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Protesters march outside Emanuel Hospital in 1971, demanding jobs for the community and keeping a health clinic open. Photo: Oregon Historical Society

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Kent Ford and the Portland Black Panthers

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Kent Ford and the Portland Black Panthers

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Kent Ford moved to the Albina District, Portland, Oregon in 1961 and started the Portland Black Panthers with Percy Hampton. In 1969 the Portland BP opened the Fred Hampton People’s Free Health Clinic on the corner of N Vancouver Avenue and N Russell Street. Doctors and nurses volunteered, offering free services for the community. Six months after the opening dentists volunteered and the BPP opened the Malcom X People’s Free Dental Clinic on N Williams Avenue. The Black United Front (BUF) led efforts to reform education in N Portland and the Albina District, and worked with BPP and the Highland Church to serve breakfast for students. The BPP disbanded in the eighties due to Hoovers FBI Investigation, COINTELPRO, which disrupted the lives of many BPP members across the country and in Portland. Kent Ford at age 80 continues to do walking tours through the Albina District, telling the legacy of the Portland Black Panthers.

https://www.orartswatch.org/reckoning-and-walking-with-portlands-past/

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South African Anti-Apartheid Campaign in Portland, Oregon

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South African Anti-Apartheid Campaign in Portland, Oregon

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Elizabeth Groff from the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and Avel Gordly from the Black United Front (BUF) joined together to form the Portlanders Organized for South African Freedom (POSAF) to fight against Apartheid. Reagan's Policy continued trade with White South Africa and it angered the Anti-Apartheid movement. Margaret Carter was the first Black woman to be elected to the Oregon legislature in 1984. When protests against the South African Consulate in Oregon began Margaret Carter, along with the leaders of BUF, Ronnie Herndon and Reverend John Jackson, were all arrested under the radar so that mainstream press would not cover the story. The Oregonian took the side of the consulate and demonized Anti-Apartheid protesters stating

"This is the kind of action sanctioned in Nazi Germany, where thugs marched through the streets, beating those who chose to be different or sought to stand up to them. That was the modern nation built upon the standard of the end justifies the means."

Johnson, E. (2016). “Black Americans and the South African Anti-Apartheid Campaign in Portland, Oregon.” Journal of Pan-African Studies (online). Vol. 9, No. 10: 159-184. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=black_studies_fac

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Big Walter Horton with Carey Bell Album Cover

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Big Walter Horton and His 1972 Album with Carey Bell

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Big Walter Horton and His 1972 Album with Carey Bell

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Big Walter Horton was born in 1921 and moved to Memphis, Tennessee at an early age. He started playing the harmonica near Beale St for tips at age 5. In his preteen years he played sides with the Memphis Jug Band and learned from the band's harmonica player, Will Shade. During the depression he worked any jobs he could and toured as a sideman with several blues bands such as Ma Rainey and Big Joe Williams. In 1939 he started experimenting with amplified harmonica. Today, he is known as one of the most influential blues harmonica and amplified harmonica players of all time.

Big Walter Horton was known to be a shy individual with a bad temperament and drinking problem, because of this, he struggled to hold bands together and gain the same recognition as other artists at the time. Despite this, he is responsible for the release of 8 albums and 1 single on his discography. A lot of his work was released after his death in 1981.

I like this album cover because I think it reflects who he was as a person. The cover is of an introverted, reserved man, who had problems like anyone else, but had an incredible vibrance in his own music. His passion inspired so many of his mentees like Carey Bell. His song Little Boy Blue and Hard Hearted Woman give me so much joy, and it means more coming from someone who didn't have a large spotlight.

Big Walter Horton "About" on Spotify -https://open.spotify.com/artist/7ApWhtmpJkPyd5WjwDdDfX

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Walter_Horton

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Nina Simone at the Harlem Cultural Festival

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Nina Simone and The Harlem Cultural Festival

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Nina Simone and The Harlem Cultural Festival

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I think an interesting thing about Simone's music is that it is genre-less. It's classical, it's pop, it's Blues. She grew up playing classical on piano, and it was a very important part of her artistic identity. Many musicians at the time didn't respect her because she played in so many different ways. Nina Simone began playing piano for her church at age six. She continued playing piano and graduated high school as the valedictorian, then attending Julliard for a year. After her education she worked as a piano teacher and accompanist. Born by the name Eunice Kathleen Waymon she adopted her stage name to work performing in a bar without her parents knowing. She released her first album "Little Girl Blue" in 1958 and gained popularity into the 70's. She performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival that went through the summer of 1969 with 300 thousand attendees. At the festival she sang eight songs two of them being "Young, Gifted, and Black" inspired by Lorraine Hansberry's play, and "Are You Ready?" a poem written by David Nelson.

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/nina-simone

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/nina-simone/1969/mount-morris-park-new-york-ny-3bf72818.html

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The crowd at the festival. Photograph: Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

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The Harlem Cultural Festival and Why it Disappeared

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The Harlem Cultural Festival and Why it Disappeared

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After the death of Dr. King, Harlem was in an uproar, the city burned and the people grieved. So in the summer of 1969 some of the best performers at the time banded together put on the Harlem Cultural Festival at St. Morris Park. Despite spectacular performances by Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, The Staple Sisters, 5th Dimension, and many more, the festival was erased from history until the Summer of Soul documentary directed by Questlove. Hal Tulchan videoed 40 hours of the Harlem Cultural Festival, but because the Woodstock Rock Festival took so much attention, no one would produce and air a whole documentary on the Harlem Festival. Hal Tulchan even aired 2 hours of performances on television, but with no luck. The producers Robert Fyvolent and David Dinerstein, who had gained the rights to the footage before Tulchans death in 2017, sold it to Searchlight and the documentary aired in 2021. 400-450k people attended the Woodstock festival between August 15-18, 1969, but what garnered the most attention was the film about Woodstock that aired early 1970. The Harlem Cultural Festival happened from June 29-August 24, 1969, almost the whole summer. Despite the footage to prove it was a put together festival worth turning into a film, unlike Woodstock which had 742 drug overdoses along with a multitude of other mishaps, no one believed that it could even compare to Woodstock so no one would produce it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Cultural_Festival

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jul/15/stevie-gladys-nina-summer-of-soul-uncovers-a-festival-greater-than-woodstock

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Stokely Carmichael was a West-Indian born civil rights activist, the originator of the "Black Power" slogan, and helped in the fight for Pan-African freedom. Carmichael immigrated to New York in 1952 for high school and attended Howard university in 1960. At Howard he joined SNCC and the Nonviolent Action Group. He was arrested and jailed for 50 days in Jackson, Mississippi for being a member of the Freedom Riders. Carmichael was becoming frustrated with the non-violent movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. due to witnessing beatings and murders of civil rights activists, so in 1966 he became the Chairman of SNCC and controversially rallied demonstrators, founding the "Black Power" movement and encouraging self-defense. in 1968 he left the U.S. to speak out against the Vietnam War. When he returned his passport was confiscated for 10 months. He left the U.S. the next year to Guinea, changed his name to Kwame Ture, and helped form the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. In 1971 he wrote Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism.

Even though Stokely began his journey on the non-violent side of the desegregation movement, his views began to change, "In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent has to have a conscience. The United States has no conscience."

Black Power Mixtape

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Miriam-Makeba

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Angela Davis's 71 Conviction and Dennis Roberts 

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Angela Davis's 71 Conviction and Dennis Roberts 

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Dennis Roberts was one of the attorneys for Davis when she was convicted of murder, killing, and criminal conspiracy. Reported by the New York Times in 71, Johnathan Jackson brought guns into a courtroom to free San Quentin convicts, killing a Judge and wounding a district attorney. Jackson and the two convicts were also killed. Investigations said that Davis was the owner of some of the weapons used in the escape attempt and a friend of Jackson, this information was abused to unfairly involve her in the crime. Angela Davis was a prominent figure in the Black Power movement and this made her a target. Dennis Roberts, one of Davis's attorneys, called her indictment unfair and unconstitutional. The choosing of jurors favored white, older males. The jurors were decided by the judges, and as an excuse for this the Assistant State Attorney General pointed out that the jurors represented the population of Marin County. Dennis Roberts says in Black Power Mixtape, "There is nothing illegal in the state of California about owning guns that were registered, and it's not a crime. But because of the inflammatory press that built up around this incident, and because of the need the government felt to put her in jail, and to hopefully, from their point of view, to kill her, they could put enough pressure in that grand jury room to get an indictment."

New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/07/21/archives/angela-davis-indictment-scored-as-result-of-an-unfair-system.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/01/05/archives/miss-davis-picks-a-black-attorney-atlanta-lawyer-to-defend-her-in.html

Dennis Roberts Interview from Black Power Mixtape

https://video.wosu.org/video/independent-lens-a-miscarriage-of-justice-or-conspiracy-to-silence/

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The Golden West Hotel was founded by William D. Allen in 1906. He was an entrepreneur from Tennessee and a prominent figure in Portland's Black community. The hotel is located in NW Portland by the North Park Blocks. It was neighbored by Mt. Olivet Church before the churches move to NE Portland in 1921. The hotel was opened because many African-Americans worked building the railroads, but were not given accommodations in other parts of the city. The hotel became a hub for Black business. It had 100 rooms, a barber shop, a famous candy and ice cream store, a gymnasium, and supposedly a gambling den under the hotel, largely still a mystery today. In 1931 the hotel closed due to the great depression. Now, it is a housing development run and subsidized by Central City Concern for the homeless and drug addicted.

https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/golden_west_hotel/

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/golden-west-hotel-portland-1906-1931/

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Robert Church worked as a cabin boy for his father until he settled in Memphis in 1865 as a businessman. After the yellow fever pandemic in 1878, Church bought land around Beale St and this decision made him the first Black Millionaire in the South. Beale St was started by developer and entrepreneur Robertson Topp in 1841. In the 1860s, Beale St became a popular attraction for musicians like the Young Men's Brass Band, the first band to call Beale St home. The Memphis Free Speech newspaper edited by Ida B. Wells was also located on Beale St. Church renovated the Grand Opera House and Church Park, a center for blues music, wonderful performances, and political speeches. In the 1900s more clubs, restaurants, and shops were opened by Black entrepreneurs. Church's purchase of Beale St gave economic opportunity for Black businessmen throughout the 1900s despite his death in 1912. In 1955, the house Church built for his family was burned by Hull Crump, the Mayor, for Church's activism in Black voter rights.

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/beale-street-1841/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reed_Church

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Jefferson Student Wins Art Award in 1952

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Jefferson Student Wins Art Award in 1952

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The Portland Challenger reported that a Jefferson Student, Miss Dolores Harris, won the National Scholastic Art Award on May 16, 1952. Junior year Miss Harris won a Golden Key, and in her senior year her work was displayed at the National Scholastic Art Award at Meier & Frank. Her senior portfolio won her a scholarship at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, which she planned to attend the following autumn. I like this clip from Charolette Rutherford's collection because it showed how much the newspapers cared about community success. We are still encouraged to submit to the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards by Amy Hargrave, and I didn't know there was such a long history of it at Jeff until now.

Portland Challenger

https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=portlandchallenger

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Racism and Boycotts at Jefferson and Roosevelt High School

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Racism and Boycotts at Jefferson and Roosevelt High School

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On September 28, 1944, a school dance was held at Jefferson High School. It was a school dance for the whole school, but when Black students arrived they were asked to leave. The student president told the Black students that there was no jitterbugging allowed, even though they were not jitterbugging and dancing the same way as other white students. The student body president then told the students that if they wanted to dance they could do it on their own time somewhere else. Racism was not just happening at Jefferson, but also at Roosevelt High School. Black Students at Roosevelt were unjustly policed in hallways, and accused of starting fights with white students. Black Students were being suspended without good cause and this led to a boycott supported by the Black Coalition. After days of unrest at the school and the principal, Art Wescott, calling in police to patrol school grounds, Jan 14th was the first successful day of the Roosevelt Boycott. The first march went from Dawson to Unthank park Jan 15, 1970, the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's Birthday. The Clarion Defender reported on the incident and went to Roosevelt High School. In an interview a white teacher stated, "Something about [Black people] affects and scares white kids." I think a notable thing about the boycott is that Black students still went to class at the Highland Community Center while they could not attend class at Roosevelt.

Clarion Defender

https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=clariondefender

People's Observer

https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=peopleobserver