May 30, 2023
Content warning: This story contains quotations of racist views and statements The Oregonian printed. It is part of a series examining the newspaper’s history of racism.
The white men leading Oregon’s highway department were ready to dramatically reshape Portland as soon as federal money arrived. Their asphalt aspirations, unveiled in 1955, envisioned dozens of miles of interstate highways revolutionizing automobile travel in the growing post-war city.
Some of the freeways would never be built. Others moved after hitting neighborhood resistance. But Interstate 5 quickly cleaved a path through the Albina district, the heart of Black Portland.
Highway engineers dead-ended dozens of streets and demolished hundreds of homes.
Oregon’s leading newspaper barely noticed.
The Oregonian didn’t interview residents forced to move. The daily newspaper didn’t acknowledge the pressure that people faced to sell their homes and businesses.
“People were paying attention,” said Avel Louise Gordly, now 76, who lived in the area as a child and went on to become the first Black woman elected to the state Senate. “But their voices weren’t heard. Their voices weren’t elevated.”
For the latest installment of The Oregonian/OregonLive’s series scrutinizing its racist legacy, the newsroom revisited coverage of one of the most profound changes in Portland’s racial makeup: The arrival of some 20,000 Black people during World War II and a decades-long government effort that pushed them out of Albina, the place where they’d been allowed to buy homes.
The newsroom examined hundreds of news stories and interviewed more than two dozen former newspaper staffers, community members, academics and people whose families were displaced between the late 1950s and early 1970s.
The review found The Oregonian masked the destruction of Albina with the shiny gloss of progress. The newspaper disregarded people who lived where white leaders wanted to build the interstate. And it supported or ignored the impacts of other publicly funded projects, including the voter-approved Memorial Coliseum and a failed expansion of Emanuel Hospital, now Legacy Emanuel.
Albina over the years
The Albina district has no formal boundaries. It’s seen here before annexation in 1889, in city plans from 1962 and 1993, and in academic research from 2007.
Bulldozing Albina’s housing had a lasting impact on generational wealth. Today Black people in Portland are far less likely to own homes than white people, according to a 2023 city report. The average Black family is unable to afford to rent in any Portland neighborhood.
Albina began as a railroad town, settled by Russian, German, Irish and Scandinavian immigrants before Portland annexed it in 1891. A federal program in the 1930s redlined the area, limiting access to home loans based on its racial composition, which by then included most of the city’s small Black population. Real estate agents, adhering to a racist code of ethics prohibiting home sales to Black people in white neighborhoods, continued funneling Black people there in the decades that followed.
By 1960, more than 80% of the city’s 15,500 Black residents lived in Albina.
The district, which has no formal city boundaries but includes North and Northeast Portland neighborhoods like Eliot and Boise, formed a vibrant community of single-family homes and Black-owned barbershops, grocery stores and jazz clubs, places where famous musicians like Louis Armstrong, Etta James and Duke Ellington performed.
Portland’s white leaders called Albina “blighted.” The administrative term was used in cities nationwide to justify spending federal money on projects creating “urban renewal,” which disproportionately displaced people of color. The Oregonian also adopted those terms, labeling the district “one of the worst blighted areas of the city” in a 1960 news story.
Block by block, government projects dismantled Albina, filling it with towering concrete pylons, thousands of polluting vehicles daily, acres of parking lots and the Trail Blazers’ eventual home. More than 1,000 houses were demolished; some were replaced by nothing more than lots that still sit empty.
Today, following decades of displacement and gentrification, only about 10% of the city’s Black population of nearly 52,000 lives in Albina.
Sharon Gary-Smith’s childhood home at 1835 N. Benton Ave. disappeared without a word in The Oregonian, swallowed up as the city acquired land for a water bureau maintenance yard next to what today is Portland Public Schools’ headquarters.
Gary-Smith said her parents, Frederick and Bobbi, thought about holding out but had no choice: They sold in 1961 and moved to Southeast Portland with Sharon and her three sisters, Linda, Carla and Daria. They returned for church on Sundays, but Gary-Smith said she never saw some schoolmates again.
The Oregonian “had an opportunity, but not enough intention, to tell the truth about how all this was tied together,” said Gary-Smith, 74, who went on to become president of the Portland chapter of the NAACP.
“You lost the nucleus of your own sense of community,” she added. “And then it’s not written about as part of a much larger, more sinister removal. It’s like we never existed there.”
The newspaper described Interstate 5 as a catalyst for neighborhood improvement. Paraphrasing Portland Mayor Terry Schrunk in 1960, the paper wrote that “only one (area), the Albina district, was really in need of renewal and this is being accomplished in great part by the new freeway being put through much of the area.”
A three-part news series profiled Albina the next year, debating whether it was beautiful or a slum in need of government investment.
Discussing possible causes of its purported blight, The Oregonian wrote that “some blame community indifference, some blame a lack of individual initiative by Albina home dwellers, some see the blight as an inescapable consequence of low-income, uneducated families with little aspiration.”
By contrast, when an early route for Interstate 205 avoided wealthy, white neighborhoods, including Alameda, Grant Park, Laurelhurst and Eastmoreland, the editorial board in 1964 praised the path for being “drawn cleverly” to leave those “high-value” places intact.
Karen Gibson is a Portland State University emeritus urban studies professor who has extensively researched Black displacement in Albina. She said the newspaper denigrated the Black population by employing the same stereotypes and word choices as Portland’s discriminatory real estate industry. That helped perpetuate racism in a city where white residents had little exposure to Black people other than through the news, she said.
“It’s a subtle way of being racist,” she said, “without being directly racist.”
What The Oregonian missed, she said, is that Black home ownership rates were high in Albina and the area housed a burgeoning Black middle class flush with savings after World War II.
“It’s lying about a population group,” she said. “There were many strong, successful, creative, brilliant people in Black neighborhoods.”
But in a newsroom that for years had employed just one Black journalist, the story of Albina and what Black residents were losing there wasn’t acknowledged until the 1970s.
For many, it came too late.
From segregation toward equality
Thousands of Black workers piled into trains in the early 1940s, traveling what The Oregonian called “the new Oregon Trail” for jobs building ships in Portland. They came from Alabama, Arkansas, Texas and other southern states as part of the Great Migration, chasing opportunity, equality and the chance to help their country during World War II.
Their arrival sparked a long overdue shift in the racial dynamics of a state that at its founding legally excluded Black people. Oregon’s Black population, which before 1940 had never climbed above 3,000 people, quickly topped 20,000.
Portland’s white political leaders viewed the arrivals with concern. So did The Oregonian.
“New Negro Migrants Worry City,” read a Sept. 23, 1942, front-page headline, using the federal government’s term at the time for Black people. The news story labeled the Albina area a “colony” for Black people and said the growing population was a “problem,” quoting a police inspector who reported adding a patrol there because of “numerous complaints of beat-ups, robberies and noisy parties.”
The story’s racist framing was quickly challenged by Dr. DeNorval Unthank, one of the state’s first Black physicians, who rebuked the newspaper’s “alarmist attitude” in a letter to the editor published Oct. 4, 1942.
“Accept these people as citizens of Portland, worthy of the same respect as any other group of incoming people,” Unthank wrote. He called for an end to the real estate industry’s discrimination, including segregating Black people in Albina. “I ask that we stop creating a black belt in Portland. Rent and sell these people homes where they can afford to buy them.”
In the same issue as Unthank’s letter, a white reporter named Don McLeod wrote that crime in Albina was “not as bad” as rumored but also labeled the Black workers’ arrival a “problem” and “an issue that could develop into a civic headache.”
Paraphrasing Mayor Earl Riley, McLeod wrote, “Portland can absorb only a minimum of Negroes without upsetting the city’s regular life.”
Discrimination extended to the city’s shipyards, where a white labor boss refused to give Black workers the highest-paying jobs, saying it would incentivize too many to come to Portland. The Oregonian applauded when he relented in 1942. But the newspaper’s position came with a caveat.
Black people “should be sent here in approximately the same proportions as they exist in the present population,” The Oregonian editorial board wrote Oct. 9, 1942. “If some such proportions are maintained … it should be a happy solution all around.”
No West Coast state had a smaller percentage of Black residents. In 1940, before the war began, Oregon’s population was 98.7% white and 0.2% Black.
Portland was a northwestern city with a southern ethos. Jim Crow segregation flourished. Theaters and restaurants refused to serve Black people. Workplace discrimination limited jobs.
Civil rights remained unfulfilled in part because the newspaper had backed segregation in the early 1900s, then ignored the repercussions for decades as signs sprouted at Portland restaurants saying “White Trade Only.”
By 1945, The Oregonian’s editorial page had become supportive of equality. Yet it downplayed the importance of the type of legislation passed by California and Washington decades earlier, which prohibited segregation in public places. Discrimination would end, the newspaper said, when people changed.
“The road is long, and the final answer lies not in laws but in the intelligence and humanity of the people,” an editorial said.
As shipyards closed at war’s end and racism limited job opportunities for Black people, Oregon’s Black population declined the most of the West Coast states. In 1950, The Oregonian’s all-white, all-male editorial board supported a Portland city initiative to end legalized segregation, saying the board “would be deeply disillusioned should the people of Portland, alone among the great western and northern cities, fail to meet the moral test involved here.”
Portlanders did fail that test, rejecting the initiative by a 56%-44% vote. Civil rights didn’t take hold until Oregon’s Legislature passed a landmark bill in 1953, a whopping 34 years after it was introduced.
By then, The Oregonian’s editorial page was unequivocal about the necessity. Quoting Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the paper said: “It is high time that the American nation rid itself of discrimination on racial or religious grounds. Such discrimination is morally wrong.”
Discrimination at the newspaper
As Oregon eliminated its color line in restaurants, theaters and other public places, so did The Oregonian.
The newspaper deliberately hired its first Black employee, William “Bill” Hilliard, in 1952. It was progress, but the newsroom remained the domain of white men who decided which stories and communities to cover.
Hilliard, who had just graduated from Pacific University in Forest Grove, started as a copy aide running errands under the supervision of a high school student, then became a sports reporter in 1953. He was for years the lone Black person in the newsroom, becoming executive editor in 1982.
As a child, Hilliard had been discriminated against by The Oregonian, which refused to give him a paper route.
“They told me the neighborhood was not ready for a Black kid to deliver the paper, so they turned me down,” Hilliard said in a 2013 interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Hilliard died in 2017.
When Hilliard joined The Oregonian, “there was very little news about what was going on in Portland as far as the Black community was concerned,” he said in the interview.
“If I hadn’t pushed them, they wouldn’t have paid any attention to it,” he added.
Hilliard quickly ran into a conflict with McLeod, the sports editor, who as a reporter two decades earlier had called Portland’s Black population boom a “problem.” Hilliard was rarely sent out of the office on assignments. Another sportswriter told Hilliard that he should complain.
When Hilliard approached McLeod, he said he was told: “Don’t complain to me, kid, I’m giving you a break.” McLeod warned Hilliard not to complain to anyone else, including the union, or he’d be fired.
“I went to my city editor and told him about it, he said, ‘We’ll take care of that.’ The next thing I knew I was transferred to the newsroom,” Hilliard said in the 2013 interview.
Phil McLaurin, who joined the newsroom staff in 1961 as a copy aide while attending Portland State College, told The Oregonian/OregonLive he also had a run-in with McLeod. McLaurin, who said he was just the second Black person on staff after Hilliard, applied for a sports reporting job.
He’d been editor of Jefferson High School’s newspaper. He had announced sports on Portland Public Schools’ radio station. He’d been working in the newsroom for years and was ready to move up. He was sure he was qualified.
McLeod said no. “We don’t think you would fit in,” McLaurin remembers him saying. McLeod died in 1990.
McLaurin, who would go on to a career that saw him become the first Black person on both the Portland mayor’s staff and the state Board of Higher Education and to hold the position of Oregon state ombudsman, said the discrimination was clear.
“From my perspective,” McLaurin said, “it was pretty explicit.”
John Harvey, who worked as a reporter and editor from 1961 until 2005, said racism was rarely overt in the newsroom, at least around him, a white man who in his youth skipped school to witness the state Senate approve the civil rights bill. But, Harvey said, the newspaper ignored the Black community during the civil rights era.
“It was more ignorance and not caring around the plight of Black people in Portland,” he said. “It’s what The Oregonian didn’t do.”
Harvey remembered taking a call on the city desk one afternoon in the early 1960s: An armed robbery on North Williams Avenue, a major commercial street in Albina, once known as the “Black Broadway.” At the time, Harvey said, the paper covered “every two-bit stickup.”
Harvey went to a white editor and asked whether someone should report on it.
“He said, ‘No, that’s just some of Hilliard’s people,’” Harvey said. “That was kind of the attitude.”
History erased, stories ignored
As the state swallowed homes and businesses to build Interstate 5, the story of the displacement of Black Portlanders wasn’t told in The Oregonian.
Charles Maxey, who had moved to Oregon from Texas to work in the shipyards, was among those whom the newspaper overlooked.
Signs began appearing on the door of his barbershop in the commercial building he purchased at 26 N.E. Weidler Ave. after the shipyards closed: Property of the Highway Department. No trespassing.
Maxey threw the signs in the trash. He wanted a fair price. A white person with a building across the street, he said, was being offered tens of thousands of dollars more.
Then came an FBI agent, flashing a badge and asking who was throwing away the signs. Me, Maxey told him. The man delivered a warning: “This is federal property.”
“The Highway Department wanted to really put the squeeze on me,” Maxey said in an oral history interview in 1994 with the Oregon Historical Society.
Maxey, who died in 2001, unsuccessfully tried organizing Albina residents to get a better deal. The Oregonian didn’t report on it. The competing Oregon Journal didn’t either, relying on highway officials as the only source for a 1961 story claiming that all the property for the freeway had been “harmoniously acquired.”
During the 1950s and 1960s, The Oregonian’s coverage of other publicly funded projects was the same. Through years of reporting and editorializing about where Memorial Coliseum should be built, the presence of homes and businesses that would be torn down across 17 acres was an afterthought.
When construction crews razed homes in October 1957, pushing the debris into a massive bonfire, The Oregonian said they had succumbed “to progress.” By the time the 12,000-seat arena opened in 1960, the newspaper’s coverage was celebratory, calling it “a symbol of Portland’s emergence from a conservative ridden hick town into the ranks of bright, modern big-time cities.”
Maxey and his family saw their church, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal, torn down for the coliseum. The interstate, which opened in December 1964, demolished Maxey’s commercial building and his family’s home at 2724 N. Borthwick Ave.
The Oregonian noted the house’s fate only once, as an auction item in the classified ads.
The state highway department, now the Oregon Department of Transportation, purchased it and other homes along the route and then offered them at auction, allowing bidders to salvage sinks, furnaces and fixtures before tearing down the houses.
The Oregonian covered one auction in 1961, noting that the state highway department sold 175 condemned homes for between $50 and $155 apiece. “Even the shrubbery is included,” The Oregonian wrote.
Former residents’ identities were not.
Maxey, his wife, Johnnie, and their five children, Carolyn, Virginia, Bill, Donna and Jonathan, were among the last families to leave their block. They moved from a home with a basement so big the kids could ride bikes there to a duplex on a smaller lot about a mile north.
Donna Maxey, now 74, said the memories of the Borthwick house never left her. The boxwoods out front. The peach and plum trees. The pocket doors and built-ins. It was home.
She said The Oregonian missed the story of what happened to her family and their neighborhood. “There was no reporting,” she said.
Maxey said she has lived with the emotional trauma of witnessing the demolition of her neighbors’ homes, her church, the nearby nursery school, the ice cream store, the community center. “Just on and on and on,” she said.
The Oregon Department of Transportation, now looking to widen Interstate 5 in the same area, has acknowledged that its freeway project harmed generations of Black families.
“What I find most devastating,” Maxey said, “all of my childhood memories have been wiped out, all the historical places I went to are gone. If I wanted to take my daughter to places that I grew up in and say, ‘I used to do this or that,’ I can’t do that.
“My history has been erased.”
Belated recognition
The Oregonian’s coverage of displacement in Albina evolved in the early 1970s as Hilliard ascended to city editor, becoming the first Black person in the country to hold the position. With civil rights advances nationally, and new reporters on staff, stories took a more adversarial tone when the newspaper reported on two projects targeting the area.
A young reporter working his first job out of college wrote in 1972 about those being displaced by a new Portland Public Schools headquarters. Bill Keller told the story of residents who complained to the school board that they weren’t being fairly compensated by the district.
Keller quoted one resident, Henry Clardy, a cement worker who was offered only $595 more than he’d paid for his home 13 years earlier.
School and city development officials ended up securing federal money to compensate displaced residents like Clardy. The district in 1979 opened its brutalist-style headquarters atop 10.5 acres and what had been dozens of residential lots.
Keller, who is white, said he was encouraged by city editors, including Hilliard, who recognized gaps in the paper’s coverage of schools and other issues affecting Black residents.
“The presence of Bill Hilliard was a factor,” Keller, who worked at The Oregonian until 1979 and eventually led The New York Times as its executive editor, said in an email. “He was respected and he was a champion of civility. But he was pretty much the only Black man in the newsroom.”
The Oregonian’s reporting on Emanuel’s hospital expansion began by making its buildings sound like beautiful oases of investment in an ugly neighborhood that needed help.
The paper in 1967 wrote that Emanuel planned “a new 14-story skyscraper hospital of modern hospital design,” which would make it “one of the largest and most efficient campus-type medical centers in the West.”
“Although the non-profit hospital has been in an older area of Portland for many years and has had many blight-area problems,” The Oregonian reported in a news story announcing the expansion, “it has embarked on a program which quipsters might call, ‘If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.’”
The expansion demolished 22 city blocks in the heart of Albina’s commercial district, displacing dozens of businesses and more than 400 people, most of whom were Black. But The Oregonian’s coverage absolved notions of harm to the families forced out. They were displaced, but not displeased, according to a 1971 news story that quoted just two families who moved. The story’s source for everyone else was the Portland Development Commission, the city agency that acquired their properties.
Rahsaan Muhammad’s great aunt and great uncle, the late Alberdia and General Skipper, lived at 3103 N. Vancouver Ave. Their one-story home, surrounded by a white picket fence and fruit trees, was demolished for the hospital expansion. They moved in 1971 to a house a mile north, with the city development agency and federal money covering the cost.
Muhammad, 47, said the newspaper’s portrayal of Albina helped create “a narrative of, ‘We have trouble in Albina again, why don’t we just go in and clean that out? Why don’t they do something about that?’ That’s the narrative and the effect the newspaper had.”
Residents organized in protest as the Emanuel Displaced Persons Association. Their concerns didn’t see The Oregonian’s front page until 1973, when federal financing fell through and hospital officials halted the expansion. The demolition left behind a “wasteland,” the newspaper wrote in its front-page headline, calling those displaced “Emanuel’s victims.”
“Their homes are gone,” the newspaper wrote in April 1973, “trees and shrubs they planted bloom without people in a neighborhood destroyed.”
Muhammad is among 26 descendants of people displaced by the failed expansion who in December sued the hospital, the city and the development commission, now called Prosper Portland. Members of the group, known as Emanuel Displaced Persons Association 2, allege their civil rights were violated.
Before the federal lawsuit, Prosper Portland and Legacy Emanuel had apologized for or acknowledged their roles in destroying homes in Albina but stopped short of compensating residents.
Today, a parking lot sits where Muhammad’s relatives’ old home stood.
“It’s disrespectful,” Muhammad said, like putting a tombstone with no name “in the middle of the last piece of our neighborhood.”
The hard questions
Twenty-five years after Hilliard started breaking The Oregonian’s racial barriers, its diversity ranks had barely expanded. By 1977, the paper employed just three people of color on a news staff of more than 100 people. (Today, Hilliard remains the only Black executive editor in the daily newspaper’s 162-year history; 14 of the current newsroom’s 65 employees are racially or ethnically diverse.)
When Linda Williams McCarthy arrived at The Oregonian for a reporting job in 1979, she said she felt like a curiosity as the first Black woman among the nearly all-white news staff.
In conversations with colleagues, she recalled Albina being described as the city’s slum.
“When I went there,” she said, “I was like: Where is the slum? Portland is a place, even in poor neighborhoods, where people made an effort. That’s what I saw in Albina. Neat little houses with roses and rhododendrons in the yard and children around. No slum.”
McCarthy left in 1983 for The Wall Street Journal. The Oregonian seven years later critically examined predatory lending practices that limited home buying opportunities for Black residents in the area. But while she was there, she said, the institution’s coverage of Albina and its residents was often reactionary and cursory.
“I didn’t get the sense that it was a newsroom that wanted to be out front on anything and taking the rein,” she said. “The race story was mostly avoided unless you just had to confront it. The hard questions and hard stories about race, The Oregonian didn’t seem to want to go there.”
— Rob Davis
Mark Friesen contributed data analysis.
This article is part of the third major installment of our “Publishing Prejudice” project. Editor Therese Bottomly in October apologized for the paper’s failures in the past and pledged steps for improving current coverage. Read Bottomly’s latest column for an update on those efforts.
The Oregonian/OregonLive would like to hear from you. Please share your comments about this project, provide ideas for future stories or tell us about your experience with racism in Oregon. Contact us at equity@oregonian.com or leave a voicemail at 503-221-8055.
Laura Gunderson was one of several editors involved with the Publishing Prejudice series, which in this installment focuses on The Oregonian’s coverage of Black residents from the 1940s through the 1970s. During that period, Gunderson’s grandfather Al McCready worked for The Oregonian as a reporter and later in several leadership positions. From mid-1953 through sometime in 1956, he was the newspaper’s assistant city editor, a role in which he assigned and edited stories. He left the newsroom in 1956 to serve as an associate editor on the newspaper’s editorial board, writing unsigned editorials and voting on board stances through 1971. He became an assistant managing editor in 1971 and managing editor in 1976, serving as the paper’s second-in-command until 1982. It’s unclear whether he was directly involved with any of the stories we examined.
The project, Publishing Prejudice: The Oregonian’s Racist Legacy, is generously supported in part by a $30,000 grant from The John Farmer Memorial Journalism Fund. The Oregonian/OregonLive is solely responsible for all content.
