In 1844, Oregon’s provisional government banned Black people from settling there. Those who stayed could be whipped, up to 39 lashes, until they left.
In the late ’60s, they demolished the heart of the thriving black business district for a hospital expansion that never happened.
And here’s how that hospital fiasco happened. The newly formed Portland Development Commission (PDC) had targeted central Albina as a “slum” and approached Emanuel Hospital to expand there using federal funds from the War on Poverty. All this without any citizen input, 22 blocks razed. Blacks organized into the Emanuel Displaced Persons Association. Residents were given some compensation and 90 days to move. “Negro removal” the residents called it. Blacks scattered to Portland’s East side, “in the numbers”; that is, 100th street and on up where city
https://portland.theosophical.org/features/a-short-history-of-racism-in-portland-and-in-oregon/
Oregon’s small white population had voted on July 5, 1843, to prohibit slavery by incorporating into Oregon’s 1843 Organic laws a provision of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance: "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.‘’ The law was amended, however, on June 26, 1844, by the provisional government’s new legislative council, headed by Missouri immigrant Peter Burnett. As amended, the law prohibited slavery, gave slaveholders a time limit to “remove” their slaves “out of the country,” and freed slaves if their owners refused to remove them.
The effect was to legalize slavery in Oregon for three years. Moreover, once freed, a former slave could not stay in Oregon—a male would have to leave after two years, a female after three. Any free Black person who refused to leave would be subject to lashing, a provision that was known as “Peter Burnett’s lash law.” Burnett, who later became the first U.S. governor of California, gave this explanation for his support for the law: "The object is to keep clear of that most troublesome class of population [Black people]. We are in a new world, under the most favorable circumstances and we wish to avoid most of those evils that have so much afflicted the United States and other countries.‘’
