Kylee Taube

Portland FRINQ
Final Draft

Housing in America became a critical focal point for issues of race and social
equality in the postwar era when millions of people of all races moved to cities like
Portland to seek employment in the defense industry during World War II. (Pickren pg.
27) Prior to World War II, many African American men in Portland were limited to
employment by the railroads while other Black men and women struggled to find work as
domestics and janitors. During the war years, around twenty-three thousand African
Americans arrived in Portland. (Taylor pg. 109) The prejudice that they encountered
astounded many of them because they felt that they had walked into another southern
state.
In 1942 signs were put up into windows reading Whites Only. In 1945 about
twenty-three thousand African Americans arrived in Portland not knowing how
discriminated the city was. When this many African Americans migrated to Portland, it
brought positive changes including the visible increase of black political influence, the
strengthening of civil rights organizations and black-related service groups, and the
enactment of anti-discrimination legislation in Portland. But it also resulted in negative
changed including increased racial tensions, as well as severe overcrowding which
accelerated the pace of physical deterioration in residential areas in the community. Black
residents who had lived in Portland before the war knew where they could and could not
go but all the newcomers had to learn the boundaries. (Pearson pg. 162&163)

In the twentieth century, most African American in Portland had lived in

coontown which was a rundown west side district near the Union Station where most
of the black men were employed. On Memorial Day in 1948, a Columbia River flood
destroyed Vanport. About half of the African American population of Multnomah County
was pushed out of the expanding downtown district of west Portland and into Albina until
Whites eventually considered it the citys Black neighborhood.
When the African American population grew, it impacted housing stock within the
cities because White neighborhoods came under pressure to accommodate the housing
needs of the growing Black population. Due to the housing shortage, it was not
uncommon for several African Americans families to have to live in one small apartment.
High interest rates were a benign problem compared with the often-violent resistance of
Whites to the intrusion of Blacks into their neighborhoods. Real estate agents and lending
officials redlined loan applications of minority applicants, and when loans were made,
African American and other minority applicants were charged with much higher interest
rates. In their efforts to exert personal agency and to improve living conditions for
themselves and others, a number of African American families pushes into formerly allWhite areas in the postwar period. They were often met with violence including arson,
breaking windows, harassment, physical attacks, and vandalism. (Taylor pg. 117) White
law enforcement officials stood by and did little or nothing to prevent such actions. This
caused housing to remain largely racially segregated and a volatile issue for both local
and national elected officials.
The public housing act of 1937, which initiated federal involvement in housing
issues, was followed by the Housing Act of 1949. These two acts created the legal

framework and funding for a new era of public housing, in which racial segregation
became a major issue. The passage of the Housing Act of 1937 laid that the legislative
foundation of federally supported public housing in the United States. The program from
the beginning was intended for the poor, especially for poor African Americans. A man
named Clarence E. Ivey noted that many of the African American men wanted to bring
their families west to join them but could not do so until adequate housing was available.
Ivey finally declared, Portlands Negro housing problem could be solved more easily if
real estate men and white property owners would stop imposing their ideas of segregation
and sell and rent homes entirely on the basis of ability to pay. Blacks were coming to
Portland for the same reason as everyone else and should not be singled out for the
criticism because of housing difficulties. (Taylor pg. 120) Whites were using the
segregated housing issue to distance themselves from the Black population.
Many Blacks who were newcomers to the region found it easier to live in the state
of Washington than in Oregon. (Taylor pg. 109) Throughout the war years, Vancouver
accepted a greater number of African Americans in its housing projects that Portland did,
despite having some segregation issues of its own. Washington had a long history of
accepting African Americans who were unwelcome in Oregon, and many White
Portlanders who believed that racially mixed conditions led to social difficulties were
surprised at the general smoothness of relations in Vancouver. Given its distance from
most of the regions industry sites, war workers, including many Blacks, continued to
search of housing in Portland. (Pickren pg. 32)
For African Americans to be segregated from the White majority an restricted to
an inferior and undesirable neighborhood made it difficult to disprove the assumption that

they were somehow inferior and undesirable. The Urban League argued that the primary
reason segregation continued in Portland was the unsubstantiated belief that the presence
of a non-White family in a neighborhood caused property values to go down. By any
measurement, Portland responded with prejudice and insensitivity to the wartime
immigration of African Americans.
The flooding of Vanport may have triggered the beginning of change in Portlands
race relations. (Pearson pg. 162) The loss of federal public housing meant that city
officials could no longer keep five thousand Blacks outside of the city limits. As refugees
sought assistance and living accommodations, the size of the African American
community, though still segregated, was more active politically, economically, and
socially than at any time in Oregons history. (Pearson pg. 171)
Going through these articles were some very interesting things that I had never
heard before. It was very interesting that Portland was so discriminated towards African
Americans; I had never heard that we were so strong towards them not being in this town.
I was getting so use to reading about how Whites were not liking having all the African
Americans in the town that in one of the articles it stated, Native Portlanders resented all
newcomers, blacks as well as whites. According to one city official, white Portlanders
anxiously awaited the end of the war so that the newcomers would leave the town again.
This was so interesting because through all the other articles, you never heard a quote like
this, you just always heard about Whites not liking the African Americans but it never
said anywhere else how the older Whites in town did not even like the Whites who were
new so that fact was found very interesting

Bibliography

"PortlandChapterNAACP50thAnniversary."OregonHistoryProject.
N.p.,n.d.Web.21,Oct.2014.
Pickren,WadeE."Psychologists,Race,andHousinginPostwarAmerica."
JournalofSocialIssues67.1(2011):2741.Web.
"TheGreatMigration,TheAfroAmericanCommunitiesofSeattleand
PortlandDuringthe1940s."N.p.,2014.Web.