The World War II-era housing project outside North Portland maintained race and class boundaries
It was a place of contradiction, at once utopian and Jim Crow, innovative and second rate. It was a town, they joked, with everything but a future. Vanport, the World War II-era federal housing project on the outskirts of North Portland, was never meant to outlast the war. It was built in a year. It was destroyed in a few hours, engulfed by a massive springtime runoff out of the mountains. But in its brief lifespan of five years, Vanport birthed a militant anti-racist activism that would supplant the politics of accommodation that prevailed in prewar Portland.
You couldn’t live in Vanport unless you worked for a war industry. Most worked in Henry Kaiser’s shipyards. At its peak, the town housed 42,000 people, the largest wartime federal housing project in the country. People came from all over to work for Kaiser. The majority were white. But by war’s end, more than 15,000 African-Americans had flooded into the area. Housing was scarce. Families slept in their cars, in cheap hotels, church basements, theaters, trailer camps, on grandma’s sofa or behind the bar at their cousin’s saloon.
None of them, black or white, was welcome in Portland. Someone had to build the ships, but the denizens of the Rose City did not want those “coloreds” and “Okies” making a home in their fair city.
The local African-Americans – fewer than 2,000 total in 1940 – were respectable folks who’d worked hard not to call adverse attention to themselves. As described in a wartime study by Robert E Colbert in the Journal of Negro Education, they’d crafted a more or less congenial relationship with white Portlanders, which required a fair amount of looking the other way at local discriminatory practices. They did not welcome their new African-American neighbors, those “floaters” and “undesirables,” the men so boisterous, the women in their gaudy dresses. Those signs – We Cater to White Trade Only? They’d never seen them before. They were especially fearful that the newcomers would disrupt the status quo, which, in fact, they did.
Vanport was sunk down in the rich, dark bottom-land of the Columbia River floodplain, crisscrossed by sloughs and two shallow lakes, all muddy in the wet season, dusty in the dry. It was a mile squared off, utterly flat, and enclosed by four dirt levees. Unless you were a curious kid on foot, the only place to exit that swampy bowl was a slant-wise road that climbed the eastern dike.
You could get lost in that town, easy, because the apartment buildings all looked alike. Wood-framed, wood-sided, two-story buildings, they looked like barracks. No building in town was taller than two stories or any shade other than drab and dreary. The town had no center. No central square, no city hall, no commercial hub, no main drag. It had no pool halls, card rooms, bowling alleys, bars or night clubs, no place where you might make a fool of yourself, and probably that was the point. Liquor was prohibited, which didn’t mean you couldn’t find it in makeshift speakeasies all over town.
The town had no newspaper. It had no churches. Sunday morning services were staged in school auditoriums and hosted by a revolving cast of ministers. There were parks, a swimming beach and recreation centers, but the latter were underused and often deserted. Community was not so much dead in Vanport as never come to life, especially among the whites.
But the African-Americans who lived there liked to organize dance parties. Just months after deadly race riots in Detroit in 1943, they threw a dance to raise money for the war. At the event, young African-American men invited white teenagers onto the floor. The authorities, sensitive to the feelings of white Southerners in Vanport and paranoid about race riots, shut down the dance. It was the Communists, the story went, who put up the blacks to dancing with white girls.
But really, who had time to play? Sixty-hour workweeks, and usually both parents worked. The wages were eye-popping – so long as you were white. In blatant violation of wartime federal employment rules, African-Americans were offered only the lowest-paid and dirtiest work on the shipyards. Kaiser blamed the Boilermakers Local, who blamed the Boilermakers International, who said it had nothing to do with them. Wyatt Williams, a prominent African-American lawyer, helped the Boilermakers set up an auxiliary union for African-American workers. The auxiliary collected dues but provided no benefits, no collective bargaining, no grievance procedure, no protection against unfair discipline, no pathway for advancement. Despite wartime labor shortages, Kaiser fired hundreds of African-American workers who refused to join the Jim Crow auxiliary.
Folks didn’t stand for it. Not Vanporter Julius Rodriquez, founding president of the local chapter of the Shipyard Negro Organization for Victory. Not Vanporter Lee Anderson, who sued Oregon Shipbuilding and the Boilermakers for the right to work as a welder. Not Vanporter and Communist Party member Sam Markson, who was once arrested for being white in the black section of Vanport – no joke – and interrogated by the Red Squad, the unit embedded in the Portland Police Bureau to spy on local activists. Not the Rev. J.J. Clow, president of the local NAACP, which threw itself into the fray. And not Bill McClendon, editor of the People’s Observer, who covered the conflict in Portland’s only wartime newspaper for the African-American community. They were all part of the Double V campaign, victory abroad against tyranny and victory at home against racism.
In what might have been the first signal that the politics of accommodation were about to end in Portland, Wyatt Williams was booted out of the NAACP for his “traitorous and malevolent” collusion with the Boilermakers, as Bill McClendon wrote in the Observer.
In November 1943, the feds came to town to investigate the alleged discrimination. They issued cease-and-desist orders. Kaiser and the Boilermakers ignored the orders. In March 1945, the courts ruled in Lee Anderson’s favor, but by then, the shipyards were all but shut down. There were no more jobs for anyone.
As detailed in Vanport, Manley Maben’s history of the project, Vanport was a town of strangers. Residents worked three shifts a day, coming and going at all hours. It was noisy, cars and trucks and buses night and day, dogs barking, cats yowling, babies howling, never a quiet time. It was trashy, too, in the way places got when no one felt attached. Broken windows, debris in the gutters, litter blowing down the streets and collecting against the buildings.
“Cardboard palaces” was what they called the apartments. Corners cut everywhere you looked. Walls as thin as tissue paper so you could hear every nose blow, every radio show, every go at it, your neighbors banging the bed. In winter, they turned off the heat and hot water at night, and too bad for you if you worked the swing shift and might have liked a shower before hitting the sack. And vermin? You had rats and flies and mice and fleas and bedbugs and cockroaches. Plus, like any place built on the cheap, Vanport was frighteningly combustible. Some 200 fires broke out in the first two years of the project.
Families moved out in droves, the white ones mostly. In 1943, the Housing Authority of Portland, Vanport’s landlord, commissioned a survey, later published in American Sociological Review. As documented by authors Charlotte Kilbourn and Margaret Lantis, respondents said they didn’t like African-Americans and whites in the same neighborhood, especially not in the same schools. The shopping facilities were inadequate, and the cooking facilities stank. The place was too noisy, too crowded, and the mud just too much. To top it off, Portlanders discriminated against them.
In fact, the neighborhoods of Vanport were largely segregated, and the hospital was Jim Crow. Illegally and by design, although the Housing Authority of Portland denied it. Not until after the war did activists force the housing authority to admit to their practice of keeping secret and separate waiting lists for African-Americans and reserving certain neighborhoods for African-Americans only.
The Housing Authority of Portland wanted to segregate the schools in Vanport too. But Superintendent James Hamilton refused. Then he made a point of hiring African-American teachers at a time when the Portland school system had none. His schools became the crown jewels of the community, winning awards for their innovations, their meal programs, infirmaries, 24-hour child care, after-school activities and summer school. Kaiser liked Hamilton’s vision because workers who weren’t worried about their children showed up for work every day.
Survivors of Vanport, most of whom were kids at the time, have fond memories of the place. They had basketball teams and sewing classes and marching bands and field trips to the beach and the mountains. They could swim in Force Lake or hitch a ride up to Jantzen Beach to ride the Big Dipper and the Rollo-plane, though if you were African-American, you couldn’t swim in any of their three giant pools. The kids made friends of all colors. If they were African-American, it was likely the first time they’d ever gone to school with white kids or studied from brand-new text books. They were largely shielded from the discrimination their parents faced.
At the end of the war, developers were slavering to get their hands on the land to build a new industrial park. But what to do with all those people? White families blew out of there as fast as they could. But most of the African-Americans were stuck, not welcome in Portland, not wanting to go back home to even worse conditions. Vanport shrunk to less than half its wartime population. The Housing Authority of Portland began to neglect Vanport’s upkeep in earnest. The infrastructure crumbled; the piles of trash grew. They shut down summer school and after-school programs. The kids ran wild. A quarter of the apartment buildings were dismantled and shipped off to house construction workers elsewhere.
By then, the Vanport Tenants’ League, or VTL, had organized to challenge the discriminatory practices of the housing authority, their Jim Crow housing scheme and their failure to apply federal rent relief policies. The VTL staged large, angry demonstrations, alerted the federal overseers to the housing authority's deliberate and illegal circumvention of federal rules. They wrote letters and challenged authorities. They drew the NAACP and the newly formed Urban League of Portland into the fight. Eventually they forced the housing authority to back down.
During the war, African-American trainman Robert Folkes was framed for a murder of a white war bride just south of Portland. He was executed in 1945 in the face of of widespread protest. Eight months later, Portland police would shoot and kill African-American father and shipyard worker Ervin Jones while in pursuit of another man. When the police were exonerated, a near riot broke out in Vanport. In 1946, sheriffs chased African-American suspect Bennie Sellers from the site of a burglary in Vanport and shot him to death. In 1948, Vanporter and African-American veteran Wardell Henderson was executed for the murder of a white man after two jurors signed affidavits that Henderson was sent to the gas chamber because he was African-American, to make an example of him. The serial injustices further inflamed and organized African-Americans and their allies. There was no going back.
In 1946, hope for rejuvenation in Vanport came in the form of Vanport College, intended to serve the overflow of vets seeking to better themselves. The Housing Authority of Portland set aside apartments around the college for vets, called Veterans’ Village, which boasted new paint and picket fences and gardens. In another point of bitter contention, Veterans’ Village did not admit African-American veterans. But Vanport College did. Some of the Vanport kids, white and African-American alike, seized the opportunity to enroll and launch careers their parents would never have dreamed of.
The rain began toward the end of May 1948, a warm deluge. Winter’s snowpack ran off the eastern peaks and poured into the Columbia River. Army Corps engineers stood atop the levees surrounding Vanport, measured and probed and conferred. The lakes below the western dike swelled to twice their size. The folks who’d scrambled up the muddy slopes to watch might have overheard one of the engineers say to the other: This isn’t a levee at all. It’s just a railroad berm.
Memorial Day dawned sunny and warm. Early that morning, a flier was slipped beneath the door of every apartment:
REMEMBER:
DIKES ARE SAFE AT PRESENT.
YOU WILL BE WARNED IF NECESSARY.
YOU WILL HAVE TIME TO LEAVE.
DON’T GET EXCITED.
Shortly after 4 p.m. the sirens went off. The dike-not-really-a-dike had burst.
The first rush of water hit the western-most sloughs, which filled and overran their banks. The second wave was a half-hour away. Vehicles plowed down shallow but rapidly rising rivers that once were roads. People on foot struggled with suitcases, baskets and babies. Cars, trucks and buses jammed the long incline of Victory Boulevard, their only way out.
Within the hour, all the buildings were adrift in muddy, swirling waters. Towers toppled over. Cars and buses bobbed like bathtub toys. Some residents were stranded on the roofs. Kids were tossed into boats from the second floors. A chain of men in water to their knees pulled one person after another to higher ground.
Eighteen thousand homeless. Scores injured. Fifteen dead. That was the official count, but certainly there were more. Some of the missing bodies were never recovered and never counted among the dead. Rumors circulated about dozens of bodies trapped in the Vanport Theater, stashed away in cold storage or shipped out to sea to be returned disguised as dead soldiers. The stories were fed by the suspicion that authorities were secretly delighted to see Vanport destroyed and hoped to deflect attention from their own culpability.
Families lost nearly everything they owned. The buck was passed back and forth between city, the state and the feds so fast it flew through the air in a blur. Not until 1952 did a federal court decide that no one was to blame for the catastrophe and no one, therefore, was entitled to compensation.
In her book, "Perimeters of Democracy," a study of wartime “inverse utopias” including Vanport, Heather Fryer documented the aftermath of the flood. The Vanport Tenants’ League joined with other activists to form the Vanport Citizens’ Emergency Disaster Committee. They protested not only the lack of compensation but the housing of flood victims in rotten conditions, in dilapidated trailers and former dormitories for shipyard workers. Meetings were disrupted. Marches were staged. A caravan to Salem was organized. Pickets were dispatched. “No Home Sweet Home for Us, Just Trailers!” “Billions for Europe, This for America!” “Investigate Vanport disaster!”
Six years later many of those same activists, like Sam Markson and reporter Julia Ruuittala (who was fired for writing incendiary reports about the failures of Housing Authority of Portland in the wake of the flood), would be hauled in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and interrogated about their activities after the flood.
The land was never reclaimed for industrial or residential purposes. It now hosts a golf course, a race track and Delta Park. Vanport College was reborn as Portland State University. The railroad embankment was rebuilt, again not as a levee, but only as a railroad berm.
Vanport was never built to last, but rather to service the industrial needs of a wartime economy and, in the process, to maintain certain race and class boundaries. But Vanport activists and their allies took up the fight for a better future for their kids. With their mass demonstrations and pickets and marches and impolite disruptions of official meetings, they were the first to challenge the politics of accommodation that characterized the prewar African-American community. It was these men and women who set the stage for the civil rights protests to come.
Portland’s Patricia Kullberg is the author of “Girl in the River and “On the Ragged Edge of Medicine.” She is currently working on a novel about Vanport, based on historical events. Kullberg is a former medical director for Multnomah County Health Department and practiced in a clinic that served the homeless, undocumented, disabled and unemployed.
The author is indebted to Ed Washington and Bea Gilmore for sharing with her their personal remembrances and to Vanport Mosaic for its collection of oral histories of Vanport survivors.
Vanport Mosaic Festival
On May 23-28, the Vanport Mosaic, a Portland-based community-driven nonprofit, will commemorate Vanport City, and the 70th anniversary of the flood that destroyed it, with The Vanport Mosaic Festival.
This “memory activism” effort takes place in various venues in North and Northeast Portland, and includes exhibits, theater and music performances, a reunion/celebration of former Vanport residents, oral history documentary screenings and recordings, tours of the historic Vanport area, and community engagement activities.
For more information and reservations, visit vanportmosaic.org, email info@vanportmosaic.org, or call 971-319-0156.
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