Racism in Oregon During the Second World War

(This is not a sign from the American South during the mid-20th Century.  It a picture in the window of an "all-white" restaurant in north Portland, circa 1943)

 

.  During the war, a lot of African-Americans settled in the Pacific Northwest and parts of California for the first time due to the heavy demand for labor in the defense plants and shipyards.  Here's some info on this from the Oregon History Project.           

"Signs similar to this one across the street from the Kenton Theater in north Portland popped up around the town during World War II. Acute labor shortages and a booming wartime industrial job market expanded Portland’s African American population from 2,565 in 1940 to 25,000 in 1944. The demand for labor, along with the wartime Fair Employment Practices Commission, buffered to some extent the racism that permeated Portland’s private industry and local unions. In her memoirs, Kathryn Hall Bogle, recalled her wartime experience working as one of the first black women to hold an office position in government at the U.S. Employment Office. There, Hall witnessed wartime racism as well as new opportunities offered blacks in the public sector. For instance, Hall recalled blacks being turned down for specialized jobs they had worked all their lives including stevedores, truck drivers, and laundry workers because of union laws that did not allow blacks to join their ranks. At the same time, blacks were hired freely for common labor and in all shipyards except the Albina Shipyard, which was privately owned. Training programs for shipyard skills and shipyard crafts were also offered to blacks and whites alike.

I mentioned the hostility towards Japanese-Americans and the decision by FDR to dislocate by force all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast. This program was not carried out Hawaii.  The recent Ken Burns/PBS Documentary "The War" explains this on the official website for the film:

At first, plans had been drawn up in Washington for the wholesale internment of all 158,000 people of Japanese descent living in Hawaii,too – nearly 40 percent of the total population of the islands. But wealthy landowners in Hawaii opposed the plan; they depended on Japanese field workers to tend their sugar and pineapple plantations. And the presence of a massive American military force on the islands made the danger of an internal threat seem less and less plausible. In the end, Japanese Americans in Hawaii would be allowed to go about their lives more or less as they always had.

 Odd that Americans fought against  racist regimes and yet so many people practiced racism at home.  Oddly, though, the war I believe helped lay the ground work for the end to Jim Crow in whatever of the four corners of the USA it cropped up in. Once men and women of color had fought and worked to kill fascism, it became more hypocritical to keep up the injustice of segregation at home.  Of course, as my friend Frank points out in the last blog, the racism continues but the institutional levers of white supremacy are pretty much routed in the legal codes.  Of course, it took a full two decades before the Civil Rights Bill was passed, but I would say much of the groundwork for that law was jump-started during the shared experiences of whites and black Americans at risk in battles and  working in some cases side by side during World War II.

 

The Oregon History Project article continues:

"Racism against blacks continued through the wartime era in the job market and in urban housing standards. Blacks did not sit by idly, however. Several agencies, including the Portland branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, the Office of Vocational Opportunity, and the Committee on Inter-Racial Principles and Practices, established and continued to operate already established institutions in Portland that sought to provide a voice for Portland’s black residents. Through today these groups continue to represent Portland’s black community through education, employment programs, legal representation, and the promotion of equality and civil rights.

Written by Trudy Flores, Sarah Griffith, © Oregon Historical Society, 2003.