Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.
So far in our reader discussion on race relations in Portland, Oregon, we’ve heard from many residents, including: working-classwhites who lived in the Albina area during the pre-gentrified ’80s, a long-time black resident of Albina who sold real estate in that NE area of the city for decades, a middle-class white woman who bought a house there recently, and a half-Filipina woman who grew up in the racially-diverse, blue-collar neighborhood of St. Johns. This next email comes from a black woman who lived in the wealthier area of SW Portland during the ’80s:
My family came from California. Alana Semuel’s article made sense of all the racial hostility my family and I experienced during our 10 year residence. The schools, the rise of the Skinheads ... I still remember Mulugeta Seraw [seen right] being murdered by Skinheads outside a local nightclub. Thanks for the history of a city I haven’t returned to since graduating from high school (Lincoln). In fact, no one in my family has returned.
She adds, “I am happy to add further comments in you have questions.” So I asked her why her family moved to Portland in the ’80s and if she would be willing to share the worst examples of racism she experienced back then. She kindly replied:
We encountered the most racism in the school system. Two memories that remain: being called “monkey” and “gorilla” and “primate” in school—two girls in particular were really hostile. They even showed me books of monkeys and asked me if I was related to them. My mother had to intervene because the teacher was ineffective at stopping the bullying.
More subtlety, when at my Catholic middle school, I was never invited over for birthday parties, sleepovers, etc. It was a pretty small school, so the kids were all close. While my classmates were kind to me during the school day, all of the relationship building I was not privy to. I was definitely an outsider.
We had moved to Portland from California because my father worked for Portland Community College as Vice President. We lived in SW Portland, where we were just one of a few black families, that I can recall. (If my memory serves me correct, N.E. was where the majority of blacks lived; Portland was divided racially by class as well.)
Mulugeta Seraw, the murder victim she mentions, was actually attending her father’s school, PCC, at the time of his death. Seraw was an Ethiopian immigrant who had arrived in Portland from Addis Ababa in 1981, and on the night of November 12, 1988,
three skinheads [members of the White Aryan Resistance and a Portland gang called East Side White Pride] encountered Seraw and two of his friends as their two cars drove in opposite directions on SE 31st at around 1:30 am. A verbal altercation over the right of way quickly became racially confrontational and within minutes, [Ken] Mieske had pulled a baseball bat from his trunk and beaten Seraw in the head at least twice with it, according to news reports from the time. Seraw died in hospital eight hours later.
It prompted a series of hate crimes and a groundbreaking state law to monitor them. It galvanized the horrified citizens of Portland against racism. And it led to a landmark trial that pitted a famous civil rights lawyer against the West’s most notorious neo-Nazi. [More on that trial here] … The Seraw murder stunned Portland, but it shouldn’t have. Racist Skinheads began to roost in the city in about 1985. But police mistook them for punk rockers and paid them little mind, [said Loren Christensen, a former Portland police officer and author of Skinhead Street Gangs].
Skinheads in Portland—including the non-racist kind, if you can believe it—got a mention in the following CBS Evening News segment on Portland gangs that aired in October 1993:
As far as recent signs of white-supremacist sentiment, here’s the intro to Alana’s article:
Victor Pierce has worked on the assembly line of a Daimler Trucks North America plant here since 1994. But he says that in recent years he’s experienced things that seem straight out of another time. White co-workers have challenged him to fights, mounted “hangman’s nooses” around the factory, referred to him as “boy” on a daily basis, sabotaged his work station by hiding his tools, carved swastikas in the bathroom, and written the word “nigger” on walls in the factory, according to allegations filed in a complaint to the Multnomah County Circuit Court in February of 2015.
Alana adds, via email to me, “The lawyer told me one woman, an engineer who’s African American, was greeted by a German woman who gave her the Heil Hitler sign.” Just yesterday, Doug Brown at The Portland Mercurydug up some disturbing details about a recent murder involving neo-Nazi sentiment:
The white 38-year-old Portland man accused of murdering a 19-year-old African American man fleeing from him in Gresham earlier this month has tattoos indicating he’s in “European Kindred,” a white supremacist gang based in Oregon. The Mercury has also found several references he and his associates have made online backing up his connection to the group.
