Publishing Prejudice: Whitewashing Albina s destruction oregonlive.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from oregonlive.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Today, Senator Akasha Lawrence Spence (D-Portland) and Representative Janelle Bynum (D-Clackamas) join Black women leaders across Oregon in releasing a statement celebrating Nataki Garrett, who has served as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s (OSF) Artistic Director since 2019. The leaders join in denouncing the racist death threats made against Ms. Garrett.
Though often omitted from history books, African American people had feet on the ground side by side with early explorers of the Oregon Territory from Markus Lopius, a servant on the
Lady Washington in 1788 with Robert Gray, to York, a slave on the Lewis and Clark expedition, to Moses Harris, a free black mountain man and legend in the fur trade and later a sought-after wagon train guide. There s also James Douglas, chief factor at Fort Vancouver in the 1840s and concurrent governor on Vancouver Island and British Columbia. Somewhat simultaneous with Douglas rise to political power, legislated race restrictions known as Exclusion Laws were set for Oregon Trail immigration. Racial limitations also applied with the Oregon Donation Land Law in 1850. These federally enforced restrictions, present at the inception of Oregon, created major undeniable barriers. Bearing these inequities in mind, we ve set aside some ink this week to look at some of Oregon s modern a