January 10, 2018
The
INSIDE
Week in Review
Martin Luther King Jr.
Page 3
2018 special edition
This page
Sponsored by:
page 2
L OCAL N EWS
M ARTIN L UTHER K ING J R .
C ALENDAR
O BITUARY
O PINION
page 23
page 28-29
pages 30-31
M ETRO
page 33
photo by Mark Washington/The Portland Observer
Oregon Senate Minority Leader Jackie Winters grew up in Vanport and Portland’s Albina community
before embarking on successful career in business and politics that took her to Salem. She reflects
on her life and her priorities in government during an interview with the Portland Observer.
On Equality and MLK
Jackie Winters earns respect from all sides
pages
32-39
Arts &
ENTERTAINMENT
C LASSIFIEDS
page 38-39
by Beverly Corbell
The Portland Observer
The ideals that Martin Luther
King Jr. espoused and lived by are
personal for Sen. Jackie Winters,
but one episode in her own life
brought it all into sharp focus.
Winters, 80, was recently
named minority leader of the Ore-
gon Senate, the first black woman
to hold that position.
But long before she got into
politics, Winters built a minor
restaurant empire, opening several
versions of Jackie’s Ribs in Salem
and the Portland area. It was when
she decided to open a Jackie’s
Ribs on Southwest Broadway that
it hit her. She was opening a busi-
ness “right smack in downtown
Portland,” where blacks faced
discrimination just a generation
before.
“My son didn’t understand.
He said, ‘Well, this is not the first
Jackie’s you’ve opened, so why
are you getting so emotional about
it?” she said.
“I said to him that he has to
understand that when we were
in Vanport and also the early in
settling into Portland, there were
places we could not eat,” she said.
“There were places we could not
even sit to eat as a kid,” she said.
“These kids (today) don’t under-
stand what was going on.”
Winters was born in Kansas,
moved as a small child to Vanport
where she survived the infamous
Vanport Flood, and grew up the
Albina neighborhood of Portland.
“We had a lot of small business-
es and had over 100 social clubs
in Portland,” she said, describing
African American participation in
commerce and community gather-
ings at the time. Before the flood,
Vanport was a vibrant, self-suffi-
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