Last summer, the city of Portland paid millions to descendants of Black families forced from their homes by racist urban renewal projects. It was an effort decades in the making. And one of the driving forces was a local librarian.
Through her own research, the librarian discovered that her grandmother’s home was demolished by the city ahead of a planned expansion of Emanuel Hospital. The expansion never happened, and the city never paid a dime to the librarian’s grandmother.
A plaintiff in the lawsuit who goes by the name Byrd, the librarian later transmuted the traumatic events she helped document during a decade of research into what she calls “wearable history.” Byrd chose jackets made of denim, which she calls a universal fabric, as her canvas. She embellished the jackets with materials that reflect the story of gentrification, including colorful textiles, chains and signs printed on fabric.
Byrd does not see herself as an artist, and hardly even takes credit for making the jackets. Instead, she says, it was a spiritual journey to craft the jackets while immersing herself in the history of displacement.
“They created me,” Byrd told Street Roots. “I didn’t sit down and plan to study the history for 10 years. It came to me. It is all so spiritual. My spirit protected me by giving me a way to communicate that is nonverbal. They are words unspoken.”
For decades, city officials used racist housing practices, eminent domain and gentrification to force Black people out of the Albina neighborhood in the North and Northeast quadrants of Portland. Many of their descendants are now returning, reclaiming the area and its legacy.
“When Black folks moved into Albina, between 1948 when the Vanport flood happened and 1956 there were over 200 businesses on North Williams Avenue,” Byrd said. “Everybody wants to redefine that area and say it didn’t have an identity. No, it had an identity. We made the tax foundation for this area, we invested in this area when nobody wanted it.”
The history Byrd documented helped build the foundation for the lawsuit filed in federal court in 2022 by 26 descendants of Black Portlanders forced from their homes by the city in the name of urban renewal.
“I had about four million documents,” Byrd said. “I had my granddaddy’s old trunk and that thing was filled.”
If not for her work, some of that history could have been lost to time.
“I got some documents within a week of their scheduled retention expiration date at the national archives on the East Coast,” Byrd said.
This June, the city agreed to settle the lawsuit, paying $7.5 million to 26 plaintiffs with an additional $1 million from Prosper Portland. The total came out to about $327,000 for each person.
The settlement represented an effort to “acknowledge past harms,” according to Cornell Wesley, executive director of Prosper Portland.
Portland City Council voted unanimously to increase the settlement from $2 million to $8.5 million after hearing from Black homeowners and descendants. Councilor Loretta Smith proposed the increase following a mid-session executive meeting. Councilor Candace Avalos seconded the motion, and the council approved with full support.
Making the jackets helped Byrd through the arduous process of documenting the traumatic history of her community.
“They tell the story and the impact that the story had and continues to have,” Byrd said. “It was a tough place and my spirit kicked in to sustain me.”
Wearable history
Byrd’s creations trace themes around civil rights and gentrification and evoke memories of North and Northeast Portland. She would like the jackets to be shown in a gallery or exhibition.
One jacket came about when Byrd met with descendants and survivors of displacement in Portland. It shows chains over a picture of the old Albina neighborhood. She said she saw that the Black community is chained to the history of displacement and the emotional, mental, spiritual and psychological destruction of the community.
“Everyone was anchored to the geographical location of Albina,” Byrd said. “One of several things uniting plaintiffs is we are all chained to this history. Chains harken to slavery and being chained to the history of what happened to our homes and families. It’s not going anywhere — we carry that history with us every day.”
Byrd said she has never done any type of art. The inspiration for the jackets came to her when she started her research.
“There’s a vocabulary around the jackets,” Byrd said. “Wearable history is when you wear clothing that sparks a conversation. I have created a glossary that goes with the jackets.”
Some of the jackets were inspired by her research on the past. Others were a way for Byrd to process the experiences her community was sharing in real time. After listening to plaintiffs in the lawsuit share memories about the forced removal from Albina, she created a jacket that speaks to the emotions she heard. Like a face, the plain white surface on the front gives the impression that all is well, while under the surface a neighborhood or human is in distress.
“From eating lunch at your aunt’s house to moving to a community as a child where you were not wanted: as a child you may not have the words to say it, but this jacket can say it,” Byrd said. “The adverse psychological effect that gentrification has is like snatching a protective circle from children.”
Byrd found second-hand denim jackets at Goodwill. She liked that medium because people wear denim all over the world: a parallel to the fact that gentrification is universal and happens everywhere on the planet. Making the jackets, Byrd felt moved by a force outside herself.
“It felt like I was in a tunnel, nothing was around me, nothing mattered,” Byrd said. “The only thing that mattered was the release of the expression the jacket wanted to communicate. I was having a conversation. I felt safe and there was a stillness. Every time a jacket came to me and told me what to do, I felt safe and protected. I still do when I look at them. I cannot explain how the materials appeared and how I knew how to put them together.”
History of displacement
From the 1880s into the 1920s, Black people in Portland mostly lived in Old Town and Albina, close to jobs in freight rail yards and Union Station.
It wasn’t always a free choice.
In 1919, the Portland Realty Board declared it unethical for an agent to sell property to either Black or Chinese people in majority white neighborhoods, according to Bleeding Albina, a study by Karen Gibson, associate professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University. The realtors designated the Albina neighborhood for Black and Asian residents. Their plan was to contain the projected decrease in property values within that section of the city. It also led to redlining by banks and further disinvestment by city leaders.
That segregation was repeatedly reaffirmed by historical, social and structural factors.
During World War II, a new wave of Black people arrived in Portland to work in shipyards. Many moved to the lower Albina neighborhood in North and Northeast Portland.
In 1942, Henry Kaiser built Vanport, a housing project between Portland and Vancouver, to accommodate the growing population of shipyard workers. However, a flood on May 30, 1948 destroyed Vanport. Of the 18,000 residents displaced, more than a third were Black. Most moved to Albina.
After the war, the Albina community thrived, with businesses, churches, homes, community centers and the arts — until the city destabilized it, destroying homes and businesses in the name of urban renewal.
“We don’t get to reap the benefits of our investment in an area that was undesirable,” Byrd said. “Because we invested in it, because we had homes there and we raised our families there, it thrived and it became valuable.”
The city used eminent domain to seize homes and businesses to build the Memorial Coliseum, Interstate 5 and for a planned expansion of Emanuel Hospital that never materialized. Together, those projects displaced hundreds of Black businesses and homes. In 1956, more than 450 Albina homes and businesses were torn down to accommodate the voter-approved construction of the Memorial Coliseum. Construction of I-5 in 1962 cut through the center of the community, claiming more homes and businesses. Many businesses moved or closed permanently.
Portland Development Commission and Emanuel worked together from the 1950s into the 1970s to force 171 households out of Albina, according to history collected by the Oregon Law Center. The city demolished 158 residences and 30 businesses. About three-quarters were Black-owned. The city gave people 90 days to leave their homes.
Discriminatory mortgage lending policies restricted Black home ownership in the 1970s and 1980s, according to Bleeding Albina. This made it challenging to find a new home to purchase, with or without compensation.
Black community members organized and fought back.
Public testimony in an October 1970 city council meeting shows some of the conversation from the time.
“When people are being moved through no choice of their own, under an urban renewal project, they should not suffer any financial loss or be forced to assume any indebtedness because of the move,” Leo Warren of North Cook Street told councilors and then-Mayor Terry Schrunk. “There is a great deal of uneasiness and anxiety on the part of the people who are scheduled for removal from the Emanuel Hospital Project.”
PSU’s research also revealed that Emanuel Hospital began purchasing properties across the Albina neighborhood long before the city approved or announced plans for an urban renewal project there. The hospital allowed buildings it had bought to sit empty or demolished them, contributing to claims of blight in the neighborhood. Once the Portland Development Commission approved an urban renewal project in Albina, it paid the purchase price and demolition costs of the properties that the hospital had acquired earlier.
The 2022 lawsuit traced some of that history.
“Recently discovered information, long concealed by defendants, shows that urban renewal and blight were pretexts for defendants’ real motive: a racist desire to remove Black people from the economically valuable neighborhood of Central Albina,” the lawsuit states. “Over the decades and in recent years, the City, PDC, and Emanuel have profited from this stolen land.”
Guided by ancestors
Byrd assembled a series of jackets about Black businesses that served the Albina neighborhood. One jacket memorializes the Williams Beauty Salon — one of many businesses the city pushed out of Albina. Another shows a truck full of watermelons a man used to sell in the summer when the neighborhood was thriving.
Some jackets commemorate protests organized by the Albina community in the 1960s and 1970s, with signs people made during that time: “I am a man” and “Black people need jobs too,” along with “Emanuel has no respect for Black and poor people.”
Another, which Byrd calls “The Original Investors,” illustrates the fact that Black business owners and families made Albina flourish. Byrd points to the side of the jacket with white fabric sewn onto it, holding up the sleeve. The fabric fans out, creating a triangular shape.
“This is a wedding theme. When you raise your arm, that resembles a slave ship but it’s also a shark bite and that’s a whole other conversation. It’s made like a wedding dress out of cotton gauze.”
Byrd said the jacket symbolizes the marriage of America’s economy with the Black community.
“Because of gentrification, white folks benefit from the economic appreciation that Black folks laid the groundwork for,” Byrd said.
“Not only are we the original investors there, we’re the original investors in this country,” Byrd said. “If it were not for Black labor — slave labor, free labor — this country would not exist economically the way that it does. So in that regard you’re married to us, you can never get rid of us.”
Loss of generational wealth is at the heart of the lawsuit.
“It’s not a finality,” Byrd said. “It still goes on. When you are denied your inheritance and your culture’s pattern of success has been removed, you try to blaze new trails. Every generation has to start over. You don’t get to benefit from the continuity of success. Gentrification is ongoing and continues to this day.”
The pain and turmoil of displacement is represented through scenes sewn and glued onto the fabric of Byrd’s jackets, evoking attachment to home and community. To Byrd, the jackets are an initiation and she believes they came to enhance, elevate and broaden what she learned about the history of her own community.
“I would meet with the plaintiffs and people would cry in the meetings,” Byrd said, “and the more people talked it was like the more they remembered. I watched. It took a certain toll on people.”
The white jacket shows a calendar and a clock face on the back and contemplates mental health, spelled “hellth.”
Through this creation, Byrd asks, “What mental hell are you in and will you come from it? How do you heal in the midst of chaos?”
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