Portland Magazine
January 31, 2019
University of Portland's first North Portland Civil Rights Immersion
by Jessica Murphy Moo
photos by Adam Guggenheim
Cecil Mae Frazier knew she had to leave her Vanport home quickly. It was 1948, Memorial Day. The flooding Columbia River had ruptured the railway embankment at the border of the city. It was time to evacuate. But as the family story goes, Cecil Mae told her husband she wasn’t going anywhere without her yellow curtains. So down the curtains came. Then out the door.
It’s easy to see how the story of Cecil Mae and her beloved yellow curtains made its way down the generations. For one, it depicts a woman defined by her taste—her choices—and not by her circumstances. This story also offers a sneak peek inside her home, a home she took pride in, that she decorated just so. She loved those curtains. We don’t know why, but that doesn’t matter. She wasn’t going to let the flood swallow everything she loved.
What’s a little harder to see or imagine is the massive flood that wiped Cecil Mae’s home—and all the homes in what was then the second largest city in Oregon—off the map. Fast forward 70 years and the challenge today is to imagine the opposite. It is hard to see those 650 acres—now a golf course, race track, public dog park, wetlands—and imagine a whole city into being. There are remnants of roads, waterways, and dikes, but no sign of the 9,924 residences, the 150-bed hospital, the schools, 24-hour nurseries, fire department, or university (the seedlings of Portland State). The one artifact, a slab of the concrete foundation of Vanport's 750-seat movie theater, only comes alive when we imagine children in there watching Robin Hood on the day of the flood.
Hard to imagine, but important to understand if we want to know the forces that shape the places where we live, according to Laurie Laird, director of University of Portland’s Moreau Center for Service and Justice. In October, nine students visited Vanport for a tour as part of the University’s first North Portland Civil Rights Immersion. Laird created the experience after a campus visit by author and activist Tim Wise. “He spoke about the responsibilities of universities like ours,” Laird says, “to make sure our students learn about the histories of the communities we’re in.”
The six-day immersion involved intense listening, learning, and reflection on the experiences of some of UP’s closest neighbors. These neighbors were generous; they took time from their busy schedules to share their work, the food they grow and prepare, and the stories not only of the history of their communities but also the changes they have seen in their neighborhoods in more recent years. It was a week of staring down hard realities and historical trauma but also of seeing resilience and hope—all right here in North Portland. In addition to Vanport, students visited the New Columbia, Mississippi, Boise-Humboldt, and Albina neighborhoods, one local farm, and a community garden where people speak 17 languages. Students also ate a crazy-delicious breakfast at Po’Shines Cafe in Kenton, while hearing from the manager and the cook about their work readiness training program.
The students started the experience at the First African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church on Skidmore and Vancouver. They joined the congregation for worship and a community meal (the church opens its doors to the public every Sunday evening). First AME Zion is an example of the complicated dance between past and present in North Portland, particularly as it concerns the city’s historically black neighborhoods.
The most obvious example of change—what we often call gentrification—is right on the surface: Pastor Micah McNeal is a white pastor of a historically black church. The optics are not lost on anyone, least of all Pastor Micah. He told me that some churchgoers were introduced to him and never came back. “I’m an interloper,” he says. “I need to be respectful of the history.” And First AME Zion’s history is remarkable. Founded in 1862, the church was the first black church on the west coast north of San Francisco. Its members have always been a voice for equal rights. They have been involved in abolishing slavery, played a role in the Underground Railroad, and their leadership was active in lobbying for voting rights.
Members of the First AME Zion Church used to live nearby; they now drive from Gresham, Vancouver, Hillsboro, and other outlying communities. Pastor Micah, working to address his church community’s needs, is exploring a renovation that would put the church on the first floor and affordable housing above. And he still refuses to put his photo in the spot saved for the pastor in the front hall. Instead, he has displayed old photos he found in the attic. He asks, “Is the church about me?”
Cinna’Mon Williams, a program manager at the Urban League of Portland, has also seen many changes in her home neighborhood. She lives in the Mississippi District, where businesses were once almost entirely black-owned. Skyrocketing housing prices are part of the story—her family’s annual taxes have gone from $700 to $5,000—but she makes the point that economics aren’t the only reason for changes. The expansion of Portland Community College, new bus lines, and the MAX on Interstate brought in an influx of people. Her neighborhood used to be all families with children. “We looked out for one another,” she says. Now, the neighborhood is predominantly young professionals—fewer children, more cars, fewer people of color, and she and her husband can no longer park in front of their home.
The irony here is that the new businesses and all the investment being poured into her neighborhood don’t make her feel safer.
She told me a story about her son. He recently graduated from college and moved back home. He was walking home one day, and a police car pulled over beside him. The police officer asked him, “What are you doing here?”
First, the unease that people of color feel around police cannot be ignored. Second, the question confused him. Was the question really “what was he doing in his home?” He responded, “This is my home. I live here.”
The police went on their way, but of course an exchange like that lingers. It insinuates that this young man was out of place, that something was “off” about his being there, that he doesn’t belong in the neighborhood he calls home.
Andre Channel, who runs youth programs at the Charles Jordan Community Center, shares the mixed feelings about the changes he has seen in his lifetime of living in the neighborhood next to New Columbia, a mixed-income housing community. “The neighborhood is safer. That is good,” he says. There was heavy gang activity in the not-so-distant past. But he does want the community—particularly people of color and low-income residents—who have been there all along to have a say in how the region moves forward. “We just want to have a voice in the changes,” he says.
The students visited several youth-support organizations and food growers that are driving home the point—again and again and again—that they belong and that their voices are worth hearing. They make this point through every child they help to succeed, every new farmer they mentor, every native crop they plant and harvest from the earth beneath their feet. These acts—in very different ways—all say to very diverse communities of people: you are here, now; you are valued; you belong. We want you here.
Self Enhancement Incorporated (SEI)—recently voted #1 nonprofit in Oregon—has a 37-year track record of finding positive solutions for youth. They started as a basketball camp, and they now work with 19 schools and more than 16,000 families. They, too, have seen their youth moving farther away, with an annual transportation budget that has grown from $30,000 to more than $275,000.
Husband-and-wife team Arthur Shavers and Shantae Johnson founded Mudbone Grown, a farm located next to Oregon Food Bank. What a thriving, healing place. Their goals are threefold: to grow healthy food, to strengthen community, and to create space for African and black farmers. “We want to change the narrative of being a black farmer,” Johnson says, acknowledging both the ancestral knowledge and historic trauma in that narrative.
They have an army of volunteers, as well as a thriving CSA (where you pay a fee for monthly fresh vegetables during certain times of the year), and they run a mentorship program (last year they had 95 applicants for 10 positions). They grow vegetables, and they also grow farmers.
Eca-Etabo Wasongolo, community organizer at the Village Gardens, facilitates the community garden that serves New Columbia and Tammarack residents. He also sees food and gardening as a way to bring people together. He requires participants to register anew every year in February, so that they come back and get out of the isolation that inevitably accompanies the winter months. Wasongolo is quick to point out that while the garden doesn’t “belong” to anyone, it does create a community to which members are proud to belong.
Vanport was planned as a city where everyone—no matter your roots—could belong if you were willing to join the effort to build ships. But when Vanport was destroyed in 1948, Cecil Mae, owner and packer-upper of those yellow curtains, had to find a place to live. Cecil Mae and her husband, Joe, were black. They’d left the south to get away from Jim Crow, but there were barriers in Oregon too.
A friend of Joe’s took them in. This friend was Jewish, and he and Joe had bonded over their “outsider” status. Eventually, his friend signed a home loan in his name, so that Joe’s family could have a path to home ownership. (Oregon laws still forbade realtors to sell homes to black families in certain areas.) This home stayed in the family for nearly 70 years. They sold it last year to help pay for Cecil Mae’s healthcare.
How did we learn about Cecil Mae, her family story, her curtains? Through her granddaughter, Velynn Brown, who came to UP to talk to the immersion group as a representative of Vanport Mosaic, an organization working hard to preserve and tell this history. Brown recently moved her family back to Portland (she has a son attending UP next year). Moving back to an old neighborhood that has changed so much has been an adjustment. But recently, a woman in her neighborhood—someone she doesn’t know—acknowledged her. “I see you,” the woman said. “I see you and your kids. Keep it up.” That affirmation meant the world to Brown. It means something to belong. It means something to be seen.
The challenge for UP students is to take what they have learned and figure out their own roles as North Portland neighbors. “What’s the takeaway going to be?” asks Meghan Potter ’22, a political science major. “How is my life going to be different when I go back to University of Portland? How am I going to effect change on campus? As a school, what should we be doing better? Are we doing anything right now? A question we’ve been asking ourselves a lot throughout the week is: the University of Portland plays a prominent role in the North Portland community—are we respecting that? Are we recognizing our role, our privilege, and our influence? And if not, how can we be doing that better?
“I think a big problem we have at UP, and in general, is that people are just unaware of what’s going on around them. What this experience has taught me is we need to understand the history of where we are. We can’t just sit in North Portland and stay in our cozy little place on The Bluff and not care about things that are happening two blocks away from us. We need to pay attention. We need to pay attention to the history and also to what’s going on right now.”
JESSICA MURPHY MOO is the editor of Portland magazine.
Photographs: 1) Executive chef James Bradley and general manager John Tolbert at Po'Shines Cafe de la Soul in Kenton. The restaurant, which grew out of a work training program through the Celebration Tabernacle next door, still offers food to schoolchildren in need and training in the culinary arts; 2) UP students on the steps of First African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church; 3) Cinna'Mon Williams in front of the Urban League of Portland; 4) Students follow Shantae Johnson on a tour of Mudbone Grown, the North Portland farm she co-founded with her husband.
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