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WEDNESDAY, MAY 25, 2022
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A reckoning with the past
Capi Lynn
Salem Statesman Journal
USA TODAY NETWORK
Asahel Bush was a newspaper pub-
lisher and businessman in Salem, syn-
onymous with the city's early growth
and development.
He also was a racist, using the power
of the press during the 1850s to flaunt
his personal views and incite public
support for Oregon's Black exclusion
law.
Both are true, yet the latter rarely sur-
faces when talking about Bush's legacy.
A city-owned park and museum bear
his name, and The Oregon Statesman he
began has morphed into today's States-
man Journal. There's also a Bush Ele-
mentary School and a Bush Street.
The narrative is being reexamined at
the urging of Oregon Black Pioneers, a
nonprofit dedicated to preserving and
presenting the history of African Amer-
icans in Oregon.
"Tell the whole story," was the mes-
sage first delivered by Kim Moreland,
president of the Oregon Black Pioneers.
"Don't hide the truth because the truth
is complex and messy."
Bush House Museum, managed by
Salem Art Association, welcomed the
advice and is taking steps to deepen the
history it interprets and unveil new pro-
gramming it hopes will help heal the im-
pact of systemic racism.
The nonprofit organization formed a
reimagining committee with diverse
representation from the community
and will soon hire a strategic planning
facilitator to help craft a new vision and
mission statement for the museum with
an anti-racist and diversity, equity and
inclusion lens.
"We want to confront this racist his-
tory, and we want to use art to do that,"
Matthew Boulay, executive director of
Salem Art Association, said. "Art is en-
tertainment, but art also can tell differ-
ent truths, art can have dialogue, and
art can help us heal."
The efforts come during a period of
reckoning for cultural heritage sites
across the country. Statues have been
smashed. Buildings have been re-
named. Salem has no statue of Bush,
but renaming the museum could be part
of the conversation.
Museum director Ross Sutherland
described some of those efforts as con-
frontational, but he and Boulay view
this as the beginning of a community-
wide conversation that is respectful and
inclusive.
"This isn’t like it's us against them,
and they're telling us this is what's going
to happen," Sutherland said. "This is an
issue, we have this resource, and we're
not serving the community as well as
we thought we were. How do we make it
better?"
'Difficult to read'
Asahel Bush was 26 when he came to
the Oregon Territory in late 1850,
recruited by Congressional delegate
Samuel Thurston to establish a newspa-
per. Bush settled in Oregon City, and the
first edition of The Oregon Statesman
published on March 28, 1851.
The four-page weekly quickly flexed
its political muscle, supporting the
Democratic Party. When the state cap-
ital relocated two years later to Salem,
Bush followed with the paper.
He led a small but powerful group
called the "Salem Clique" during Ore-
gon's quest for statehood. His newspa-
per promoted its agenda with no con-
cern for impartiality or objectivity, and
the subject of slavery provided constant
material.
Bush opposed slavery but favored the
constitutional ban against allowing
Blacks to settle in Oregon. As publisher
and editor, he both swayed public opi-
nion and reflected the opinion of most
Oregonians at the time.
"He was just one player in a larger so-
An early view of the house that Asahel
Bush II had built on Mission Street in
Salem, circa 1885. COURTESY OF BUSH
HOUSE MUSEUM
A portrait of Asahel Bush hangs in the Bush House Museum in Salem. ABIGAIL
DOLLINS / STATESMAN JOURNAL
ciety that really looked down on Black
people and viewed them as not equal to
white people and not deserving of the
same rights and opportunities," Zachary
Stocks, executive director of Oregon
Black Pioneers, said. "That emboldened
him to be able to make those statements
very publicly through his paper."
Stocks is on the steering committee
of the Bush House Museum Reimagin-
ing Project and his lecture today at Sa-
lem Art Association — "The Statesman
and The Freedman: Asahel Bush, Hiram
Gorman, and Black exclusion in Oregon"
— is one of the first new programming
events.
He takes a close look at Bush's words
and actions and their impact on early
Black residents. Bush's editorials were
vitriolic. So were his personal letters.
Stocks points to an 1863 letter written
to Matthew Deady, a judge and member
of the Salem Clique. Bush expressed his
disgust about the wedding of a Black
couple presided over by a white preach-
er and attended by both Black and white
people.
"It is really racist and even a little dif-
ficult to read," Stocks said.
A small number of Black people set-
tled in Oregon despite exclusion laws
enacted in 1844, 1849 and 1857. Bush was
considered the architect of the last one,
which prohibited Blacks from residing
in the state, holding any real estate or
making any contracts.
Oregon voters approved the Oregon
Constitution on Nov. 9, 1857, and had a
say on two sections of the Bill of Rights.
They overwhelmingly voted against
slavery but for exclusion, according to
returns published by The Oregon
Statesman and posted today in an ex-
hibits section of the Secretary of State's
website.
"There are scholars who have been
talking about this for a long time,"
Stocks said. "But I think the general
public is still largely unaware of the role
of Bush and the Oregon Statesman in
crafting Black exclusion in the Oregon
constitution."
Gorman, who worked for the States-
man after Bush sold the paper, was one
of those early Black residents. He oper-
ated the power press, turning the wheel
by hand.
Gorman was a successful and well-
liked member of the community, re-
ferred to in the paper as a giant and "the
fighting editor," his name often prefaced
with titles such as "Prof." and "Col." An
1887 article described him carrying a
400-pound barrel of ink upstairs with
ease.
"I think that when they wrote it,
those were playful descriptions," Stocks
said. "They viewed him as a friend and a
colleague and someone that had a per-
sonality and was appreciated and wel-
comed at work.
"However, it's important to recognize
how that might be a racist act as well.
They were sort of treating him as a mas-
cot."
'Do you know who he is?'
Moreland shined a light on Bush's
racist views in 2019 while serving on a
grant review committee for the Oregon
Heritage Commission. Bush House Mu-
seum had applied for a grant.
"I always had an issue with Bush and
the silence that they have about his dark
history," she said. "When the grant ap-
plication came up for discussion, I kind
of blurted it out: 'Why do you support
him? Do you know who he is?' "
While some may argue that everyone
was a racist back then, Moreland said
that isn't a reason to give Bush the man
— or the museum — a pass.
"While it was a popular view, there
were still other opinions out there that
opposed slavery and opposed the exclu-
sion of African Americans from the ter-
ritory," she said. "There were small
groups of abolitionists who came across
the trail, too."
The Rev. Obed Dickinson and his
wife, Charlotte, arrived in Salem in 1853,
around when Bush relocated the news-
paper. Dickinson came to lead the newly
formed Congregational Church, and
they openly welcomed and appreciated
the town's small Black community.
They took a stand nearly a century
before the civil rights movement, the
backlash well-documented in the
Statesman archives. Dickinson often
was personally attacked in Bush's edito-
rials.
Dickinson denied requests to hold
separate services, drawing the ire of
some white church members. Charlotte
would later tutor Black women and chil-
dren in their home.
And it was Dickinson who presided
over the wedding of America and Rich-
ard Bogle, the one referenced in Bush's
letter, in January 1863.
Dickinson doesn't have a park,
school or street in Salem named after
him.
Cementing a legacy
Later in 1863, Bush became a widow-
er. His wife Eugenia's death of tubercu-
losis left him with four children under
the age of 7. He sold the newspaper but
remained influential in regional politics
and local business.
Bush co-founded Ladd and Bush
bank, Salem's first financial institution.
The building with the ornate cast-iron
facade, on the southeast corner of State
and Commercial streets downtown, is
now home to the Ladd and Bush Branch
of U.S. Bank.
He used some of his earnings to build
an elegant new home on a hillside south
of the state capitol, a 100-acre farm-
stead he and his wife had earlier ac-
quired. The parcel was a portion of the
donation land claim Rev. David Leslie
established in 1851 on ancestral lands of
the Kalapuya Tribe.
The Oregon Donation Land Law was
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Continued from Page 1A
might be able to play a part in this new
community center,” he says.
In May 2022, during National Poetry
Month, he established a tele-poem hot-
line where a caller could listen to a poem
recorded by former Oregon Poet Laure-
ates Paulann Petersen, Kim Stafford,
and Elizabeth Woody.
Mojgani had originally conceived the
idea for the tele-poem hotline in 2020
but had to put it on hold due to the pan-
demic.
Now two years later, he has a second
chance to finish the projects like the
hotline that the pandemic brought to a
halt in 2020.
“One of the projects I’ve been want-
ing to do since I took the position is to
create something that’s rooted in poetry
that’s on something as disposable and
familiar as a newspaper,” he says.
“Here’s this opportunity to continue do-
ing something that I really enjoyed do-
ing. But I also have two years’ experi-
ence of what that feels like. So any of the
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elements of growth to experience dur-
ing the position, I know what this role
entails.”
And now that the weather is starting
to warm up, Mojgani even plans to re-
turn to the balcony of his Portland art
studio to recite poetry once again.
“We are always surrounded by po-
ems, even if they are not taking shape as
poems. And what are the ways that we
may let some of that poetry into our
lives?”
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