BLACK
HISTORY
MONTH
Special edition features inside
'City o/Roses'
TÿgÔÏL
Volume XXXXII
Number 8
US
server 4 3
www.portlandobserver.com
Wednesday • February 27, 2013
F c ts h lic h ^ H in
in 1970
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Established
Committed to Cultural Diversity J
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Endurin
Generations follow
first black families
by
J ane E lder W ulff
After Pearl Harbor, when Henry J. Kaiser built his
shipyards in Vancouver and north Portland, workers
poured in from all over America to restore the Navy’s
Pacific Fleet. Among these were the first African Ameri
cans to establish a presence in Vancouver.
Portland already had a settled black population, and
connections with Portland were strong from the start,
but the African-American newcomers across the river
found themselves breaking ground.
“We never saw so many white folks in all our lives,”
some of these new residents recalled in interviews for the
book First Families of Vancouver’s African American
Community: From World War Two to the Twenty-First
Century (published last March by Vancouver NAACP
#1139). “And they never saw so many black folks,
neither! But we got the job done.”
By war s end, 9,000 African Americans were living in
Vancouver.
Mrs. Ida (Oliver) Jones, who turned 104 last year,
was one of those shipyard workers. A welder, she was
going onto the dock one morning when she heard
loudspeakers announce the war was over.
“We went home and wondered what we were gonna
do, Jones said. A lot of people left, but we made up our
minds we were gonna stay.”
While most of the black workers did find it easier to
leave the Vancouver area for other pursuits, for Jones
and others, Vancouver was home by then. They formed
continued
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