Vanport an Oregon City
By
John C Abercrombie
To those familiar with the history of Oregon know it has a very racist past and at its formation was the only state with an exclusion law on the books barring Blacks from living in the state. The population is less than two percent Black. At one time there was a law that required the beating of Blacks that could be exercised every six months, although there is no evidence that it was applied.
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As America entered World War II, there was a need for ships and the call for workers was sent out nationwide for workers. Many of the workers there originally were needed as soldiers causing the need for workers to escalate. Blacks were among those who heeded the call and were more than willing to escape the oppressive nature of discrimination they faced in the South.
All workers migrating to Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington area were faced with housing shortages. * Kaiser was a ship building magnate and demanded housing for the workers needed to do the work. This developed into a planned but temporary city known as Vanport, Oregon. The name is a portmanteau combining the names of Portland and Vancouver. The city was sometimes called Vanport City or Kaiserville after Kaiser of shipbuilding fame.
The city was located in Multnomah County between the Portland city boundary and the Columbia River. The town was destroyed in one day by flooding in 1948 with an official death count of fifteen although this number is believed by many experts as too low. The city has never been rebuilt. Situated in the site is currently Delta Park and the Portland International Raceway.
Portland is the largest city in Oregon and is known as the City of Roses. Portland is known for gorgeous beaches, centuries of lighthouses and wonderful food. Portland is also known for breweries and world class restaurants. Sites like the Japanese Garden, Pittock Mansion, International Rose Test Garden with contains almost 650 different varieties of roses.
Vancouver, Washington is a city on the north bank of the Columbia. Incorporated in 1857 with a current population of 190,000. It is the fourth-largest city in Washington state. It forms part of the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area the 25th largest metropolitan area in the United States. The area was originally settled in 1825 around Fort Vancouver, a fur-trading outpost, the city is located on the Washington-Oregon border along the Columbia River, directly north of Portland and is often considered a suburb of the city along with its surrounding areas.
The mere utterance of Vanport was known to send shivers down the spines of “well-bred” Portlanders. Not because of any ghost story, or any calamitous disaster—that would come later—but because of raw, unabashed racism. Built in 110 days in 1942, Vanport was always meant to be a temporary housing project, a superficial solution to Portland’s wartime housing shortage. At its height, Vanport housed 40,000 residents, making it the second largest city in Oregon, a home to the workers in Portland’s shipyards and their families.
But as America returned to peacetime and the shipyards shuttered, tens of thousands remained in the slipshod houses and apartments in Vanport, and by design, through discriminatory housing policy, many who stayed were Black. In a city that before the war claimed fewer than 2,000 Black residents, White Portland eyed Vanport suspiciously. In a few short years, Vanport went from being thought of as a wartime example of American innovation to a slum.
A 1947 Oregon Journal investigation discussed the purported eyesore that Vanport had become, noting that except for the 20,000 residents who still lived there, “To many Oregonians, Vanport has been undesirable because it is supposed to have a large colored population,” the article read. “Of some 23,000 inhabitants, only slightly over 4,000 are colored residents. True, this is a high percentage per capita compared to other Northwestern cities. But, as one resident put it, the colored people have to live somewhere, and whether the Northwesterners like it or not, they are here to stay.”
Faced with an increasingly dilapidated town, the Housing Authority of Portland wanted to dismantle Vanport altogether. “The consensus of opinion seems to be, however, that as long as over 20,000 people can find no other place to go, Vanport will continue to operate whether Portland likes it or not,” the 1947 Sunday Journal article explained. “It is almost a physical impossibility to throw 20,000 people out on the street.”
Portland’s whiteness is often treated more as joke than a blemish on its reputation, but its lack of diversity (in a city of 600,000 residents, just 6 percent are Black stems from its racist history, of which Vanport is an integral chapter. When Oregon was admitted to the United States in 1859, it was the only state whose state constitution explicitly forbade Black people from living, working, or owning property within its borders. Until 1926, it was illegal for Black people to even move into the state. Its lack of diversity fed a vicious cycle: Whites looking to escape the South after the end of the Civil War flocked to Oregon, which billed itself as a sort of pristine utopia, where land was plentiful, and diversity was scarce. In the early 1900s, Oregon was a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity, boasting over 14,000 members (9,000 of whom lived in Portland). The Klan’s influence could be felt everywhere, from business to politics—the Klan was even successful in ousting a sitting governor in favor of a governor more of its choosing. It was commonplace for high-ranking members of local and statewide politics to meet with Klan members, who would advise them in matters of public policy.
Vanport was home to 40,000 people, about 40 percent of them Black, making it Oregon’s second-largest city at the time, and the largest public housing project in the nation. After the war, Vanport lost more than half of its population, dropping to 18,500, as many wartime workers left the area. However, there was also an influx of returning World War II veterans. In order to attract veterans and their families, the Housing Authority of Portland opened a college named the Vanport Extension Center; the school would eventually be renamed Portland State University.
The Columbia River is a major river which flows through southern British Columbia, central Washington and forms a portion of the Washington – Oregon boundary before emptying into the Pacific Ocean. It is the largest river in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. The river rises in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Canada. It flows northwest and then south into the U.S. state of Washington, then turns west to form most of the border between Washington and the state of Oregon before emptying into the Pacific Ocean. The river is 1,243 miles long, and its largest tributary is the Snake River (used by Lewis and Clark and the Black guide York). Its drainage basin is roughly the size of France and extends into seven of the United States plus a Canadian provinces. The fourth-largest river in the United States by volume, the Columbia has the greatest flow of any North American river entering the Pacific. The Columbia has the 36th greatest discharge of any river in the world.
Vanport was dramatically destroyed at 4:05 p.m. on May 30, 1948, when a 200-foot section of a railroad berm holding back the Columbia River collapsed during a flood, killing fifteen people. The city was underwater by nightfall, leaving 17,500 of its inhabitants homeless.
Vanport was a hub of transient laborers from all over the country. The city was built as temporary housing to last during the ship building serving during the duration of the war.
The establishment of Vanport coincided with an unprecedented influx of Blacks into Oregon, attracted to work in newly federally desegregated wartime defense industries. Due to exclusionary racial laws, the state had a population of fewer than 1,800 Black people in 1940; by 1946 more than 15,000 lived in the Portland area, mostly in Vanport and other segregated housing districts. One prewar observer, Portland Urban League secretary Edwin C. Berry, described Portland as a ” ‘northern’ city with a ‘southern’ exposure”, arguing that the city shared with southern cities “traditions, attitudes, and things interracial in character.” Berry argued that prior to the war the city exhibited remarkably unprogressive racial attitudes.
The Vanport’s social and cultural mores had little in common with Portland as a whole. Vanport’s immigrants imported their particular brands of racism from throughout the country. White migrants from the South were the most vocal in opposing the degree of integration that HAP dictated for schools, buses, and work sites. The Authority was unsympathetic to these complaints and at no time was de jure segregation imposed on any of Vanport’s facilities. When police were called because Black men were dancing with White women at a local event, only the White women were detained and warned that their conduct might lead to a race riot.
HAP never had any explicit policy advocating segregation; nonetheless, for several reasons de facto segregation was the norm. Whites complained when placed near “Black” areas, and segregation of Vanport by neighborhood might as well have been enforced legally. Only in 1944 were complaints raised about the segregation situation in the city. Reacting to the criticism—and pressure from Eleanor Roosevelt—by April 1944, HAP began placing incoming Blacks into the “White” areas of the settlement. However, word quickly spread, and 63 White residents quickly signed a petition demanding a reversal of the policy. Entire buildings were free in the “Black” areas of town, they argued, and after opponents of the integration plan appeared at a HAP meeting the authority decided to resume its previous policies.
The situation changed when the war ended in 1945. The Housing Authority of Portland sought to attract World War II veterans who needed housing, a community to raise their families, and higher education through the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (G.I. Bill). The establishment of a college at Vanport in 1946 was a key part of the strategy to keep Vanport a thriving Oregon community.
Although there were unprecedented levels of integration does not mean there were no tensions.
Tensions were part of Vanport life, and these spilled over into nearby Portland. A study by the American Societical Review indicates the top complaints included.
- “Whites and Blacks in the same school
- “Whites and Blacks in the same neighborhood”
- “Discrimination against Vanport people by Portlanders”
Although some of Portland’s Black people lived in 53 of the city’s sixty census tracts before the war, about half were concentrated in two tracts east of the Willamette River and north of the east–west centerline of the city. After the war, much of Portland’s Black community remained centered in northeastern parts of the city.
As In the response to Hurricane Katrina, public officials led the population to believe that the damage would be slight, and in both cases the government response to the disaster was harshly criticized. Critics attributed the poor response, in both cases, to racist attitudes on the part of officials, who pointedly neglected to respond appropriately to the destruction of a community that had a substantial number of Black residents. However, some experts dispute the role of racism, pointing to the transformation of Vanport by the influx of World War II veterans and their families and official commitment to the area shown by the establishment at Vanport of the only state college in the greater Portland metropolitan area. At the time of the flood, one-third of Vanport residents were Black.
As we see, the history of Oregon was not welcoming to Blacks, however, Vanport and later Portland led Oregon in integration. The first Black teachers and police officers in the state were hired in Vanport. Martha Jordan one of the first Black teachers hired in Vanport later became the first Black teacher hired by Portland Public Schools.
Vanport College plaque near Lincoln Hall at Portland State University
Vanport’s destruction eased the integration of a large Black population into North and Northeast Portland. Indeed, some Black leaders argued that the flood was ultimately beneficial for the city’s Black community. Vanport, argued National Urban League director Lester Granger, was a “nasty, segregated ghetto” where “negroes lived in the same patterns as they did in the South.” The flood that wiped out the district, he continued, was a benefit in that it allowed Black people to further integrate into Portland’s society.
To prevent future incidents, Congress enacted the Flood Control Act of 1950 which spawned projects such as the Priest Rapids Dam. The flood also resulted in the 1961 Columbia River Treaty and later the construction of Libby Dam in Montana.
The loss of Vanport is considered a factor in the eventual closing of the Jantzen Beach Amusement Park on Hayden Island in 1970. Several acres of the former city became “West Delta Park” which is now the Portland International Raceway. The Vanport Extension Center refused to close after the flood disaster and quickly reopened in downtown Portland. Dubbed by a national magazine “The College that Wouldn’t Die,” it became present-day Portland State University.
Beginning in 2016, the Vanport Mosaic Festival has been held annually to commemorate the city and its history.
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Vanport an Oregon City – Heavy Black Population
Portland’s Dark History: The Sunken City of Vanport
In 1948, a flood destroyed the City of Vanport, originally a temporary settlement for the workers of the Portland Shipyard. After the war, with one-third of the population being African Americans, Vanport became a thorn in the side of Oregon’s proliferate conservatives including many white supremacists. So when a flood threatened to destroy the city in 1948, the lackadaisical or worse attitude of the authorities led to the destruction of the town.
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Vanport (Images of America)
Nestled in the floodplain between North Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington, a housing project was built to help house World War II shipyard workers. Its very name, Vanport, is derived from Vancouver and Portland. When the United States entered the war, the demand for ships and for workers to build those ships became a huge priority. Workers were recruited from all corners of the United States. Portland had a serious lodging shortage, so much so that these workers lived in cars, tents, parks, and whatever shelter could be found. Vanport, built in a little over a year to house them, was a city that did not sleep. In its heyday, Vanport was the second-largest city in Oregon with a population of over 40,000 residents. It was a city with many firsts. It was a city that touched many lives in a very short period of time. And on May 30, 1948, it was a city that disappeared just as quickly as it came into existence, leaving a legacy that will not soon be forgotten.
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The flooding of Vanport: full documentary | Oregon Experience
During the early 1940s, Vanport, Oregon was the second largest city in the state.
But on a Sunday afternoon in May 1948, it disappeared completely—destroyed by a catastrophic flood.
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Vanport and the Columbia River Floods of 1948
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The story of Vanport shows the difficulty faced by Blacks in America. These hard working ambitious people only wanted an opportunity to work like most Americans. They wanted to send their children to good schools. They wanted to share the American Dream.
While the myth persists that all people had the opportunity as everyone else, we see so many instances where this is not true.
The American dream should be open to all. Failure to address this problem by understanding the truth of history and working to solve the inequities results in unfairly kicking the can down the street and dumping it into the laps of our children who certainly don’t deserve it.