I grew up in Texas, where race and racism are written into the landscape. In the names of neighborhoods. The sides of highways. The silences in certain rooms. So when I first started hearing about the Pacific Northwest, about Portland and Seattle and Vancouver, something stirred in me that I can only describe as cautious curiosity. These were cities whispered about in certain circles as places that were different, not post-racial, but somehow more expansive. More room to breathe. After years of living in all three cities, and time spent in uniform that took me from the South to Hawaii and back again, I can say this: the Pacific Northwest is complicated, historically fraught, and yet for this particular Black man from Texas, it has been, more often than not, a place where I felt free to simply be.
Oregon: The State That Tried to Erase Us and Failed
Oregon has a history that should make any honest American uncomfortable. When it entered the Union in 1859, it was the only state whose constitution explicitly banned Black people from living, owning property, or working within its borders. This didn’t appear from nowhere. As far back as 1844, Oregon’s Provisional Government passed a “lash law” that threatened public whipping, 39 lashes repeated every six months, for any Black person who dared to settle there. The message was unmistakable: this land was being built as a white homeland, and that vision was codified not just in sentiment but in statute.
The Donation Land Act of 1850 compounded this cruelty by restricting free land grants to “white settlers” only, embedding racial exclusivity into the very soil of Oregon. The effects were generational. Land meant wealth. Wealth meant power. Power meant political voice. By shutting Black families out of landownership from the very beginning, Oregon guaranteed a racially stratified society for generations to come. Remarkably, the racist language of those exclusion laws remained embedded in Oregon’s constitution until 2002, and when voters finally had the chance to remove it, 30 percent still voted to keep it.
And yet. Despite every effort to erase them, Black Oregonians were there. They built churches and businesses. They sued the city of Portland when it tried to bar Black children from public schools. In 1903, ten Black waiters who worked at the Portland Hotel founded The Advocate newspaper, with a masthead that declared: “Don’t ask for your rights, take them.”That defiant spirit is Oregon’s real Black history. Not the absence of Black people, but their insistence on presence despite everything.
Portland: Six Years, a Classroom, and a City Worth Understanding
I lived in Portland for six years. I taught there. I walked its neighborhoods, ate at its tables, and argued in its coffee shops. Portland is a city that wears its contradictions openly. Yes, it is overwhelmingly white. Yes, it has been called the whitest major city in America, and that reputation is not entirely unfair. But it is also a city with a genuine progressive spirit, a deep investment in civic life, and a Black community in the Albina and Williams Avenue neighborhoods that has fought for its place for over a century.
What struck me most about Portland was something I also ran into in Seattle and Vancouver: the prevalence of the phrase “I don’t see color.” You hear it everywhere in the Pacific Northwest, in schools, in workplaces, over dinner. It is usually offered as a kindness, a declaration of open-mindedness. But colorblindness is not neutrality. When you refuse to see race, you also refuse to see the history that race produced: the lash laws, the land acts, the redlining, the displacement of Portland’s historic Black neighborhoods during urban renewal. The Pacific Northwest taught colorblindness in its elementary schools for decades, and the result was not equality but erasure. That is the ongoing work of cities like Portland, not to stop seeing race, but to finally, honestly look at what race has meant here. And as someone who will always love Portland, it does have a history of trying to fix any of its ills when it comes to race. It’s not perfect, but I do love the energy of the city.
Washington State: A Different Legal Foundation, A Different Story
Cross the Columbia River and something shifts. Washington State did not pass the kind of sweeping anti-Black legislation that Oregon did. It was the only state among Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana to pass a civil rights law before 1950. Washington Territory briefly banned interracial marriage, but repealed the law before statehood. This legal difference mattered enormously. It shaped who came, who stayed, and what communities were able to build.
Washington’s Black population grew slowly through the late 1800s, then accelerated sharply. The job opportunities in Seattle, in shipping, domestic service, and the hospitality industry, drew Black workers from across the country. World War II transformed the picture entirely. Defense jobs in shipbuilding and aircraft plants brought waves of Black families to the area. By 1948, the average income for a Black family in Seattle was 53 percent higher than the national average, a striking figure that coexisted with segregated lunchrooms, racially restrictive housing covenants, and the overcrowding of Black neighborhoods that had nowhere left to grow. Seattle also had William Grose, one of its earliest Black entrepreneurs, who built a home, sold parcels to Black families, and helped create what would become the Central District. And Owen Bush, son of pioneer George Washington Bush, won first place at the National Centennial Exposition in 1876 and became the first Black legislator in the state of Washington in 1889. These were not marginal figures. They were foundational ones.
Seattle: An Open Society Still in Progress
Seattle is where I live now, and I will say plainly: it is among the most open cities in which I have ever lived. I spent time in the Army. I was stationed in Hawaii, which offers its own remarkable model of multiracial society, one I carry with me as a personal benchmark. Seattle is not Hawaii. But it has a quality of openness that feels genuine rather than performative. People here, by and large, are willing to engage. They are not always comfortable with race conversations, but they show up for them. That matters.
The Central District, historically the heart of Black Seattle, is changing fast. Longtime Black residents have been pushed out by rising rents and tech-driven gentrification. The tension between Seattle’s progressive self-image and the actual displacement of its Black community is real and unresolved. But the organizations remain. The NAACP branches are active. The first Black-owned bank in the region was born here. The political will, expressed in fair employment legislation, civil rights organizing, and the direct-action campaigns of the 1960s, is part of this city’s character. In all my years here, moments of overt hostility have been rare. That is not the same as saying racism doesn’t exist. It does. But the texture of daily life, the ease with which I can move through this city and feel like I belong here as much as anyone, is something I do not take for granted.
Vancouver, BC: North of the Border, But Not Beyond History
I first came to Vancouver in 2009 for a graduate program and fell in love immediately. It is one of the most beautiful cities on earth, with mountains rising behind you and the ocean out front. Vancouver’s Black community is small, roughly 1.5 to 2 percent of the city’s population, and unlike in Toronto or Montreal, there is no single concentrated Black neighborhood. The community is dispersed, woven into the fabric of one of the world’s most diverse cities.
But Vancouver has its own history of Black erasure. From the 1920s through the 1960s, Hogan’s Alley in the Strathcona neighborhood was the city’s Black cultural center. Nora Hendrix, Jimi Hendrix’s grandmother, lived there. Black-owned businesses, musicians, and community institutions gave the area its pulse. In 1972, the city demolished it for urban renewal and highway construction. The Hogan’s Alley Society is now working to reclaim and memorialize that history, but the erasure was profound, and the story is a familiar one. The same thing happened in Portland’s Albina district, in Seattle’s Central District, in Black neighborhoods across North America. In my years in Vancouver, I encountered one incident I would call racial hostility, and I believe to this day it involved someone struggling with serious mental illness rather than a coherent worldview. Beyond that, I found openness, curiosity, and the particular generosity of a city that has, by necessity and by choice, learned to make room.
Salt Spring Island: History Worth a Pilgrimage
No piece about Black history in the Pacific Northwest is complete without Salt Spring Island, and I want to say this plainly: every Black American should know this story.
In 1858, Governor James Douglas, born to a Scottish merchant father and a free woman of color from Barbados, personally invited Black families from California to settle in British Columbia. These were free Black people fleeing the suffocating racial laws of California and the existential threat of the Fugitive Slave Act. They came in significant numbers, settling on Salt Spring Island and Vancouver Island. They farmed. They educated their children. Emma Stark became the first Black teacher on the island. Families like the Estes and the Starks built lives of dignity and relative freedom at a time when such things were being systematically denied to Black people across the American continent. Today, Salt Spring Island is a working island, beautiful and quiet, with farms, art galleries, and kayakers in the harbor. But beneath that quiet is a history of refuge and resilience that deserves far more attention than it gets. It is worth visiting, worth studying, worth telling your children about.
Victoria, the Clipper, and Sooke: A Personal Invitation
From Seattle, you can take the Victoria Clipper, a high-speed passenger ferry, over to Victoria, British Columbia. It is one of the most elegant small cities in North America. From Victoria, it is a short drive to Sooke, where the wilderness opens into trails through old-growth forest above the ocean. I have done this trip more than once, and I recommend it to everyone, but especially to Black Americans who may never have imagined that this particular corner of the world was available to them.
The Pacific Northwest tried, in various ways and with varying degrees of commitment, to exclude Black people from its story. It failed. We were here at the beginning, as sailors and mountain men and pioneers. We built its cities and farmed its land and published its newspapers and won its rodeos. We are here now, in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, and on a small island where our people found freedom north of the 49th parallel. The rain falls on everyone here. The mountains do not check your papers. And for a Black man from Texas who spent years in uniform and years in classrooms trying to find a place where he could live without the weight of history pressing down too hard, the Pacific Northwest has felt, more often than not, like somewhere worth calling home.
