September 14, 2016
Page 9
Mississippi
Alberta
North Portland
Vancouver
East County
Beaverton
A historic photo from 2014 shows members of the historic Vancouver Avenue First Baptist Church gathered for a group photo.
A National Landmark
Vancouver Avenue First Baptist named to historic register
Vancouver Avenue First Baptist
Church has been officially listed on the
National Register of Historic Places.
The historically black congregation,
located at 3138 N. Vancouver Ave., re-
ceived word of the designation last week,
a landmark status that helps preserve Af-
rican American and civil rights history in
Portland.
Raymond Burrell III, a historian and
church leader, said it was great news to
announce the historic listing and help
preserve an important cultural and social
institution in Portland and for the Albina
and Eliot neighborhoods.
The church is steeped in Portland’s
black history. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
visited the church with local black pas-
tors during the height of the Civil Rights
movement. It’s one of the few remaining
historic structures from a thoroughfare of
Vancouver and Williams Avenues when
the area was known as “Black Broad-
way,” a hub of African American life and
culture in Portland during the 1940s and
50s.
The church’s roots began with the
thousands of shipyard workers who came
to the Northwest during World War II.
Most of these new arrivals were South-
ern, many were black. Originally formed
in Vancouver in 1944, the congregation
moved to Portland one year later un-
der the driving force of the Rev. Oliver
Booker “O.B.” Williams.
Under Rev. Williams and his wife Wil-
la Ida Jackson-Williams, the next decade
saw the church relocate no fewer than
three times. As World War II ended, the
housing projects closed, and the Church
moved to Albina, eventually moving
into its current location in 1951, a for-
mer Methodist Episcopal church built in
1909.
The church’s most famous moment
came in 1961. As a central pillar of
Portland’s black community, the Urban
League selected it as one of the stops
on Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s nation-
al speaking tour. He met with the clergy
and delivered a speech entitled “The Fu-
ture of Integration” to the congregation,
commenting that “if democracy is to
live, segregation must die. Segregation is
a cancer in the body of democracy that
must be removed if the health of the na-
tion is to survive.”
Still a heavily segregated neighbor-
C ontinued on P age 13