Street roots., June 09, 2017, Page 4, Image 4

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Street Roots • June 9-15, 2017
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H O L O C A U S T E D U C A T I O N A N D O R E G O N H IS T O R I C A L S O C I E T Y
Portland-based history consulting company.
S T A F F W R IT E R
Photographs and historical documents serve
as a glimpse into an Oregon that, in the 1920s,
n Sunday, June 11, the public is invited
had the highest concentration of Klansmen
to peruse several captivating exhibits,
west of the Mississippi, with more than 60
free of charge, at the grand opening of
local chapters of the KKK spread across the
the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for
state.
Holocaust Education’s permanent location in
“You can draw the line from white supremacy
the Pearl District.
in the 1920s right to Friday night,” said Dilg, in
The museum’s newly acquired
reference to the MAX-train attack that left two
building on the corner of Northwest
Good Samaritans dead and another seriously
Davis Street and Eighth Avenue is
wounded for taking a stand against racist abuse
more than twice the size of its
inflicted upon two black girls.
previous home in Northwest Portland.
The three-dimensional exhibit will reveal to
It includes a 100-seat auditorium, a
visitors that Oregon’s predominantly white
gift shop, a café featuring Jewish deli
demographic is no accident, but rather
items, a children’s play area and a
achieved by design through centuries of
dynamic two-story exhibition space
exclusionary laws and intentionally oppressive
for its core and rotating exhibits.
practices.
The inaugural exhibit features the
It’s a history that’s entered the national
tapestries and other works of famed
dialogue in recent weeks, with commentaries
Russian Jewish artist Grisha Bruskin.
in The Atlantic, The Washington Post and
But it’s one of the museum’s new
Huffington Post all quick to point out Oregon’s
core exhibits that couldn’t come at a
racist past in connection with the attack.
better time for Portland.
But that’s only one side of Oregon’s story.
As guests walk through “Discrimination and
Dilg’s exhibit gives equal weight to the
Resistance, An Oregon Primer,” they may
parallel history of the courageous Oregonians
notice that the horrendous Memorial Day
who resisted that discrimination, who refused
weekend attack is not an anomaly, but merely a
to leave despite efforts to push them out, and
new chapter in Oregon’s long and sordid
who fought to reform the state in the face of
history of deep-rooted racism.
great opposition.
Guest curator Janice Dilg illuminates this
As she poured through newspaper archives,
history from Oregon’s days as a territory
Dilg said, she noticed it was difficult to
through the 20th century, leading up to more
differentiate between time periods based on
recent examples from the fight for marriage
words alone.
equality. Dilg is the principle of HistoryBuilt, a
BY EMILY GREEN
O
A new exhibit
juxtaposes
Oregon’s long
and tangled
histories of
discrimination
and resistance
“It might be 1850, it might be 1910, it might
be 1960 - and you just could not tell the
headlines then from the
headlines when you looked
up and it was 2017,” she said.
it Yflll GO
Yes, there s been
oppressive discrimination
going on for a very long
Oregon Jewish Museum and
time, some of it’s changed,
some of it’s slid back, but
(includes gift shop; rotating and
there are always those
core exhibits)
people out there who are
When; Noon to 4 p.m. Sunday,
speaking up, who are taking
June 11
action in a variety of forms,
and we need to see all of
that.”
Often, it has been
Cost; Free
Oregon’s victims of
discrimination who were also
its agents of change.
One example Dilg pointed
out is the Unthank family.
They were a black family
forced, through intimidation,
A Southern Poverty Law
from their home in an all-
Center official on the MAX
white Portland neighborhood
attack and intolerance, Page 5
in the 1930s.
But DeNorval Unthank
in
and his wife, Thelma, were
also civil rights pioneers. He
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was one of the first medical
doctors to serve Portland’s black population
when hospitals were segregated.
When his son, DeNorval Unthank Jr., fell in
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