Artifacts, harsh truth on exhibit for Black History Month

A February exhibit at the Vancouver Community Library of historical newspaper articles, photographs, scrapbooks, artworks and other artifacts of black life in the Pacific Northwest includes an anonymous personal letter mailed by one Kelso neighbor to another.

Dear N-word, it begins. You aren’t wanted in this superior white town. You got a free ride to America; take another one and go back to Africa. The letter spends a couple of handwritten pages delivering a brutally simple message: Get out.

Perhaps what’s most shocking about the letter is when it was written and postmarked: 2015, not the heyday of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. But the creators of this Black History Month exhibit, all officials with the Vancouver NAACP, don’t seem shocked at all.

“I hope we can help educate people in the Pacific Northwest about racism and the African-American experience here,” said spokeswoman Andrea Marzette.

It’s too easy for white people to believe there’s no such thing as racism in this very white part of America, she said. But Oregon was the only state in the nation ever to write racial exclusions — of blacks and Chinese — into its new state constitution, in 1859. Today, a chief reason why blacks are concentrated in Portland’s inner northeast neighborhoods is that supposedly polite, progressive city’s history of “redlining” them out of purchasing real estate in white, well-to-do neighborhoods.

Vancouver is happily different by design, according to exhibit curator Claudia Carter. “What makes Clark County so interesting is, there isn’t one black area that people migrated to the most. Vancouver wasn’t built that way.”

Vancouver was still a small town, Vancouver NAACP President Bridgette Fahnbulleh recalled, when wartime shipyards here opened and black people hungry for work started arriving from all over the country. That was the spark that launched the Vancouver Housing Authority, which created thousands of units of racially integrated “instant housing” and drove growth of the city we know today.

“The basic premise was, everybody’s going to live together, and if you don’t like it you can move,” Fahnbulleh said. “Vancouver was the tip of the spear of unity. That’s one of the things that made Vancouver so unique.”

Buffalo Soldiers

The first black man known to set foot in Oregon was Marcus Lopez, a servant on the ship Lady Washington, in 1788; he was followed in 1805 by Yorke, a slave attached to Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. Slaves and servants of white families on the Oregon Trail followed, but their numbers stayed small until that wartime mass exodus of blacks from the American South in what’s now called the Second Great Migration.

But in 1899, a unit of the U.S. Army’s Buffalo Soldiers — just over 100 black men — became the resident garrison for 13 months at the Vancouver Barracks. They led the town’s annual Memorial Day parade that year and were also noted for everything from playing in local baseball games to intervening in violent labor unrest at a mine in Idaho. This was a time when Buffalo Soldiers were held in high regard for their bravery during the Spanish-American War, including the famous charge up San Juan Hill.

That’s all according to a historical summary by historian Greg Shine, the former chief ranger at Fort Vancouver (now a communications specialist for the Bureau of Land Management, based in Portland). If the Buffalo Soldiers interest you, don’t miss Shine’s return to Vancouver at 2 p.m. Saturday to discuss his two decades of original research about Buffalo Soldiers in this area.

Also scheduled by the NAACP in February, which was designated Black History Month by President Gerald Ford as part of the American Bicentennial in 1976, is an afternoon of African-American music and dance, including drumming and dancing lessons. That’s set for noon to 5 p.m. on Feb. 17 at the Luepke Center; registration is required so there are enough drums for all. Send an email to naacpvancouver@gmail.com by Feb. 10.

Tell the truth

Membership has always risen and fallen at the local NAACP, according to Marzette, but lately there’s been a serious upswing to around 125 — and that predates the election of our current president, she added. Racial discrimination, hatred and violence have been and still are plentiful in America, she said, if not glaringly obvious right here in this region.

“I often find that my white friends say, ‘We’re so happy that didn’t go on here,’ ” she said. “That’s why we want to collect all these materials that tell people the truth.”

Those materials are on loan from the archives of the Clark County Historical Museum as well as individual collections, Carter said. There have been many delightful discoveries, she said — like historical NAACP scrapbooks, which have been photocopied so visitors can browse the pages while the originals stay safe behind glass. Also on display will be original artworks by local black artists, including ceramic masks, busts and statues by Carter herself.

“I try to blend the past and the future,” she said while showing off a couple of masks called “Enslaved” and “Lasting Freedom.”

There will be so much to read and look at, Carter hopes visitors will make multiple trips to the library to see it throughout February. “There’s no need to rush,” she said. “It’ll be up for 28 days, so take your time and let it sink in.”

Marzette likes repeating a tale from a black friend who grew up in Portland and always went roller skating on Wednesday nights. When relatives visiting from the South heard about that, they wanted to enjoy the fun too — but were told they couldn’t go because it wasn’t Wednesday night. Marzette’s friend had never realized the truth: Wednesday night was the only night blacks could go skating.

“If you grew up black, you eventually came to know there was racism,” Marzette said.