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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (July 25, 2018)
JULY 25, 2018 Portland and Seattle Volume XL No. 43 News ................................ 3,6,8 A & E ........................................5 Opinion ...................................2 Hiding Political Money ...6 Calendars ...............................4 Bids/Classifieds .....................7 CHALLENGING PEOPLE TO SHAPE A BETTER FUTURE NOW COURTESY OF PPS YOUTH CLIMATE MARCH Exterior of Harriet Tubman Middle School. By Melanie Sevcenko Special to The Skanner A s a young woman, Natasha Butler remembers watching students of Harriet Tubman Middle School board the Number 4 bus from the window of her father’s business on Williams Avenue. Decades later, Butler will be the proud principal of that very same school when it reopens this fall after closing its See TUBMAN on page 3 PHOTO BY SUSAN FRIED Tubman School Reopens Aug. 27 A celebration for alumnae of the historically Black school has been canceled due to lack of support from Portland Public Schools Aji Piper, 17 speaks during the Zero Hour: Seattle Youth Climate March and Rally July 21 at Garfield Community Play field. About 100 young people and adults marched from Garfield Play field to Pratt Park. Similar events were held throughout the country. Aji Piper is one of the original plaintiffs in a case called Juliana v. United States, which argues that the government’s actions that cause climate change violate the younger generation’s Constitutional rights to life, liberty and property. The case is currently making its way through the courts. Black Portlanders Weigh In on Future of PPB Survey calls for transparency, accountability and 21st-century policing By Christen McCurdy Of The Skanner News AP PHOTO/REBECCA BLACKWELL P Letty Stegall speaks with her daughter on a video call as she walks near the port in Veracruz, Mexico on May 25. Stegall, who once was arrested for a misdemeanor DUI years before her deportation, wonders why the government’s immigration crackdown includes noncriminals and low-level criminals instead of focusing on the “bad hombres” that Donald Trump said he’d banish. Deportation and Mixed-Status Families page 8 Kam Interviews Creator of BET’s ‘Hit the Floor’ page 5 25 CENTS ortlanders of color want to see increased accountability, trans- parency and a push toward 21st-century polic- ing, according to an infor- mal survey conducted ear- lier this year by Nike and Herman Greene. The Greenes created an online survey they pub- licized through word of mouth and social media this spring and present- ed earlier this month at a meeting of the Commu- nity Peace Collaborative in North Portland. Their methodology was informal – they capped the survey once 100 had been submit- ted, to make it easier to tally the results – but the intention was to bring the voices of Black Portlanders and other Portlanders of color to the fore. The ma- jority of participants iden- tified as being of color or as part of mixed-race mar- riages or families. “If you figure out what’s hurting Black America, you’re going to figure out what’s hurting America,” Nike Greene said as she prepared to present sur- vey results to the group. She began with a slide of a photo taken in Portland that became a famous im- age in 2014: that of Devon- te Hart, then 12 years old, hugging a Portland police officer during a police bru- tality protest following the death of Mike Brown. (Hart is missing but pre- sumed to have died along with his three siblings and adoptive mothers, all of whom died in April in an apparent murder-suicide, with Jennifer Hart behind the wheel of an SUV that plunged off a California cliff.) When first published, the photo was touted and shared on social media as a moment of healing and hope between a Black child and a police officer during a painful national mo- See POLICE on page 3 Georgia Governor’s Matchup Sets a Battle for the Middle Stacey Abrams would be the nation’s first Black woman elected governor By Bill Barrow and Ben Nadler Associated Press ATLANTA — With the Georgia governor’s race now set, the contest between Republican Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams becomes a question of which candidate can move beyond their partisan bases to capture the electoral middle in this emerging battleground state. Kemp, a two-term secretary of state backed by President Donald Trump, hardly moderated his approach as he celebrated an overwhelming runoff victo- ry Tuesday. After a cam- paign featur- ing guns, chain saws and his smiling pledge to “round up criminal il- legals” in his Stacey Abrams pickup truck, the newly minted Republican nomi- nee painted Abrams as a radical left- ist threat to Georgia values. Abrams, a former state legislative leader, isn’t a radical by any conven- tional definition of U.S. politics, but she’s run an aggressive campaign to energize the Democratic base by pledging to expand Medicaid insur- ance and spend more on education, infrastructure, and job training. She also backs tighter gun restric- tions, abortion rights and removing Confederate monuments from state property. Her effort to become the nation’s first Black woman elected See GEORGIA on page 3
