(NAME-MCE) Lane County’s segregationist history too often forgotten

[Anselmo Villanueva]

GUEST VIEWPOINT    Register Guard Newspaper    Eugene OR

http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/opinion/17445195-47/story.csp

Lane County’s segregationist history too often forgotten

By Mark Harris    July 27, 2009

I love the space program as much as anyone. I have relatives who worked in
influential positions in the aerospace industry. I like the vision of
humanity implied by the Star Trek universe.

Amid the observance of the 40th anniversary of the first humans to walk on
the moon, I write to mark the unobserved 60th anniversary of the order to
vacate the Ferry Street Community in Eugene.

That order created what later was referred to in the press as the “Negro
Settlement.” It’s not that they settled there, because they came in wagon
trains or were refugees. They were American citizens who were denied access
to housing, by law and business custom, because of their race.

This fact was well known to the Lane County commissioners who signed the
order that bulldozed their housing and did not allow them to live within the
city limits of Eugene — hence, the “Negro Settlement” outside the city
limits.

To partially quote the county commissioners’ order, to be executed by the
Lane County Sheriff’s Office:

“Whereas certain persons are trespassing and remaining on said county-owned
land without authority from the county court or anyone competent to give
such authority,

“It is therefore hereby ordered, adjudged and decreed that all persons now
camped or otherwise living upon property owned by Lane County, Oregon, near
the Willamette River and near Ferry Street Bridge, and bounded on one side
by what is known as the Patterson Island Road and the Willamette River on
the other side, vacate said premises not later than 10 days from the date of
this notice, and if they fail to so vacate the sheriff is ordered to evict
said persons thereupon by all means necessary to do so.

“Dated at Eugene, Lane County, Oregon this 16th day of July 1949.”

One irony is that while one of the signatories to the order was named
Christian, among the structures bulldozed was a church, the Ferry Street
Chapel, now St. Mark’s CME Church.

In what probably was his only Eugene appearance, because there would be no
venue to host him or hotel to accommodate him, Paul Robeson — civil rights
activist, actor and singer — sang at Ferry Street Chapel. It would have been
precisely the situation the Apostle Paul would illuminate, agitate to
change, and thus be reviled for: No room in the (inn) town, so they found
shelter in a (manger) field in a flood plain, outside of town.

Segregation was put in place in Oregon to prevent race mixing (about 22,000
years too late), to prevent, for example, the birth of a person such as our
president, a product of a single-parent home and race mixing.

It was federal laws that made such discrimination illegal, just as the
federal government sent humans into space, and the resulting technological
spinoffs have changed our world.

As Oregonians played a part in the space program, so Oregonians play a part
in the ongoing expression of human freedom loosely called the civil rights
and human rights movement.

While there has been some overt progress in that area, the technology of
discrimination has vastly improved as well, with Oregonians playing a role
in improving discrimination, too.

In Lane Community College’s Rites of Passage program — where the families of
some of the African-­American youth, biracial youth and white youth
experienced discrimination directly — the youth report near-­constant and
somewhat inventive daily doses of discrimination in every facet of their
lives — family, school, employment, the foster care system and the juvenile
justice system.

While we can and do inform them of highly educated and accomplished male and
female African-American astronauts, we also tell them of the obstacles those
individuals had to overcome, and the skills the students will need to
internalize in order to achieve and contribute.

White Eugene residents of the 1950s era pitied mix-raced children: “I feel
so sorry for the children.” Today, we can tell them with a straight face
they can become president, an astronaut, a doctor, a lawyer — anything they
can imagine, or that have yet to be imagined.

The sky might no longer be the limit, but to get to the sky you might have
to live with and go through racism’s smog.

####

Mark Harris of Eugene is a founding instructor with Lane Community College’s
Rites of Passage program.