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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (April 20, 2018)
Page 8 BY PATRICIA KULLBERG C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T t was a place of contradiction, at once utopian and Jim Crow, innovative and second rate. It was a town, they joked, with everything but a future. Vanport, the World War II-era, federal housing project on the outskirts of North Portland, was never meant to outlast the war. It was built in a year. It was destroyed in a few hours, engulfed by a massive springtime runoff out of the mountains. But in its brief lifespan of 5 years, Vanport birthed a militant anti-racist activism that would supplant the politics of accommodation which prevailed in prewar Portland. You couldn’t live in Vanport unless you worked for a war industry. Most worked in Henry Kaiser’s shipyards. At its peak the town housed 42,000 persons, the largest wartime federal housing project in the country. People came Portland’s Patricia Kullberg is the author from all over to work o f “Girl in the River for Kaiser. The and “On the Ragged majority were white. Edge o f Medicine.” But by war’s end, more She is currently than 15,000 African working on a novel Americans had flooded about Vanport, based into the area. Housing on historical events. was scarce. Families Kullberg is a former slept in their cars, in medical director for cheap hotels, church M ultnom ah County basements, theaters, Health Department trailer camps, on and practiced in a grandma’s sofa or clinic that served the behind the bar at their homeless, cousin’s saloon. undocumented, None of them, black disabled and unemployed. or white, was welcome in Portland. Someone had to build the ships, but the denizens of the Rose City did not want those “coloreds” and “Okies” making a home in their fair city. The local African Americans - less than 2,000 total in 1940 - were respectable folks who’d worked hard not to call adverse attention to themselves. As described in a wartime study by Robert E Colbert in the Journal of Negro Education, they’d crafted a more or less congenial relationship with white Portlanders, which required a fair amount of looking the other way at local discriminatory practices. They did not welcome their new African American neighbors, those “floaters” and “undesirables,” the men so boisterous, the women in their gaudy dresses. Those signs - We Cater to White Trade Only? They’d never seen them before. They were especially I News Street Roots • April 20-26, 2018 race riots, shut down the dance. It was the Communists, the story went, who put up the blacks to dancing with white girls. But really, who had time to play? Sixty-hour work weeks and usually both parents worked. The wages were eye-popping - so long as you were white. In blatant violation of war time federal employment rules, African Americans were offered only the lowest paid and dirtiest work on the shipyards. Kaiser blamed the Boilermakers Local, who blamed the Boilermakers International, who said it had nothing to do with them. Wyatt Williams, a prominent African-American lawyer, helped the Boilermakers to set up an auxiliary union The life and death o f Vanport, 70 years after the great flood for African-American workers. The auxiliary collected dues but provided no benefits, no collective bargaining, no grievance procedure, no protection against unfair discipline, no pathway for advancement. Despite wartime labor shortages, Kaiser fired hundreds of African-American workers who refused to join the Jim Crow auxiliary. Folks didn’t stand for it. Not Vanporter Julius Rodriquez, founding president of the local chapter of the Shipyard Negro Organization for Victory. Not Vanporter Lee Anderson, who sued Oregon Shipbuilding and the Boilermakers for the right to work as a welder. Not Vanporter and Communist Party member Sam Markson, who was once arrested for being white in the black section of Vanport - no joke - and interrogated by the Red Squad, the unit embedded in the Portland Police Bureau to spy on local activists. Not Reverend J J Clow, president of the local NAACP, which threw itself into the fray and not Bill McClendon, editor of the People’s Observer, who covered the conflict in Portland’s only wartime newspaper for the African American community. They were all part of the Double V campaign, victory abroad against tyranny and victory at home Aerial view o f the city o f Vanport before and after the flood. against racism. In what might have been the first signal ' that the politics of accommodation were might make a fool of yourself and probably fearful that the newcomers would disrupt the about to end in Portland, Wyatt Williams was that was the point. Liquor was prohibited, status quo, which, in fact, they did. booted out of the NAACP for his “traitorous which didn’t mean you couldn’t find it in Vanport was sunk down in the rich, dark and malevolent” collusion with the makeshift speakeasies all over town. bottom-land of the Columbia River floodplain, Boilermakers, as Bill McClendon wrote in the The town had no newspaper. It had no crisscrossed by sloughs and two shallow Observer. churches. Sunday morning services were lakes, all muddy in the wet season, dusty in In November 1943 the feds came to town staged in school auditoriums and hosted by a the dry. It was a mile squared off, utterly flat, to investigate the alleged discrimination. revolving cast of ministers. There were parks, and enclosed by four dirt levees. Unless you They issued cease and desist orders. Kaiser a swimming beach, and recreation centers, were a curious kid on foot, the only place to and the Boilermakers ignored the orders. In but the latter were underused and often exit that swampy bowl was a slant-wise road deserted. Community was not so much dead March 1945 the courts ruled in Lee that climbed the eastern dike. Anderson’s favor, but by then the shipyards in Vanport as never come to life, especially You could get lost in that town, easy, were all but shut down. There were no more among the whites. because the apartment buildings all looked But the African Americans who lived there jobs for anyone. alike. Wood-framed, wood-sided, two-story liked to organize dance parties. Just months As detailed in Vanport, Manley Maben’s buildings, they looked like barracks. No building in town was taller than two stories or after deadly race riots in Detroit in 1943, they history of the project, Vanport was a town of threw a dance to raise money for the war. At strangers. Residents worked three shifts a any shade other than drab and dreary. The the event, young African-American men day, coming and going at all hours. It was town had no center. No central square, no invited white teenagers onto the floor. The noisy, cars and trucks and buses night and city hall, no commercial hub, no main drag. It authorities, sensitive to the feelings of white had no pool halls, card rooms, bowling alleys, day, dogs barking, cats yowling, babies southerners in Vanport and paranoid about bars, or night clubs, no place where you howling, never a quiet time. It was trashy, Everything but a future
