and passing the buck rather than collaboratively problem solving.) Lastly, they discussed Portland’s history of redlining and its impact on wealth.

The information presented here was created in July 2008 for a Teaching American History grant presentation by Katy Barber in Lincoln County. Documents include a bibliography, informational fact sheets with time lines, and primary documents connected to Columbia Basin river development.

Selected Sources on Columbia Basin History

Fact Sheet: The Columbia River Basin, Physical Characteristics and History

Fact Sheet: Bonneville Dam

Fact Sheet: The Dalles Dam.

Fact Sheet: Woody Guthrie and “Roll on Columbia”

Bibliography of Regional African American History resources

At the March 21, 2009 “Uncovering Civil Rights in Our Communities” workshop, teachers started the day with two exercises–History on Location Exercises

Teachers used this map of the Vancouver National Historic Reserve to map the invisible histories on site.

They began the day thinking about what kinds of questions they might ask to uncover lived experience. They were provided with an example of oral history panel interviewing, interview tips, and the Principles and Standards of the Oral History Association.

Using oral history in the classroom can be beneficial at any age. For ideas about how to implement oral history into your classroom, see these Oral History Tips and Resources.

This page provides resources for teaching Washington State History, from our partners and from the CCRH website.

The Washington State Historical Society Education Department has many useful resources, including History Boxes, Lesson Plans, and Columbia Kids, the online history magazine for kids up to age fourteen.

The Washington State Historical Society “Treaty Trail” site includes curriculum, resources, and online activities for teaching about treaties in Washington State—who negotiated them, their significance, their relationship to the U.S. Constitution, and some of their ongoing consequences.

The Center for Columbia River History community history websites include primary documents and secondary historical narratives focused on Washington State. These materials are ideal for meeting state standards.

Through primary documents, photographs, and oral history interviews, the Camas Community history website tells the story of Camas, Washington, a mill town located near the Columbia River gorge. The site is divided into three parts demonstrating change over time from the early contact era to the end of the 20th century: I – the Cascade Indians & Early Town History; II – Company Town; III – Growth and Change.

The Columbia Basin Native Fishery website profiles many indigenous groups of the Columbia Basin. The site includes documents regarding Indian fishing rights such as treaties and court cases in both the U.S. and Canada. These documents can be used to answer the “questions to consider.” Other sections address treaty harvest rights, dams and their effects on the Native fishery, and traditional fishing methods. A photo archive includes images of Indian fishing and of the river before and after it was dammed.

The Crewport Community History website tells the story of the Crewport, Washington Farm Labor Camp constructed by the Farm Security Administration during WWII, just two miles north of the City of Granger, Washington. This web site, grounded in oral history interviews and supplemented by photos and documents, weaves together the history of migrant families who resided at Crewport from the 1940’s through the late 1960’s when the Camp was closed. Created in partnership with Yakima Valley Community College, the Crewport community history is an example of a community based service learning project using oral history in the classroom.

The Moses Lake Community History website also uses images, documents, photos, and oral histories to explore the history of a community impacted by the building of Grand Coulee Dam. Although many welcomed federal programs that provided irrigation water and cheap hydroelectric power, the resulting inundation of the lands along the Columbia fundamentally altered Native American communities and several small settlements that had grown up since the mid-1880s. This site provides “go to the source” and “questions to consider” for each section.