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Thank you. [ ??? ] MAN: Throughout much of
Oregon's early history there were exclusion laws
banning blacks from coming to Oregon. You could not
be black in Oregon. Or, if you were here,
you couldn't stay. And yet, slaves were
actually brought here. WOMAN:
The entire Northwest was created to be a racist, white utopia and yet black folks in the face
of that created communities, even when it meant
risking their lives. WOMAN: They were standing up
and saying, ''You can't do
this kind of thing to me.'' WOMAN: A lot of folks
paid a hefty price for me to have
the opportunities that I have. Let their stories be heard. [gulls cawing, waves rolling] In August of 1788, the merchant
ship the Lady Washington set anchor at Tillamook Bay where the ship's crew traded
with local tribes. When a dispute broke out, a black sailor named
Markus Lopeus was killed. MAN: ''They drenched their
knives and spears ''with savage fury in the body
of the unfortunate youth. ''He fell within
15 yards of me and instantly expired,''
Robert Haswell, 1788. Markus Lopeus is the first
documented person of African descent in Oregon. We know what the year
was, we know the man's name, we know where he came from,
what work he did. And during that time,
there were multiracial ships along the Oregon California
coast from all over the world, and these men weren't slaves,
they were workers. Gwen Carr worked to have
Lopeus' name added to this historical
marker near Tillamook, commemorating
the ship's arrival. This was a black person
in Oregon in 1788. And so I made it my business
to find out how does one get
that sign changed? I think it was important
for black people and white people alike
because most people don't know that black history in Oregon
goes back that far. [ ??? ] The Oregon Black Pioneers is an
all-volunteer organization dedicated to researching,
preserving and sharing the largely unknown history of the state's early
black residents. Well, this is a stone
commemorating Hiram Gorman who they called ''Hi,'' and this is not actually
his original resting place, but it's here somewhere. We're next to the monument that Oregon Black Pioneers
placed here in 2007 in order to honor
the African Americans or the black people
who are buried here. We try to educate Oregonians
about this wonderful, rich and largely
unknown history of African Americans'
contributions to this state
and its development. The number of African American
residents in Oregon has historically been low: For decades,
less than two percent of the overall population. [engines revving] RICHARDSON: As a person
coming out of the South and coming into this place
called Oregon, when I first got here,
40 years ago, on a daily basis
the only other person that I saw that looked like me,
or other persons, were my family,
my children, and my sisters. Even on the job
that I went to. That's a frightening
kind of thing. WOMAN: Portland was considered
to be the most segregated city north of the Mason-Dixon line,
and some black leaders called it ''Up South''. So black life
was incredibly curtailed, contained, and exploited here
because black folks were never
supposed to be here. So you had a great deal of
anti-black history in Oregon. Joseph Lane,
First Territorial Governor of Oregon, was very
sympathetic to slavery. He ran for vice president
on a slave state ticket against Abraham Lincoln
in 1860. The region's earliest white
settlers banned black slavery, but for decades, there were
still some slaves here. NOKES: It turns out that almost
every early wagon train had at least a few slaves
on the wagon train, but nobody kept that story, nobody was keeping
the history of blacks in Oregon. Until 1865, nearly half of
the U.S. states legally enslaved
African Americans. For hundreds of years,
millions of black men, women and children
were bought and sold. Even their names
were not their own -- they could change
with each owner. And often, the identities
of slaves and free blacks were left out of
official documents. You'll see references to them --
''the little black girl'' or ''the yellow girl''
or ''the servant girl'' -- you see all these
references but no names. I feel like we're
bringing 'em to life. It lets the world know
that they existed, you know, otherwise
they're invisible. The stories of Oregon's early
white pioneers are well documented, but the lives
of people of color were routinely left out of
history books. Though it is known there were
black mountain men, sailors, and settlers throughout
the region, there are very few identified
images from the mid-1800s. For researchers and
genealogists, tracking down those
early individuals can be nearly impossible. Bob Zybach and Janet Meranda have spent nearly 30 years
uncovering the story of early black resident
Letitia Carson. There's her X.
Yes! Letitia Carson,
that's her X. There are no known public
photographs of Letitia Carson. But this image of a woman
about the same age from the time period illustrates what she
might have looked like. She was in her 30s
when she travelled from Missouri with
the white man David Carson. MERANDA: When they left in May
of 1845 on the Oregon Trail, she was already
eight months pregnant. With a new baby, they endured
the 2,000-mile trip and settled in
what is now Benton County. MERANDA: Coming across
on the Trail, nobody wrote about her. You knew that that
she was on the wagon train, but she was not identified, nobody ever talked about her
having a baby. For decades, this was how wagon
train pioneers were portrayed, as white settlers
looking for a new life, but that was never
the whole story. You had people who had
come over the Oregon Trail or who were living
in various parts of Oregon -- one or two here,
one or two families there. Of the 36 counties in Oregon,
we've identified at least the presence of blacks
in almost all of them right now and most of those happen
prior to the 1900s. Blacks have been coming to
and in Oregon for a very long time,
and a very long time before the American
wagon trains began to arrive in
the 19th century as well. Most famously, the slave York,
who arrived in Oregon Country with Lewis and Clark in 1805. MILLNER:
Wherever there was a frontier you were going to have
tremendous contact between different racial
and cultural groups, and what that meant was that
people of color often came to play prominent
parts, prominent roles, and that was certainly true
in the Pacific Northwest. In the early 1800s,
much of the Pacific Northwest was known as Oregon Country, and jointly occupied
by different nations. Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia
River, was the epicenter. It was the regional
headquarters of the British-owned
Hudson's Bay Company. The company employed
and traded with people from all over the globe,
including black fur trappers, explorers and sailors. MILLNER: One of the most
powerful individuals in the Hudson Bay Company
in the Pacific Northwest. His name is James Douglas. Douglas was mixed race. Born in Guyana,
his father was Scottish, and his mother was
a free woman of color. At that time, if a person had
any known African ancestors, they were considered black, no matter what color
their skin was. In the United States, that would have limited
Douglas' opportunities, but in British occupied areas
of Oregon Country, it didn't matter as much. Douglas would spend
20 years at Fort Vancouver, and go on to become governor
of both Vancouver Island and British Columbia. MILLNER: The things in Oregon
and in Washington, and in the American experience that we name after
Lewis and Clark, in Canada they named it
after James Douglas, a man of color. In Southern Oregon, some blacks found opportunities
with the Gold Rush. Nellie Matthews
and her adult children arrived in Jacksonville
in the early 1850s, shortly after gold
was discovered. In the mining boomtown,
they found plenty of work, and eventually, settled into
the region as farmers... while Louis Southworth
travelled the gold camps of Northern California
and Southern Oregon even though he was a slave. His owner said, ''Well,
you have to buy your freedom. You have to pay me
for your value.'' ZYBACH: And he went down
to the gold mines and he made a lot of money, some say as a prospector,
but others say by fiddling. NOKES: And he made enough money
to pay a thousand dollars to his owner
for his freedom. He was wounded in
the Rogue Indian Wars, reportedly as the first African
American in the Oregon militia. NOKES: He operated a livery
stable in Polk County. Eventually went down
to the Oregon Coast where he operated a ferry. Originally there was
a creek named for him in not a very
complimentary way, which is now named
Southworth Creek to honor him -- that's on the coast --
and so he became another prominent black in Oregon. Throughout the mid-1800s, Oregon's future was being
decided in Washington, D.C., including the passage
of land laws designed to lure
white settlers west. Under the Donation Land Act, if you came to Oregon
and settled, then that land would be given
to you absolutely free by the government. The only qualification
that you really had to display to get that free land was
you had to be white, or you had to have
a father who was white. From the 1830s to the 1860s, it's estimated
some 400,000 settlers travelled the Oregon Trail,
displacing the native people, claiming land, and creating
their own laws and governments. NOKES: 1843 was the big
wagon train that came out called the Great Migration,
and they brought about 1,000 white settlers on that
wagon train from Missouri which more than doubled
the existing white population in that period. And that was led in part
by a Peter Burnett who later became
a governor of California. He had this fantasy
and it could only be that, that the West would be
preserved for whites. He didn't want blacks here. Gregory Nokes has written books
on both Peter Burnett and slavery in Oregon
after discovering his own family's history
as slave owners. My grandparents had written
about a Robert Shipley, an ancestor who brought a slave,
Reuben Shipley, out from Missouri to Oregon
and settled in Benton County. Reuben Shipley
was given his freedom, became a fairly
successful farmer down in Benton County,
had a hundred acres of land
and his own farm. In 1861, Reuben Shipley donated
part of his farmland to establish
Mount Union Cemetery, open to both blacks and whites. His wife, Mary Jane, had
arrived in Oregon as a slave, and Reuben had to pay her
former owner in order to marry her. In 1924, The Oregonian
reported on her 100th birthday. I had no idea there was any --
there'd ever been black slaves in Oregon,
no idea that the family had any involvement with
slavery, not happy to hear this, but it was a story
worth pursuing. I discovered throughout
much of Oregon's early history there were exclusion laws
banning blacks from coming to Oregon
and all sorts of discriminatory legislation
against blacks. In 1844, before Oregon
became a state, Peter Burnett
and other early leaders in the provisional government passed the first of several
exclusion laws banning both slavery and free blacks
from coming to the region -- even though some of those same
leaders brought slaves with them to help
set up their farms. Slaveholders had three years
to free their slaves, and so that meant
there was a three-year window where slavery would be lawful. And then slaves were then
obligated to leave Oregon or be subject to a severe
lashing, which became known as Peter Burnett's Lash Law. MAN:
''If such free negro or mulatto ''shall fail to quit
the country, ''he or she may be arrested
and shall receive ''upon his or her bare back
not less than 20 nor more than 39 stripes.'' Within months, new territorial
leaders removed the Lash Law. It's never known
to have been enforced. NOKES:
And so you have this conflict between the pro-slavery people
and the anti-slavery people. So that was kind of the raging
debate going on here in that it fit into
this national story of would slavery be extended out
from the slave states. In 1851, the exclusion law was
used against Jacob Vanderpool, a sailor from the West Indies
who operated a saloon and boarding house
in Oregon City. CARR: Oh, here it is. ''The statute should be
immediately enforced ''and that the Negro
should be banished forthwith from the territory.'' So the judge is saying,
''We got a law. You brought 'em so let's
uphold the law.'' In Portland
there were also efforts to remove the Francis family, that operated this store
in 1851. CARR: Their white neighbors
came to their aid and signed petitions
to have exceptions made. Nobody did that
for Jacob Vanderpool. So he got kicked out.
So he got kicked out. He got -- he got kicked out.
He needed some friends. Some white friends, preferably.
They were in short order at that point. Oregon's early black
population was small, estimated by scholars
at less than 60 known residents in 1850. CARR: I would imagine
that there were slaves who were brought here
who didn't know that this was
a free territory. They were coming
with their master and that's the way
life was for them. The End of
the Oregon Trail museum includes an exhibit
on Rose Jackson, who traveled
to Oregon in 1849 with Dr. William Allen
and his family. CARR: We call it
the ''Woman in the Box''. They drill holes in the box and brought her on
the Oregon Trail. It's said that because
of the ban against blacks, she hid in a box during the day
and came out at night. CARR: It just kinda sounds
unbelievable, but the source of that story is
really the diary of her owner. So you can't really
argue with that. You also had free blacks
who came into Oregon -- some that stayed and some
that went on and moved on
to what is now Washington. In 1844, George Washington Bush
led his family and several others
over the Oregon Trail just as early leaders in
the region were banning blacks. MAN: ''He told me he would watch,
when we got to Oregon... ''and if he could not have
a free man's rights, he would seek protection
elsewhere.'' Bush stayed the winter
with the Hudson's Bay Company and settled in what is now
Bush Prairie near Tumwater. His son would be Washington's first African American
legislator, while the similarly named
George Washington also went north. MILLNER: So he was able to get
a piece of land, and he was able later
to turn that piece of land into the city
we know as Centralia, he was the founder
of Centralia. If you were a black person, in spite of
the Exclusion Laws, in spite of
the Donation Land Act -- Law, if you were in an area
in which your neighbors accepted you, tolerated you, were willing to interact
with you in an acceptable way, then you could still live here
and even prosper here. That was the case
with mother and daughter, Hannah and Eliza Gorman, who lived and worked
out of this Corvallis home. The Gorman House
is thought to be Oregon's oldest standing residence built
by African American pioneers. Today, it is being
restored and is listed on the National Register
of Historic Places. WOMAN: So this is the very
oldest part of the house, with a fireplace,
this is obviously would've been the place where maybe
most of the cooking would have taken place. Eliza was a talented seamstress and both women took in laundry
to pay the bills. The archeological work that
we're finding out in the yard,
there are hundreds of buttons in the soil. So a lotta people who had their
laundry done here in Corvallis ended up minus a button or two,
you know, in their shirts. Like many others
in the time period, the Gormans were freed after
coming to Oregon as slaves. When Eliza died in 1869, the local newspaper
ran a glowing obituary. MAN: ''She will be missed
by nearly every family in Corvallis.'' Corvallis Gazette, 1869. A lot of them were promised
that if they came with the family
over the Oregon Trail, for example, to Oregon,
they would be free. A good example of that
is the Holmes family. The Holmes family was
offered freedom if they came with the Nathaniel Ford family
to Oregon, and yet when they got here, only part of the family
was freed, and the man and his wife ended up suing
for their freedom. Ford had kept most of
the children as slaves. The case dragged on for over
a year before the Holmes' finally won their
children's freedom. MAN: ''In as much as these
colored children are in Oregon, where slavery does not legally
exist, they are free.'' I think Robin Holmes
is a heroic figure in Oregon. He managed to prevail
in that suit -- the only slavery trial
ever held in Oregon. But as a result of that case,
the legislature very quickly did
pass a law banning blacks from testifying
against whites. But blacks still found ways
to demand their rights. This is the record
of Letitia Carson versus
Greenberry Smith. The lawsuit involved the land
claim of David Carson, who settled 320 acres near
Corvallis with Letitia Carson and their two children. MAN:
''From all the evidence at hand, ''it would appear
that David Carson ''was both Letitia's owner,
master and husband, the father of her mulatto
daughter and son.'' Today,
Oregon State University owns and operates the property
as a cattle ranch. Almost nothing remains
of the Carson homestead, though there are clues
to what was once here. See that cut
right through there? Mm-hmm.
Into the trees there? Yeah, but see where there's kind
of an opening in the canopy there?
Yeah. That might be it -- that'd be
about the right spot. They raised bacon,
potatoes, orchards. I think she was the person
who did the work. When David died in 1852,
Letitia and their children were immediately
kicked out of their home by wealthy neighbor,
Greenberry Smith. He claimed to be the executor
of David Carson's will. Nobody knew how that happened,
he was a racist. He believed Letitia Carson
was property. MERANDA: And he told her,
''You will inherit nothing. ''If you were
still in Missouri, I could sell you and your
children in a heartbeat.'' They took all the property,
including Letitia's cooking equipment and bedding,
his underwear -- everything -- and sold it
at public auction. The auction records
indicate that Letitia was forced to buy back
some of her own essentials. She moved with friends to
Douglas County and filed a lawsuit against
Greenberry Smith. MERANDA:
A young lawyer who had just moved into
the Oregon area from California named
Andrew Thayer somehow met her and he agreed that he would
represent her in court. They argued that
if she wasn't Carson's wife, then she must have been
his employee and was entitled
to back wages. A jury of all white men
awarded her over $500, which included court fees. Then she sued again
for the loss of her livestock. Once again, the jury of
the 12 men said, ''You're right,
he needs to pay her.'' There were orders from
the judge to the sheriff to go and collect
the money. But the case was unusual. Legally, blacks had
almost no rights. In 1857, Oregonians voted
to officially ban slavery -- but also to exclude blacks
from settling in the region. Two years later, in 1859, Oregon was the only free state
admitted to the Union with an Exclusion Law
in its constitution. MAN: ''No free negro or mulatto ''not residing in this State at
the time of the adoption ''of this constitution shall come, reside,
or be within this State.'' NOKES: It says a lot about
the racism in the history of Oregon. You had governors all along,
senators who were pro-slavery, and then the fact that
you had the Constitution with an
exclusion clause in it. You'd have to have had
public support for these things. The public had to be
buying into these. Oregon's exclusion clause stayed in the state
Constitution until 1926. The original racist language
remained in the Constitution until voters removed it
in 2002. It basically served
as a flashing neon light at Oregon's border saying,
''Go south, go north, but don't come here.'' And black folks,
by and large, got that message
loud and clear. And yet,
despite the hardships, some early black residents were determined
to settle and stay. In 1862, President Lincoln
enacted the Homestead Act which provided cheap western
lands to settlers, including freed slaves
and widows. Within months,
Letitia Carson filed a claim for land in Douglas County. There's been three million
or more people on the Homestead Act but she was
one of the very first to file a homestead claim. MERANDA: And it lists her as one
of seven women in Oregon, the only one of color. She listed herself not as
a freed slave, but as a widow. That tells you a lot
about what she thought about her situation
and about herself. Letitia Carson
lived the rest of her life on her own land
in Douglas County. Her son continued to live
in the region. Her daughter married
a Native American and moved to the Pendleton area where her
descendants still live today. CARR: But she had the courage
to challenge the system, and she eventually won, and so I see a woman
that's determined, that persevered, that she was
gonna take care of herself, no matter what and she did. NOKES: She's another case of a
black person in Oregon's history who's been virtually ignored
and really needs to be honored for things that she has done
to make Oregon a better place. IMARISHA: Oregon has really
tried to forget and yet we can't begin to understand
this place that we live without this information. MILLNER: When I talk about
this kind of history with audiences today,
first of all, they're shocked, they're sometimes
angry about it, and almost always they want me
to tell 'em what to do. I can tell 'em what happened,
but I can't tell 'em what to do. CARR: That history has already
happened, you can't change it. The best thing that you can do is really tell the truth
about it and acknowledge it
and move on, and say,
we know this was wrong and we're going to work to see
that this never happens again. There's more about
Oregon's Black Pioneers on Oregon Experience online. To learn more, visit opb.org. [ ??? ] Leading support for Oregon
Experience is provided by... Major support provided by... Additional support
provided by... And the contributing members of
OPB and viewers like you.
