Speaker 1: At around ten thirty pm on May nine, a crowd
Speaker 1: of more than a thousand people gathered in North Portland's
Speaker 1: Peninsula Park and marched downtown to the Justice Center, headquarters
Speaker 1: of the Portland Police Bureau. The direct inspirations for the
Speaker 1: march were the murders of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor.
Speaker 1: Many in attendance also had a strong desire to express
Speaker 1: solidarity with protesters in Minneapolis. That's what brought Chris Wise,
Speaker 1: volunteer protest medic out into the streets that first night.
Speaker 1: Initially I came out because as an African American, you know,
Speaker 1: it was that that straw that broke the camel's back
Speaker 1: on just like one death too many. We are murdered
Speaker 1: by police and other law enforcement agencies at a rate
Speaker 1: of three to one when compared to the average white American.
Speaker 1: And those numbers get a little funky because you know,
Speaker 1: obviously more white people die a year than black people
Speaker 1: in police related shootings, but there are also you know,
Speaker 1: six times as many white people, uh then black people. Tristan,
Speaker 1: another Black Portlander, didn't go out that night, but he
Speaker 1: watched everything that happened on the live streams honestly, like
Speaker 1: my my first um impression was that it probably wasn't
Speaker 1: going to be much, you know what I mean. I
Speaker 1: didn't expect it to blow up the way it did.
Speaker 1: I kind of felt like because I've I've seen it
Speaker 1: happen in the past, where you know, there's will be
Speaker 1: some kind of like something happening like nationwide or another
Speaker 1: city in Portland will kind of like you know, show
Speaker 1: up and solidarity for it, and it might become something,
Speaker 1: but usually it's kind of like a one off. So
Speaker 1: that's kind of what I was expecting, and so I
Speaker 1: was pretty surprised to see like how quickly grew and
Speaker 1: then also how like how the police were responding like
Speaker 1: and like a very tear guys kind of way. Mariah
Speaker 1: is a photojournalist and a lifestyle photographer. She was out
Speaker 1: at Peninsula Park for the very start of the march
Speaker 1: was the beginning to you know, something that not a
Speaker 1: lot of us knew we were going to get into,
Speaker 1: you know, but gosh, I remember being at Peninsula Park
Speaker 1: and it was really great to see everyone there, and like,
Speaker 1: it just reminds me of some I hate that it's
Speaker 1: like a routine thing for us because it's you know,
Speaker 1: why we're still fighting. And while we've been fighting so strong,
Speaker 1: but you know, when someone gets killed by you know,
Speaker 1: via police brutality, everyone meets up. You know, maybe we
Speaker 1: protest for a few days and like you know, quote unquote,
Speaker 1: we go back to like normal life. But you know,
Speaker 1: we already haven't been a normal life since it's been
Speaker 1: a pandemic this whole freaking year. But it was really
Speaker 1: beautiful to see all the people and all the signs
Speaker 1: and the speeches. The side walks bordering Peninsula Park were
Speaker 1: filled with different slogans and exhortations written in chalk. One
Speaker 1: of the most striking statements was make the moment count.
Speaker 1: As it turned out, the city of Portland took that
Speaker 1: to heart. The crowd at Peninsula Park marched nearly five
Speaker 1: miles to downtown Portland. There they merged with a crowd
Speaker 1: that had gathered around the Justice Center. The moment both
Speaker 1: groups met was powerful. You could taste the energy in
Speaker 1: the air. Portland's Black Lives Matter protests had actually started
Speaker 1: several days earlier before that mass gathering. On the twenty nine,
Speaker 1: a handful of activists of color had begun occupying the
Speaker 1: steps of the Justice Center immediately after George Floyd's murder.
Speaker 1: One of them was Tracy Molina, an Indigenous portland Er
Speaker 1: better known as Colsca. Well. I remember it wasn't not
Speaker 1: long after the George Floyd's story broke. A lot of
Speaker 1: us wanted to do something here, but I think most
Speaker 1: of the regular organizers kept saying wait, you know, let's wait,
Speaker 1: let's wait for this, let's wait for that. And then finally, um,
Speaker 1: then Danielle James, I think she's a pretty prominent black
Speaker 1: activist in this community and stood up against Patriot Prayer
Speaker 1: and Proud Boys and other white supremacist for years. Um,
Speaker 1: it was kind of the spark for that. You know.
Speaker 1: She was said like, we shouldn't wait in the night, supporter,
Speaker 1: I said, I don't think we should wait either. I
Speaker 1: think we should do something now. And so we ended
Speaker 1: up the seven ten thirty all meeting at I and
Speaker 1: starting to protest there, and then we moved. Um, sometime
Speaker 1: after midnight, we moved over to the Justice Center and
Speaker 1: slept on the steps there and planned to to occupy
Speaker 1: it as long as we could. And so we stayed
Speaker 1: there and then um, there was only maybe like four
Speaker 1: of us that slept on the steps, and then then
Speaker 1: next day, like at ice, we had about thirty or
Speaker 1: forty people. And then the next day after we stayed
Speaker 1: on those steps, I would say there was about forty
Speaker 1: or fifty people that showed up in the afternoon and
Speaker 1: they did a direct action or we blocked off the
Speaker 1: streets in front of the steps of the Justice Center,
Speaker 1: and I think they did it also did it die.
Speaker 1: And that night there was also impromptu direct action or
Speaker 1: some people, some young women sat on sat in the
Speaker 1: doorway of the Justice Center and they brought riot police
Speaker 1: out for that. And there was at that time there
Speaker 1: was only about twenty of us and only like six
Speaker 1: people participating in the sit in, but they still brought
Speaker 1: riot police out and they were violently removed. That made
Speaker 1: the news because one of the women, one of the
Speaker 1: women that was hit with a baton, was she was
Speaker 1: actually pregnant, a black woman. And the only way us
Speaker 1: the why I know that for sure is because after
Speaker 1: she was in the ambulance, she came I don't know
Speaker 1: if she went to the hospital, but after she was
Speaker 1: in the ambulans, she returned paperwork from the as proving
Speaker 1: that she was pregnant. And was, you know, showing some
Speaker 1: of the police officers that were still standing around. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that's how the first few days went. And then um,
Speaker 1: then we we all, um, we're going to have a
Speaker 1: rally at um and Insula Park. And then I agreed
Speaker 1: to do part of the opening. And when I was there,
Speaker 1: more and more people kept coming, and I was surprised
Speaker 1: at there are so many. I don't know, maybe a
Speaker 1: thousand people that there was a lot, there was a
Speaker 1: lot of people there. Was surprised, and it just kept
Speaker 1: getting bigger and bigger. The now merged crowd, which numbered
Speaker 1: at least a couple of thousand people, marched back to
Speaker 1: the Justice Center. For a few minutes, they stood outside
Speaker 1: chanting George Floyd's name. The police were nowhere to be seen.
Speaker 1: While most of the crowd stood out in the street,
Speaker 1: a hundred or so people gathered in front of the
Speaker 1: windows of the Justice Center. They started spray painting slogans
Speaker 1: on the glass. A few people peered on the doorway,
Speaker 1: someone lit a small fire out in front, and then
Speaker 1: quite suddenly, one person broke a window. The first broken
Speaker 1: windows set off a frenzy, and soon people were using
Speaker 1: their feet, rocks and any tools they could find to
Speaker 1: shatter every exposed piece of glass on the building. With
Speaker 1: the windows shattered, protesters ran into the Justice Center, ransacking
Speaker 1: police offices and setting small fires. The Portland police arrived
Speaker 1: a little bit later and began showering the crowd with
Speaker 1: tear gas and flash band grenades. Though no one knew
Speaker 1: it at the time, events had just been set into
Speaker 1: motion that would lead to more than a hundred consecutive
Speaker 1: nights of protests and tear gas. The Portland Uprising had begun.
Speaker 1: We should probably start by talking a bit about the
Speaker 1: definition of a riot. Legally, anything the cops declare a
Speaker 1: riot is a riot. May nine is generally referred to
Speaker 1: as riot night, because after the crowd was dispersed from
Speaker 1: the Justice Center, hundreds of people ran through the streets
Speaker 1: of Portland's luxury shopping district, smashing up high end chain
Speaker 1: stores while the police chased after them. It certainly felt
Speaker 1: like a riot, but a number of the folks that
Speaker 1: we interviewed actually disagreed. Alan Kessler, a Portland based lawyer,
Speaker 1: pushed back on that description. I guess I disagree that
Speaker 1: even the first night was a real riot. I mean,
Speaker 1: there were some shops goot burg Old, there were there
Speaker 1: were something stolen. Um, there was a fire in the
Speaker 1: in the j c. Um, I'm not sure that that.
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't know the intent there right, like
Speaker 1: looking at the fire, looking at the Piddale fire as
Speaker 1: I've seen, I don't know if anybody means to burn
Speaker 1: the buildings down or to y. Yeah, I don't know. Uh,
Speaker 1: it didn't seem like it. It doesn't seem it. If
Speaker 1: I were going to burn down the building, I would
Speaker 1: use a hell of a lot more accelerant. Then it
Speaker 1: seems like people are using. Um, I don't know. Uh.
Speaker 1: I was struck by even on even on that night,
Speaker 1: I was struck by uh, excuse me, Oh yeah, that
Speaker 1: was a lot more context. Yeah, please don't. Alvin Kessler says,
Speaker 1: I'm trusting you all the freedoms in your hands straight
Speaker 1: to Andy. So Um. Now, even that night, I was
Speaker 1: struck by Commissioner Fritz U, who I have absolutely no
Speaker 1: love for, h who seemed just horrified that that goocy
Speaker 1: got robbed. And uh, and I didn't seem able to
Speaker 1: put that in any kind of context. Um, Yeah, I don't,
Speaker 1: I don't. I didn't. I didn't see that as a riot.
Speaker 1: I didn't think that people, uh I wanted to just
Speaker 1: break shit. I think even then it was it was
Speaker 1: still it's political. It was it was a protest and
Speaker 1: it you know, I wouldn't recommend that people break stuff,
Speaker 1: for steal stuff, for set stuff on fire. But I
Speaker 1: understood the upset and I yeah, I just didn't see
Speaker 1: in those terms. Um, And it didn't seem like I
Speaker 1: don't remember that anybody died. I'm sure somebody was hurt,
Speaker 1: but I don't remember that it was particularly severe that evening,
Speaker 1: Like I don't. I don't remember that as a as
Speaker 1: a violent knight. I remember it as a night of
Speaker 1: property damage. Yeah. Yeah. And I wasn't making a legal distinct.
Speaker 1: There was more of a oral argument, like I think
Speaker 1: people put a moral import behind riot and it I
Speaker 1: don't think it was that. I don't think it was
Speaker 1: I don't think it was a breakdown in civilization. I
Speaker 1: think it was a uh, extremely heartfelt uh frustration with
Speaker 1: a system that wasn't meeting people's needs. Max Smith, a
Speaker 1: Portland based activist in live streamer, called it a riot
Speaker 1: light I called like a riot light that night. I
Speaker 1: think I was like that seems like a little kind
Speaker 1: of a riot light. They broke a couple of windows,
Speaker 1: you know, they sacked the Apple Store. Of course, you know,
Speaker 1: some opera students are gonna, you know, take that opportunity
Speaker 1: if something is, if things are getting broken, someone's gonna
Speaker 1: rob the Apple store. It's it's it's dumb because you're
Speaker 1: gonna get caught, but go ahead and rob the Apple store.
Speaker 1: But you know, that's kind of what I thought of it, Like,
Speaker 1: some stuff is gonna get broken. That's what happened. And
Speaker 1: I actually thought the police, you know, I thought that,
Speaker 1: and actually thought there was going to be some change,
Speaker 1: which we saw a couple of things, like they started
Speaker 1: talking about, you know, canceling the the d v R
Speaker 1: T and the cops in schools and things like that,
Speaker 1: and uh and since then, it's it's it's been fairly tame,
Speaker 1: and we haven't seen a whole lot of progress, So
Speaker 1: you know, I felt like it worked a little bit.
Speaker 1: The point Mac made is one that a lot of
Speaker 1: activists would agree with property damage, they argue is not
Speaker 1: nearly in the same moral realm as injuring or killing
Speaker 1: human beings. Mac himself was not out on the twenty nine,
Speaker 1: but he was most directly inspired to start protesting because
Speaker 1: of something else that happened that day, hundreds of miles
Speaker 1: south of Portland in San Jose, California, there was a
Speaker 1: guy named Derek Sanderland in San Jose and he was
Speaker 1: protesting for you know, he was prochasing against the murder
Speaker 1: of George Floyd in solidarity with Minneapolis. And I remember
Speaker 1: waking up and getting on my phone and kind of
Speaker 1: just flicking through things and seeing that this man had
Speaker 1: been shot in the testicles with a rubber bullet and
Speaker 1: it like required like emergency surgery and he's probably never
Speaker 1: gonna have kids. And I'm looking at this dude and
Speaker 1: he's like twenties seven years old. He's like a black dude.
Speaker 1: He's got dreads, he wears glasses, he's got a scrappys
Speaker 1: beard like mine, you know. And I'm looking at this
Speaker 1: guy like, man, that could have been me. And then
Speaker 1: I keep reading and he was like he was like
Speaker 1: a teacher. He taught the police about like not targeting
Speaker 1: people or whatever, like you know, de escalation tactics or whatever.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, you're telling me they shot a dude
Speaker 1: that that trains them, Like this has got to be
Speaker 1: one of the craziest things I've ever heard in my life.
Speaker 1: And he could have died from this, you know, And
Speaker 1: that just made me so mad. And I was like,
Speaker 1: it's even if it wasn't you know, it wasn't me.
Speaker 1: It could have been me if I would have been
Speaker 1: out there, And so I was just like, that's insane,
Speaker 1: Like this should not be a thing at all. This
Speaker 1: shouldn't this just this, this can't be realized. Many protesters
Speaker 1: and some journalists will argue that most of the riots
Speaker 1: Portlands saw this summer, we're not cases of protesters rioting,
Speaker 1: but we're instead cop riots. After all, if people breaking
Speaker 1: windows and looting an Apple store is a riot, then
Speaker 1: police driving into crowds, throwing grenades at random, and tear
Speaker 1: gassing hundreds of innocent motorists probably counts as a riot too, right.
Speaker 1: Riot we Broke was not the first night of Portland's
Speaker 1: bill and protests, but it was the night that set
Speaker 1: the tone for the next hundred plus nights. There was
Speaker 1: tear gas, flash bangs, armored cops fighting demonstrators who were
Speaker 1: armed with in the beginning, cardboard signs and water bottles.
Speaker 1: Now we're going to cover a lot of ground in
Speaker 1: this series, and it's probably best to kick this off
Speaker 1: by giving everyone an overview of what exactly happened in
Speaker 1: Portland from late May to the end of September, because
Speaker 1: the mainstream media only really showed a portion of this story.
Speaker 1: Late on the night of the twenty nine, the people
Speaker 1: of Portland learned that their mayor, Ted Wheeler had actually
Speaker 1: been out of town visiting his mother. His first response
Speaker 1: to what had happened was a tweet that started with
Speaker 1: the word enough in all caps and ended with a
Speaker 1: promise that he was coming back now. Now was also
Speaker 1: in all caps. City Commissioner joe Anne Hardesty, who was
Speaker 1: acting president in the mayor's absence, declared a state of
Speaker 1: emergency and enacted a curfew from eight pm until six am.
Speaker 1: At this point, Portland was in the same boat as
Speaker 1: many other American cities, including New York and Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: In Portland, the curfew was not enough to clamp down
Speaker 1: on unrest, quite the opposite. In fact, local activists like
Speaker 1: d s A member Olivia Cutty Smith were inspired. I
Speaker 1: just thought that it was it was not like anything
Speaker 1: I've ever seen before. I've never seen that level of
Speaker 1: um destruction happened at a protest before. It was exciting.
Speaker 1: I was like, we're going to start. This is huge,
Speaker 1: this is going to take off all across the country.
Speaker 1: It's happening in Portland, it's having in Minneapolis, like this
Speaker 1: is the start of a revolution, um, you know, and
Speaker 1: even knowing that that might not be true, that that's
Speaker 1: the feeling that I had. That night, several thousand people
Speaker 1: gathered again and one nearly ten thousand Portlanders marched to
Speaker 1: the Justice Center. We actually sort of organized the protest
Speaker 1: behind the scenes um and got like ten thousand people
Speaker 1: across the bridge, which was offer um. And yeah, it
Speaker 1: was just it felt like the sky was a limit
Speaker 1: at that point, like I can't believe there are ten
Speaker 1: thousand pep while showing up every single night like this
Speaker 1: does never happened before. We have to turn us into something.
Speaker 1: Both times, police eventually dispersed the crowd with indiscriminate tear
Speaker 1: gas use and liberal clubbing with truncheons. Thousands of protesters
Speaker 1: were gassed, but so were hundreds of motorists who happened
Speaker 1: to be out on city streets and dozens of houseless
Speaker 1: individuals who were gassed in their tents for no apparent reason.
Speaker 1: The curfew was rescinded in early June. It clearly hadn't helped. Next,
Speaker 1: the city began to build what would become a massive
Speaker 1: fence around the Justice Center. The protest movement started to
Speaker 1: splinter between a large group of demonstrators who engaged in
Speaker 1: daily marches that avoided police contact, and a smaller group
Speaker 1: who repeatedly confronted police at the fence. At first, Portland
Speaker 1: police would gas and grenade any group of people that
Speaker 1: drew close to the fence, along with any motorists who
Speaker 1: happened to be driving nearby. Protesters started calling at the
Speaker 1: sacred fence because law enforcements seemed to value it more
Speaker 1: than the physical well being of Portlander's The first fence
Speaker 1: war between protesters and police lasted host of June. There
Speaker 1: were occasional protests at other police buildings like the p
Speaker 1: p A, headquarters of the Portland Police Union, and the
Speaker 1: North Precinct. Smaller groups of activists also engaged in what
Speaker 1: was briefly a nationwide practice of pulling down statues of
Speaker 1: famous white supremacists. On June eighteenth, a small number of
Speaker 1: mostly teenage Portlanders toppled a statue of George Washington. This
Speaker 1: prompted President Trump to create an executive order to protect statues, monuments,
Speaker 1: and federal property. He sent dozens of federal agents to
Speaker 1: Portland to enforce this new order. The first time the
Speaker 1: Feds made a large appearance was on July four. That
Speaker 1: night was a turning point for a number of reasons,
Speaker 1: after weeks of declining numbers. More than a thousand Portlanders
Speaker 1: showed up outside the Justice Center to shoot commercial grade
Speaker 1: fireworks at its windows. They fired a few with the
Speaker 1: adjacent Federal courthouse as well. The police l rad a
Speaker 1: car mounted loudspeaker started warning everyone not to shoot the
Speaker 1: court house, so, of course, the entire crowd swarmed around
Speaker 1: the building and continued shooting it with fireworks. Suddenly, wooden
Speaker 1: hatches opened up on the front of the fortress like building,
Speaker 1: and the Federal Allegiance inside began tossing out tear gas
Speaker 1: grenades and shooting impact munitions into the crowd. For a
Speaker 1: few minutes, the scene resembled a cross between an acid
Speaker 1: trip in a medieval siege, with protesters bombarding the courthouse
Speaker 1: with fireworks while the Feds inside pumped out gas and
Speaker 1: riot munitions, Yeah, everybody. Eventually the fight spilled out into
Speaker 1: the street, and for several hours, Portland police and Department
Speaker 1: of Homeland Security agents engaged in a running battle with
Speaker 1: hundreds of protesters. Fireworks provided the activists with their first
Speaker 1: weapon that could disrupt a police riot line, while law
Speaker 1: enforcement responded by escalating physical violence even further. I was
Speaker 1: walking up from the j C Up towards the park blocks,
Speaker 1: and there was a person who was essentially having an
Speaker 1: asthma attack and a cloud of tear gas, and they
Speaker 1: had one buddy with them, and it was just such
Speaker 1: an impossible project for that one buddy to sort of
Speaker 1: haul them out of tear gas while they're having an
Speaker 1: asthma attack and like a panic attack and really having
Speaker 1: her off time. Everything got more serious after the fourth
Speaker 1: the federal agents started responding to protests downtown more often
Speaker 1: than the Portland Police Bureau. A week later, federal agents
Speaker 1: almost killed a protester named Donovan Labella by shooting him
Speaker 1: in the forehead with a less lethal round. Slowly, the
Speaker 1: mainstream media began to realize that something strange and terrifying
Speaker 1: was happening in Portland. The national interest was finally peaked
Speaker 1: a few days later when camo clad Feds in a
Speaker 1: rental band started kidnapping people off the streets. In early July,
Speaker 1: the fourth accepted most nightly protests only numbered a few
Speaker 1: dozen to a hundred or so protesters, but national media,
Speaker 1: in the specter of federal snatch fans panicked Portland's liberal majority.
Speaker 1: By mid late July, thousands upon thousands of protesters were
Speaker 1: showing up in the street every night. The time between
Speaker 1: July thirty, dubbed the Fed War, is the stuff most
Speaker 1: Americans saw from Portland in the news. Moms and dad's, veterans, doctors, chefs,
Speaker 1: and students gathering in front of the Federal courthouse, chanting demands,
Speaker 1: banging on doors, setting fires, ripping off plywood covering the windows,
Speaker 1: and repeatedly tearing down that massive fence. Whenever the federal
Speaker 1: agents came out, a shield wall of protesters would form,
Speaker 1: deflecting metal tear gas canisters and flash bangs up into
Speaker 1: the air. People armed with leafblowers directed gas back at
Speaker 1: the Feds. In response, the Feds started using experimental new weapons,
Speaker 1: including a pesticide sprayer jerry rigged di spew poison gas.
Speaker 1: Seeing the police attack people, especially the FEDS when the
Speaker 1: Feds came, when they came started attacking people like like
Speaker 1: in the smoke. After I got like a gas mask
Speaker 1: and started going into the smoke, you know, and seeing
Speaker 1: what was going on in there, I was pretty I
Speaker 1: was pretty uh disturbed by seeing the way that they
Speaker 1: were like beating people under the under the cover of
Speaker 1: tear gas. That was, um, that was a prize for me.
Speaker 1: I'd heard people saying, I've got I ask it in there,
Speaker 1: but I didn't know it was going down like that.
Speaker 1: As July came and went, so did the visible federal
Speaker 1: presence downtown. Most of the more liberal types packed it up,
Speaker 1: calling the protests a success. But while the days of
Speaker 1: walls of camouflaged Fed's head temporarily ended despite reports of
Speaker 1: their withdrawal, federal presence in Portland lingered on for weeks.
Speaker 1: Dedicated activists were not fooled by the faux withdrawal. They
Speaker 1: knew the work was far from over. Throughout August, protesters
Speaker 1: gathered in front of police precincts, city buildings in Portland's
Speaker 1: ice facility. Sometimes they engaged in property damage, but more
Speaker 1: often they just stood in the street yelling at the
Speaker 1: cops until they were inevitably charged by riot lines. It
Speaker 1: was in August that Portland first saw right wing counter protests,
Speaker 1: generally framed as back the Blue or MAGA gatherings. Sometimes
Speaker 1: these escalated into street brawls between Proud Boys and left
Speaker 1: wing activists. On several occasions, Proud Boys and other right
Speaker 1: wing vigilantes through home made explosives and shot paintball guns
Speaker 1: into crowds. Five rounds were even fired into the air
Speaker 1: and into crowds. The escalation continued until a Trump caravan
Speaker 1: of vehicles waving flags drove through Portland in late August.
Speaker 1: Several Trump supporters fired paintball guns and mace into the
Speaker 1: crowds as they drove by. The whole awful day ended
Speaker 1: with a member of the right wing street gang Patriot Prayer,
Speaker 1: being shot and killed by a white BLM activist after
Speaker 1: charging him with a can of mace. Throughout all this
Speaker 1: Portland's BLM marches occurred every single night, right up until
Speaker 1: late September, when a series of devastating wildfires overwhelmed Oregon
Speaker 1: and blanketed the city of Portland in a thick haze
Speaker 1: of poison. The nightly marches were halted, and the various
Speaker 1: mutual aid organizations that had started up to service the
Speaker 1: protests turned their efforts to meeting the needs of evacuees. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: right wing activists blamed the fires on Antifa and spent
Speaker 1: several days setting up a legal arm checkpoints and threatening
Speaker 1: people with rifles. When the rains came and the air cleared,
Speaker 1: the protests started up again. There were no longer nightly affairs,
Speaker 1: but they've remained regular occurrences ever since. And all of
Speaker 1: this begs the question why Portland all fifty U s
Speaker 1: States hosted Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of
Speaker 1: Many cities saw mass demonstrations, and while of b l
Speaker 1: M protests were considered peaceful, numerous cities saw rioting, exchanges
Speaker 1: of gunfire, and even had buildings burnt down. But no
Speaker 1: city in the United States had as many continuous nights
Speaker 1: of protests as Portland. No city saw thousands of citizens
Speaker 1: lay a week's long siege of a federal courthouse. No
Speaker 1: city experienced a thousand persons street fight between right and
Speaker 1: left wing demonstrators. Perhaps most importantly, no city earned the
Speaker 1: ire of President Donald Trump in the same way as Portland.
Speaker 1: It seems bizarre that this all would happen in Portland,
Speaker 1: a small city off about six hundred and fifty three
Speaker 1: thousand people. How did it grow to become one of
Speaker 1: the most active front lines in a national battle for
Speaker 1: black lives and against white supremacy. It actually makes a
Speaker 1: lot of sense once you scratch beneath surface a bit.
Speaker 1: Here's Tristan again. Organ was kind of um, I found
Speaker 1: it as like something of like a white utopia, you know,
Speaker 1: like a place for the the white man to really
Speaker 1: like find his destiny right and like conquer this you know,
Speaker 1: this continent. And I think that's just kind of like
Speaker 1: it's just like baked into the culture here where even
Speaker 1: like even like the love of the outdoors isn't like
Speaker 1: isn't like a love of um like keep like keeping
Speaker 1: the environment like healthy and like bounce. It's just like
Speaker 1: a very like commodified like we deserve this, you know,
Speaker 1: we deserve to live in this beautiful place, and we're
Speaker 1: the only ones who know how to take care of it.
Speaker 1: And obviously that's like mellowed out a little bit over
Speaker 1: the you know, decades, but I think that's still basically
Speaker 1: like what what like um, it's like the undercurrent, you know,
Speaker 1: that's like behind most of what cos in Oregon. You
Speaker 1: can learn a lot of what you need to know
Speaker 1: about Oregon's history of racism by studying one of the
Speaker 1: state's founders, Peter Hardman Burnett. As a young man in Tennessee,
Speaker 1: he murdered a black person with a booby trap as
Speaker 1: revenge for petty theft. In eighteen forty three, he helped
Speaker 1: organize the first great wagon train of white people that
Speaker 1: headed to the Oregon Territory. He was elected to the
Speaker 1: Provisional Legislature and served as the territory's first Supreme Court justice.
Speaker 1: In eighteen forty four, he worked to pass what became
Speaker 1: known as Burnett's Lash Law. This stated that all black
Speaker 1: people were required to leave Oregon under penalty of being
Speaker 1: whipped in public not less than twenty or more than
Speaker 1: thirty nine stripes. This punishment was to be repeated every
Speaker 1: six months until they moved. The law did include a
Speaker 1: grace period three years for black women and two years
Speaker 1: for black men. Burnett also pushed to ban Chinese immigration
Speaker 1: into Oregon. While there are no documented instances of the
Speaker 1: Lash laws being used, it set a clear tone for
Speaker 1: the state Burnet's Lash law reflected the values of the
Speaker 1: first white people who moved to Oregon. They were abolitionists
Speaker 1: in that they hated slavery, but they only hated slavery
Speaker 1: because they were revolted by the thought of living near
Speaker 1: black people. In eighteen forty eight, the Oregon Territorial government
Speaker 1: passed a law that banned any quote, negro or mulatto
Speaker 1: from living in Oregon. In eighteen fifty, the Oregon Donation
Speaker 1: Land Act gave whites and half breed Indians their quote,
Speaker 1: six hundred and fifty acres of land from the government.
Speaker 1: All other people of color were banned from the land grants.
Speaker 1: Oregon was finally made a state in February eighteen fifty nine.
Speaker 1: Under its constitution, quote, no free negro or mulatto not
Speaker 1: residing in this state at the time of the adoption
Speaker 1: of this Constitution shall ever come reside or be within
Speaker 1: this state, or hold any real estate, or make any contract,
Speaker 1: or maintain any suit therein. And the Legislative Assembly shall
Speaker 1: prove by penal laws for the removal by public officers
Speaker 1: of all such free negroes and mulatto's, and for their
Speaker 1: effectual exclusion from the state and for the punishment of
Speaker 1: persons who shall bring them into the state or employer
Speaker 1: harbor them there in. Oregon remains the only state in
Speaker 1: the Union that ever banned black people from living there.
Speaker 1: Now things have gotten better since eighteen fifty nine, but
Speaker 1: better is a low bar. In Portland remains the whitest
Speaker 1: metropolitan area in the United States. Seventent of the population
Speaker 1: is white, less than six percent is black. Today, Portland's
Speaker 1: owns the distinction as one of the most gentrified cities
Speaker 1: in the United States. Oregon continues to report some of
Speaker 1: the worst graduation rates for black students in the nation,
Speaker 1: and the wealth gap between white and black Oregonians over
Speaker 1: the last fifty years has widened, not shrunk. And moved
Speaker 1: to Portland like like five and a half six years ago,
Speaker 1: I think, and from where I definitely I did from
Speaker 1: northern California, got a Bay area, um, and I didn't
Speaker 1: really I didn't have a idea of what the city
Speaker 1: was per se, Like I've never seen an episode of
Speaker 1: Portland here, for instance. I just kind of moved up
Speaker 1: here would be closed with a family and and yeah,
Speaker 1: and when I when I kind of first got here,
Speaker 1: it was like, you know, that hang out with a
Speaker 1: bunch of like hippies, a bunch of people who love
Speaker 1: trees and to ride bikes and go hiking, and it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: they love the environment and they love progressive you know politics,
Speaker 1: and you know, and everything's just chill within. Like the
Speaker 1: longer I stayed here, the facade started to like fall away,
Speaker 1: and and it's I mean, like I've been here for
Speaker 1: you know, almost six years now, and I still I
Speaker 1: don't quite know what to make of it still, you know,
Speaker 1: but like recently, um like if the passage of or
Speaker 1: like with the most recent election, you know, like so
Speaker 1: the local measures that passed and didn't pass. It's like
Speaker 1: like Oregon loves to have a black friend. That's what
Speaker 1: they like. They like to have somebody they can point
Speaker 1: to and be like, look, I'm not racist, but they don't.
Speaker 1: They're not interested in actually like challenging the like white
Speaker 1: supremacists like power structures that actually like benefit them and
Speaker 1: and if you like, if you agitate them on that,
Speaker 1: they just you know. That's that's when like the Pacific
Speaker 1: Northwest like passive aggressiveness like kicks in and they just
Speaker 1: like kind of like try to ignore you. But secually
Speaker 1: they're totally fucking piste off that you dare to like
Speaker 1: insinuate their racist um. But yeah, that's like it's a
Speaker 1: really complicated thing and I still quite haven't figured out
Speaker 1: like what makes white people take here, but it's, you know,
Speaker 1: it's messy. Another activist we interviewed, Courtney, is an indigenous
Speaker 1: Hawaiian person who moved to Oregon when she was seventeen.
Speaker 1: She recalls being stunned by how white her school was.
Speaker 1: I like ended up going to Oregon City High School,
Speaker 1: which was like insane. I was the only non Hispanic
Speaker 1: person that was at that school. Um, and nobody talked
Speaker 1: to me for a really long time, and I just
Speaker 1: was kind of like it was a culture shock because
Speaker 1: there were so many white people that I had never
Speaker 1: seen this many white people in my entire life because
Speaker 1: everyone in Hawaii is like mixed races, majority of them
Speaker 1: are Asian or Polynesian. So um, I definitely was nobody
Speaker 1: really talked to me for a while, and I kind
Speaker 1: of like found my little niche of people to hang
Speaker 1: out with. Um. But yeah, like just even live in
Speaker 1: that area, I would get a lot of weird looks
Speaker 1: and um, yeah, just not the most friendly people to
Speaker 1: be around. Um. Yeah, that's basically it's just a culture
Speaker 1: shock to just see how white organ is. I just
Speaker 1: I didn't expect it at all. I didn't and I
Speaker 1: was like, I knew that they were going to be
Speaker 1: like Hispanic people, but I just didn't realize that. Um.
Speaker 1: I thought maybe I would see more after like black people,
Speaker 1: and especially living in a city, you know, in sport
Speaker 1: when you're from what you're like, Portland is just like
Speaker 1: a major city in the United States, and then coming
Speaker 1: here and not really seeing the mix of cultures was
Speaker 1: just kind of shocking. Tristan described the races of in
Speaker 1: Portland as unique in a subtle way. It's just it's
Speaker 1: very it's very covert, or you know, it tries to
Speaker 1: be very covert. Um and it's very like like well,
Speaker 1: part part of what it is is that for a
Speaker 1: very long time now they're barely when any people of
Speaker 1: co here at all. Like, you know, it's one of
Speaker 1: the widest states in the country. That's why it's major
Speaker 1: city in the country, and so like to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: people are they just don't actually know what like like
Speaker 1: what like a microaggression is or what that would be like,
Speaker 1: you know, I had to experience um, like just like
Speaker 1: a year, year and a half ago, maybe I was
Speaker 1: out with this group um these like forest offender type
Speaker 1: people and every year they go out post this big
Speaker 1: camp out and you know, like go out into the
Speaker 1: woods and do like surveys and stuff like that, try
Speaker 1: to collect data they can use to fight timber companies
Speaker 1: and ship and like someone us drop the N word
Speaker 1: like just five ft from me. There's like in casual conversation,
Speaker 1: and then I had to like address the camp like
Speaker 1: at breakfast. I was like, okay, so just just don't
Speaker 1: don't say that word. Like there's no like like like
Speaker 1: even if you're just telling a story that there's no
Speaker 1: appropriate context for a white person to say that. And
Speaker 1: and that's one of the reasons why I don't go
Speaker 1: to those fucking campouts anymore. But like it's like that,
Speaker 1: it's like they just don't they haven't been around black
Speaker 1: people or people of color in general, and they just
Speaker 1: don't know what to do. And of course the racism
Speaker 1: that pervades Portland's is present in the Portland Police Bureau.
Speaker 1: Despite black people making up again less than six percent
Speaker 1: of the population, Portland Police use force on black people
Speaker 1: more often than people of any other race. Portland police
Speaker 1: are five to fourteen times more likely to shoot impact
Speaker 1: munitions at and to forcibly restrain black residents. At one
Speaker 1: point in the late sixties, black Portlanders accounted for nearly
Speaker 1: half of p p b's arrests. Portland's black community has
Speaker 1: been fighting against this kind of racist violence for decades.
Speaker 1: Here's Max Smith again. For me, the battle with the
Speaker 1: police began, you know, in the hip hop field. Um.
Speaker 1: There was an event here in Portland that happened maybe
Speaker 1: six or seven years ago. UM. That happened at a
Speaker 1: venue called the Blue Monk, and it was a pretty
Speaker 1: big deal. And I was there and I had friends
Speaker 1: who were performing at the show, and the police essentially
Speaker 1: came under the guise of a capacity of violation and
Speaker 1: brought like a seven cars and twenty something officers and
Speaker 1: shut the whole street of Belmont down And and that
Speaker 1: bar eventually actually ended up a closing shortly after that. Um.
Speaker 1: And it was a huge deal. They made a huge
Speaker 1: deal about a small thing, and it went like into
Speaker 1: like national news. And even prior to that, we had
Speaker 1: been really combating the efforts of the police to kind
Speaker 1: of shut down or stifle hip hop events in the city.
Speaker 1: Every time we wanted to have a hip hop event,
Speaker 1: it became like, you know, like a world war um,
Speaker 1: to the point that it ended up actually being a
Speaker 1: protest about the hip hop community here. And so that
Speaker 1: was a fight that we had as far as hip
Speaker 1: hop music and clubs, as far as hip hop events,
Speaker 1: as far as live music. Um. They really just used
Speaker 1: the city's resources that the police, the fire marshals, and
Speaker 1: the o l c C to really like shut down
Speaker 1: hip hop and and really any black lead events. Lawyer
Speaker 1: Allan Kessler has done a lot of digging into the
Speaker 1: early history of the Portland police. His research has revealed
Speaker 1: a century long history of Portland police involvement with hate groups,
Speaker 1: most particularly the Ku Klux Klan. I think it was
Speaker 1: lost Memorial Day. I spent the whole weekend in the
Speaker 1: Oregonian Archives basic living through World War two. It wasn't
Speaker 1: fun uh and it's outrageous, like the clan was on
Speaker 1: there was a front page column talked to a klansman
Speaker 1: every day for like a week, uh, and then every
Speaker 1: other day they had the clan on the front page. Anyway,
Speaker 1: but that you know that was like, um, it was yeah,
Speaker 1: it was incredible. Um. During the war, Uh, basically everybody,
Speaker 1: every adult white dude had a little star badge. Uh.
Speaker 1: They the police would basically deputize anybody or people just
Speaker 1: don't be a badge is made, so everybody in town
Speaker 1: had a badge. There were lots of articles in that
Speaker 1: time frame about um, fake police officer pulls over so
Speaker 1: and so and they sue. In a Portland Telegram article
Speaker 1: reported that the Portland Police Bureau was quote full to
Speaker 1: the brink with klansmen. The police bureau actually deputized a
Speaker 1: hundred clansmen handpicked by the local Grand Dragon and designated
Speaker 1: them Portland Police Vigilantes. This was before the p p
Speaker 1: A existed, but the tradition lives on. In two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: Portland police officer Mark Krueger was suspended for erecting a
Speaker 1: memorial to five deceased Nazi soldiers on city property. The
Speaker 1: p p A successfully sued for him to be reinstated
Speaker 1: and given an apology. When he quit in early he
Speaker 1: was the highest paid police officer on the force. I
Speaker 1: asked Maria, a lifelong Portland resident, what her earliest memory
Speaker 1: if the police was. Here's what she told me. I
Speaker 1: would say it was when I was a child. Honestly, Um,
Speaker 1: I've had some some family stuff and a family member
Speaker 1: have to go to way to to prison. So I
Speaker 1: remember some like vaguely stuff like remember then as far
Speaker 1: as like police brutality wise. Um, the very first like
Speaker 1: murder I remember was Kindred James. Um, that will happen
Speaker 1: like a mile from my house. And I want to
Speaker 1: say I was like ten at the time. Kindred James
Speaker 1: was a twenty one year old black mother of two.
Speaker 1: She was killed under suspicious circumstances during a traffic stop.
Speaker 1: Her killer, officer, Scott McCallister, fired a single shot when
Speaker 1: James attempted to drive away from the traffic stop after
Speaker 1: the motion of the vehicle caused him to fall. A
Speaker 1: number of the statements he made in court were inconsistent
Speaker 1: with physical evidence required from the shooting, and we don't
Speaker 1: really know exactly what happened, Among other things, The police
Speaker 1: argued in court that Portland police were trained to quote
Speaker 1: shoot as they fall aslee as the police is how
Speaker 1: I grew up. My dad is a huge like Tupac fan,
Speaker 1: so like I would grow up on hearing tupac lyrics
Speaker 1: all the time. Will screw the police and everything. So yeah,
Speaker 1: no screw Yeah. Now that's how I like grew up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: um is to like not interact with them. Yeah, I've
Speaker 1: I've grown up. You know how A lot of us,
Speaker 1: you know, people who are black, feel like, you know,
Speaker 1: when we're being followed, profiled all that. I mean, I
Speaker 1: got profiled to dance in a store like it's it's
Speaker 1: still happened. That's been going on as the kid. I
Speaker 1: don't know if I don't know when it will stop,
Speaker 1: that you know, goes on. Officer McCallister was acquitted in
Speaker 1: federal court. He got to keep his job, but even
Speaker 1: if he had been fired for the shooting, the firing
Speaker 1: might not have stuck. Nationwide, of police officers fired from
Speaker 1: his conduct are reinstated because of union mandated appeals. Over
Speaker 1: the years. This has included an officer who challenged a
Speaker 1: handcuffed man to a fist fight for his freedom, and
Speaker 1: a copper sexually assaulted a young woman in his patrol car.
Speaker 1: In many cities, the number of police reinstated by union
Speaker 1: appeals is much higher than sevent of fired San Antonio
Speaker 1: officers are reinstated because of union appeals. The number is
Speaker 1: sixty for Philly cops and fifty from Minneapolis cops. This
Speaker 1: is part of why the people of Minneapolis burnt the
Speaker 1: Third Precinct to the ground after George Floyd's murder. They
Speaker 1: knew from experience that it was extremely likely Derek Chauvin,
Speaker 1: Floyd's killer, would not just avoid prison, but would soon
Speaker 1: be back on the street with a badge. In fact,
Speaker 1: as soon as Derek Schaubin and the other officers responsible
Speaker 1: for George Floyd's death were fired, police union head Bob
Speaker 1: Kroll started fighting to have them reinstated. He was concerned
Speaker 1: that they had been quote terminated without due process. Kroll
Speaker 1: was oddly unconcerned that the same thing was true of
Speaker 1: Mr Floyd. The fact that police officers are extremely difficult
Speaker 1: to fire, even when they commit murder or rape on
Speaker 1: the job is a national problem. But it is a
Speaker 1: national problem that traces back to a single place where
Speaker 1: else the city of Portland, Oregon, and more specifically to
Speaker 1: the Portland Police Association. The Portland Police Association or p
Speaker 1: p A, is Portland's police union. In a way, it's
Speaker 1: the police union because the p p A is actually
Speaker 1: the oldest functioning police union in the United States. Police
Speaker 1: had attempted to unionize several times before the p PA
Speaker 1: was established in nineteen forty two, but Portland was the
Speaker 1: first city to get it right, and the p p
Speaker 1: A has served as a model for the rest of
Speaker 1: the nation's law enforcement ever since. Every other police union
Speaker 1: in the United States is based off of the Portland
Speaker 1: Police Association, and one of the many trends that pp
Speaker 1: A set was ensuing to reinstate fired officers. This story
Speaker 1: starts on the night of March twelfth, nineteen one, when
Speaker 1: to Portland police officers from the North Precinct dumped four
Speaker 1: dead possums in the doorway of the Burger Barn, one
Speaker 1: of Portland's few black owned businesses. The use of the
Speaker 1: word possum as a derogatory term for black Americans dates
Speaker 1: back as far as eighteen thirty. The owner of the
Speaker 1: Burger Barn, George Powell, called the police commissioner to report
Speaker 1: the incident and claimed that it was only the latest
Speaker 1: example of police harassment his business had faced. An internal
Speaker 1: investigation was opened, and the officers responsible, Ward and Galloway,
Speaker 1: admitted their guilt immediately Their identity was initially kept hidden
Speaker 1: thanks to a clause in the pp A contract with
Speaker 1: the city that protected officers from having their names disclosed
Speaker 1: during disciplinary proceedings. This is another one of the innovations
Speaker 1: that the Portland Police Association brought to police departments nationwide.
Speaker 1: By the way, the possum incident happened at an awkward
Speaker 1: time for the Portland Police. Several officers had just been
Speaker 1: fired and convicted of faking evidence and using illegal drugs
Speaker 1: on the job. Nearly a hundred criminal cases had to
Speaker 1: be thrown out because of falsified evidence. Public opinion of
Speaker 1: the police bureau was low, and when Portland started marching
Speaker 1: and demonstrating to demand that officers Ward and Galloway be fired,
Speaker 1: the police Commissioner was only too happy to oblige them.
Speaker 1: Enter Stan Peters, the most powerful union president Portland has
Speaker 1: ever had. Peters took to every local news show in town.
Speaker 1: He circulated petitions. He even organized a massed protest march
Speaker 1: made up of Portland po last officers and their families.
Speaker 1: He forced the city government into arbitration, which ended with
Speaker 1: both officers being rehired and given back pay. There's actually
Speaker 1: a book about the Portland Police Association, Pickets, pistols and Politics.
Speaker 1: Alan Kessler informed us of its existence. Here's what it
Speaker 1: says about the court case that resolved the Possum incident. Quote,
Speaker 1: the City of Portland versus Ward and Galloway case is
Speaker 1: still the leading police discipline case in the United States,
Speaker 1: and in labor law circles is the arbitration decision referred
Speaker 1: to the most often. It's legal nomenclature is simply City
Speaker 1: of Portland. And so in the end, it really isn't
Speaker 1: that odd that the City of Portland wound up as
Speaker 1: ground zero for a battle against white supremacy and police
Speaker 1: brutality and a battle for black lives. It's actually been
Speaker 1: that for a very very long time. As much as
Speaker 1: people have just kind of started to contextualize how Antifa
Speaker 1: has been fighting against these studs here for years. You know,
Speaker 1: it actually isn't just the last couple of years where
Speaker 1: it's been in the news. It has been going off
Speaker 1: for decades. In Portland. There's always been a level of
Speaker 1: especially in southeast of Portland, has always been like even
Speaker 1: like in the eighties, has been like, you know, these
Speaker 1: white skinhead groups and the Sharps has always kind of
Speaker 1: been like a race war between the white folks in Portland,
Speaker 1: especially in the southeast. Over the course of the summer
Speaker 1: of Portland's wounds were exposed to the world after George
Speaker 1: Floyd's gruesome murder accelerated long brewing unrest across the country
Speaker 1: and even the globe. The Northwest's liberal bastion was forced
Speaker 1: to reckon with its own deeply anti black traditions while
Speaker 1: also becoming an unlikely epicenter in a movement for black
Speaker 1: lives that had taken the world by storm. Thousands took
Speaker 1: to the streets and a battle that would be fought
Speaker 1: against a corrupt police force, Trump's federal agents, right wing vigilantes,
Speaker 1: and even at times between protesters themselves. Through it all,
Speaker 1: people banded together to support each other and build the
Speaker 1: infrastructure that would propel the city to a hundred plus
Speaker 1: days of protests that even the strongest tear gas couldn't end.
Speaker 1: In the next episode, we will delve into how a
Speaker 1: disorganized crowd of angry Portlander's turned themselves into a movement
Speaker 1: that could stand up to the worst violence the Trump
Speaker 1: administration could throw at it. Uh where the grandpops who
Speaker 1: couldn't fathom the obamacist, I don't hate America just to me,
Speaker 1: And she keeps the promises teens looking like the sixties.
Speaker 1: It's crazy, a nationwide deja fo. What my people post
Speaker 1: to do go to schools named after the clan founder
Speaker 1: we're around town is I don't see why we're frowning.
Speaker 1: Native American students want to learn about when o'parah sarah.
Speaker 1: How is that fair? Bro? Some heroes unsung in some
Speaker 1: monster's get monuments built for them. But it ain't be
Speaker 1: all a little bit of monster. We crook it. Man,
Speaker 1: Your heroes are worthless and man can show private only
Speaker 1: God gives purpose. You crook it