Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. The Vanport flood took place on May thirtieth,
Speaker 1: nineteen forty eight, or seventy eight years ago today, so
Speaker 1: we have chosen our episode on it as Today's Saturday Classic.
Speaker 2: This episode originally came out February third, twenty sixteen, Welcome
Speaker 2: to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
Speaker 2: and Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fryne.
Speaker 2: Today's podcast is yet another listener request, but it's one
Speaker 2: that was already on my to do list, so I
Speaker 2: haven't made a note of who I'll ask for it.
Speaker 2: On May thirtieth of nineteen forty eight, a flood destroyed Vanport, Oregon.
Speaker 2: Fifteen people were killed, which, in light of some of
Speaker 2: the other disasters we've been talking about on the show lately,
Speaker 2: probably seems like a relatively small number, but the proper
Speaker 2: damage involved was colossal. And what really makes the story
Speaker 2: more than a historical footnote is how it is tied
Speaker 2: into the racial makeup of both Portland and Oregon as
Speaker 2: a whole, and a lot of the stresses and difficulties
Speaker 2: that went on with racism and race relations both before
Speaker 2: and after the flood.
Speaker 1: The historical context for the Vanport flood goes back to
Speaker 1: before Oregon became a state in eighteen fifty nine. The
Speaker 1: issue of slavery within Oregon wasn't a totally simple one.
Speaker 1: While it ultimately joined the Union as a free state,
Speaker 1: there were people living there who were in favor of slavery.
Speaker 1: This is one of several reasons why the people of
Speaker 1: Oregon voted against holding a constitutional convention three separate times
Speaker 1: before a vote finally succeeded. Among other things, putting off
Speaker 1: a constitutional convention meant putting off a final decision on slavery.
Speaker 2: Oregon did actually out lost slavery while it was still
Speaker 2: a territory. In eighteen forty three, its residents voted to
Speaker 2: incorporate language from the Northwest Ordnance into its own laws.
Speaker 2: That language was quote, there shall be neither slavery nor
Speaker 2: involuntary servitude in the said territory otherwise than in the
Speaker 2: punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. However,
Speaker 2: a little less than a year later, the Provisional Government's
Speaker 2: Legislative Council changed that eighteen forty three law with an
Speaker 2: amendment that had the rather odd effect of simultaneously outlying
Speaker 2: slavery and allowing it for a short period of time.
Speaker 2: Slaveholders were given a deadline to remove their slaves from Oregon,
Speaker 2: and if they refused, the slaves would be freed. The
Speaker 2: amendment went on to specify that those previously enslaved persons
Speaker 2: also needed to leave Oregon. Free black males had two
Speaker 2: years to do so, and free black females had three years.
Speaker 2: The punishment for refusing to leave after being freed was lashing.
Speaker 2: This law was nicknamed Peter Burnett's Lash Law, after the
Speaker 2: head of the legislative council that passed it. A little
Speaker 2: later in the year, the punishment was shifted from being
Speaker 2: lashing to force labor, and the law itself was repealed
Speaker 2: in eighteen forty five before its punishment clause went into
Speaker 2: effect after Jesse Applegate replaced Peter Burnett on the council. Then,
Speaker 2: on September twenty first, eighteen forty nine, the territorial legislature
Speaker 2: enacted another racial exclusion law in Oregon, which remained on
Speaker 2: the books until eighteen fifty four. This law stated that
Speaker 2: in Oregon, quote, it shall not be lawful for any
Speaker 2: Negro or mulatto to enter into or reside. When Oregon
Speaker 2: finally did assemble a constitutional convention on the road to
Speaker 2: becoming a state in eighteen fifty seven, two proposals were
Speaker 2: placed before its delegates. One would have legalized slavery. The
Speaker 2: other was an exclusion clause similar to the one enacted
Speaker 2: in eighteen forty nine.
Speaker 1: Both of these passed by a wide margin. Oregon ultimately
Speaker 1: did not want to be a slave state, but it
Speaker 1: also did not want African Americans living there.
Speaker 2: As a result. Article one, section thirty five of the
Speaker 2: Constitution of the State of Oregon read quote, no free
Speaker 2: negro or mulatto not residing in this State at the
Speaker 2: time of the adoption of this Constitution shall come reside
Speaker 2: or be within the state, or hold any real estate,
Speaker 2: or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein. And
Speaker 2: the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws for the
Speaker 2: removal by public officers of all such Negroes and mulattos,
Speaker 2: for their effectual exclusion from the state, and for the
Speaker 2: punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state
Speaker 2: or employ or harbor them. These articles made Oregon's constitution
Speaker 2: unique among the free states. It was the only one
Speaker 2: whose constitution was written to try to exclude black people.
Speaker 2: The legislature did not, in the end provide penal laws
Speaker 2: for the removal of African Americans from the state, though
Speaker 2: the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified on
Speaker 2: July ninth, eighteen sixty eight, nullified Oregon's exclusion clause. As
Speaker 2: a refresher, the Fourteenth Amendment was one of the reconstruction
Speaker 2: amendments that followed the end of the Civil War. It's
Speaker 2: the one that gives all citizens of the United States
Speaker 2: the right to do process and equal protection under the laws.
Speaker 2: The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in eighteen seventy, also invalidated a
Speaker 2: different article in the Oregon Constitution that denied quote Negroes,
Speaker 2: Chinamen and Mulatto's the right to vote. However, even though
Speaker 2: the Fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments invalidated them, those two exclusionary
Speaker 2: articles weren't actually repealed in Oregon until nineteen twenty six
Speaker 2: and nineteen twenty seven, respectively, and their obsolete text, along
Speaker 2: with other language that alluded to race, like specifying the
Speaker 2: white population needed to increase the number of state Supreme
Speaker 2: Court justices, was actually still present in the Oregon Constitution
Speaker 2: until a measure to remove it passed in two thousand
Speaker 2: and two, and even then it only got seventy one
Speaker 2: percent of the vote, and people cited as their reasons
Speaker 2: for voting now things like unwillingness to tamper with the
Speaker 2: historical document. So it's not clear exactly what the motivation
Speaker 2: of everyone was, but it was definitely clear what the
Speaker 2: motivation of some of them was. Although the state had
Speaker 2: never passed enforcement measures to go along with these racial
Speaker 2: exclusion laws, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had been
Speaker 2: invalidated those laws after the Civil War, the fact that
Speaker 2: they were written into the state's foundational documents and had
Speaker 2: been passed at all had a big effect on who
Speaker 2: did or didn't move to Oregon in the migration that
Speaker 2: followed the Civil War. The people who moved into Oregon
Speaker 2: were overwhelmingly white, and some of those who did did
Speaker 2: so because they found that constitutional language appealing. By the
Speaker 2: nineteen hundreds, the Ku Klux Klan, perhaps the most notorious
Speaker 2: white supremacy organization in the United States, had more than
Speaker 2: fourteen thousand members in Oregon, nine thousand of them in Portland.
Speaker 2: By comparison, very few black people moved into Oregon after
Speaker 2: the Civil War. According to the United States Census Bureau,
Speaker 2: by nineteen forty, just a few years before the Vanport Flood,
Speaker 2: more than a million people lived in Oregon, only two thousand,
Speaker 2: five hundred and sixty five were African American, or less
Speaker 2: than a quarter of a percent of the population. Nearly
Speaker 2: all of them lived in one small, segregated district in Portland, which,
Speaker 2: thanks to racist laws, housing policies, and real estate practices,
Speaker 2: was the only place in Oregon most black people could
Speaker 2: find housing. The racial demographics of the area around Portland
Speaker 2: changed dramatically before and during World War II, and the
Speaker 2: circumstances are tied directly to the Vanport Flood. And we're
Speaker 2: going to talk about that. But first we are going
Speaker 2: to have a word from one of our fabulous sponsors.
Speaker 2: To get back to our story. We're going to talk
Speaker 2: about the beginnings of the city of Banmport. During World
Speaker 2: War Two, the shipbuilding industry in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver,
Speaker 2: Washington grew really tremendously in response to military needs. Most
Speaker 2: of this growth came by a shipyards that were owned
Speaker 2: by the Kaiser Company. Later Kaiser Shipbuilding Corporation, which began
Speaker 2: working with the British Navy to build ships in nineteen forty.
Speaker 2: The industry as a whole grew from a few thousand
Speaker 2: people to more than one hundred and forty thousand employees
Speaker 2: by late nineteen forty three. The Kaiser Company, which was
Speaker 2: named for its founder, employed nearly all of them. This
Speaker 2: huge influx of workers really put a strain on the
Speaker 2: housing supply in and around Portland, thanks in part to
Speaker 2: a long standing resistance to public housing. Many residents were
Speaker 2: afraid that affordable housing would lower their property values and
Speaker 2: bring in a quote undesirable class of people when it
Speaker 2: came to the Kaiser Company's wartime employee. Another issue on
Speaker 2: the mines of the Portland majority was that many of
Speaker 2: them were black. Particularly in the earlier years of World
Speaker 2: War two, black men were not seen as fit for
Speaker 2: military duty. We've talked about this in other episodes before,
Speaker 2: so as white men were drafted into the military, black men,
Speaker 2: along with women of all races, were the ones to
Speaker 2: very often fill those jobs. The same was also true
Speaker 2: for newly created wartime work, in part because so many
Speaker 2: of the people were moving into Portland to get these
Speaker 2: jobs were black. Meetings in the city about how to
Speaker 2: address the housing shortage were met with pickets and protests,
Speaker 2: so in the summer of nineteen forty two, the Kaiser
Speaker 2: Company worked out a deal with the US Maritime Commission
Speaker 2: to build a town to house its workers, situated outside
Speaker 2: the city limits of Portland in the Columbia River floodplain.
Speaker 2: The town was originally called Kaiserville because it was being
Speaker 2: built in bottom land and a floodplain. Thirty foot tall
Speaker 2: dykes were built on two sides of the town to
Speaker 2: keep the water out. On a third side, a railroad
Speaker 2: embankment fulfilled the same function, but it had not been
Speaker 2: constructed as a dyke. It was built by filling dirt
Speaker 2: in and around a wooden railroad trestle.
Speaker 1: Going through The US Maritime Commission let the Kaiser Company
Speaker 1: do an end run around the Housing Authority of Portland.
Speaker 1: Neither the Housing Authority nor the people of Portland got
Speaker 1: much of a say in what was being built or
Speaker 1: who would live there. The homes were built quickly and cheaply,
Speaker 1: and they were intended as temporary wartime housing, not as
Speaker 1: permanent structures. They were apartment buildings made of wood on
Speaker 1: wooden foundations, and in the end there were nearly ten
Speaker 1: thousand of these units.
Speaker 2: This housing was really pretty incredibly basic. The units had
Speaker 2: a small bedroom, a kitchenette with a hot plate, and
Speaker 2: only one window that could open that was in case
Speaker 2: of a fire. Units were furnished with tenants expected to
Speaker 2: supply only personal items like linens and dishes and silverware.
Speaker 2: But because the buildings were so cheaply made, they were
Speaker 2: also quite noisy. There was very little to dampen the
Speaker 2: sound between the units, and since the shipbuilding industry during
Speaker 2: wartime ran literally around the clock, Vanport was also really noisy.
Speaker 2: Around the clock. Fires were a problem, although fortunately these
Speaker 2: were mostly small and none of them swept through the
Speaker 2: nearly all wooden city, which would have been a definite possibility.
Speaker 2: This temporary housing became the largest wartime housing development in
Speaker 2: the United States and the second largest city in Oregon,
Speaker 2: although since the government owned it it wasn't technically a
Speaker 2: real city. It was renamed Vanport by combining the names
Speaker 2: of Vancouver and Portland in November, and its first residents
Speaker 2: moved in on December twelfth. Headlines hailed it as a
Speaker 2: quote masterpiece of urban planning. Now all that happened in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty two u s. You can tell how quickly
Speaker 2: all of this was put together, since the Kaiser Corporation
Speaker 2: only started working on it in the summer. As those
Speaker 2: first families moved in, Vanport mostly offered housing anding else.
Speaker 2: Although the city was roughly equidistant from Kaiser's three shipbuilding facilities,
Speaker 2: which meant that there were shortages of rubber and gasoline.
Speaker 2: People could walk to work, it was not really convenient
Speaker 2: to getting into Portland or to any kind of transit.
Speaker 2: The first residents had trouble getting basic supplies. Often it
Speaker 2: was pressure from the Kaiser company, who was afraid that
Speaker 2: they would lose their workers if they couldn't get the
Speaker 2: basic staples that they needed that got things done. But
Speaker 2: eventually Vamport did get a lot of amenities that you
Speaker 2: would expect in a city, including a hospital, a movie theater,
Speaker 2: and some shopping centers. Since it was built as worker housing,
Speaker 2: it also had twenty four hour childcare services. In addition
Speaker 2: to schools, the Vamport Extension Center, which would eventually grow
Speaker 2: into Portland State University, taught classes there during the war.
Speaker 2: Vanport eventually got its own ration board. The housing Authority
Speaker 2: of Portland wound up essentially acting as a landlord and
Speaker 2: in some ways as the city government. The housing Authority oversaw,
Speaker 2: among other things, the creation of a fire department and
Speaker 2: a school district. Law enforcement came from the county sheriff Department.
Speaker 2: The relocation of black workers from all over the United States,
Speaker 2: but especially from the Deep South and the Southwest into
Speaker 2: Vanport was the first major migration of African Americans into
Speaker 2: Oregon in the state's history. Between nineteen forty and nineteen fifty,
Speaker 2: the percentage of Oregon's population that was African American grew
Speaker 2: from point two to point eight percent. It's a still
Speaker 2: tiny percentage, but a massive increase in all going into
Speaker 2: the same place. In the face of this influx of
Speaker 2: African Americans to the area around previously overwhelmingly white Portland,
Speaker 2: White's only signs that are more often associated with the
Speaker 2: South became a lot more common, especially in the parts
Speaker 2: of Portland that were closest to the railroad station, which
Speaker 2: would have been how most people were getting there. Vamport
Speaker 2: itself was also informally but fairly strictly segregated, with housing,
Speaker 2: medical facilities, and recreational facilities all separated along racial lines.
Speaker 2: The schools, however, were integrated, including hiring black teachers.
Speaker 1: Overall, White residents of Portland were so distressed by the
Speaker 1: influx of Black Americans that the Portland Art Museum arranged
Speaker 1: a series of special exhibitions to try to calm their fears.
Speaker 1: They were titled Wartime Housing, Ships for Victory and Migration
Speaker 1: of the Negro, and they framed Portland as a tolerant, welcoming,
Speaker 1: diverse place full of patriotic duty. Wartime Housing was an
Speaker 1: adapted Museum of Modern Art exhibition that had been used
Speaker 1: in other cities that, for various reasons, objected to the
Speaker 1: building of mass housing for wartime workers. Migration of the
Speaker 1: Negro was a Museum of Modern Art exhibition as well,
Speaker 1: and was chosen because of a huge amount of anti
Speaker 1: Southern bias being shown in Portland's white and black residents alike.
Speaker 2: Ships for Victory, on the other hand, and was funded
Speaker 2: in part by Kaiser Corporation, and, in the words of
Speaker 2: an article on the matter in Pacific Northwest Quarterly Quote,
Speaker 2: by the time the final object list was completed, Ships
Speaker 2: for Victory violated nearly every curatorial convention and would by
Speaker 2: no means have been considered a worthy exhibition or a
Speaker 2: museum of art, but for the exigencies of war, basically
Speaker 2: it was propaganda. By December of nineteen forty four, the
Speaker 2: city of Vamport was filled nearly to capacity. Its population
Speaker 2: was about forty two thousand people, but as the war
Speaker 2: neared its end and wartime manufacturing slowed down, its population
Speaker 2: started to drop. Most of the people who moved out
Speaker 2: were white. They had the means and the opportunity to
Speaker 2: find housing elsewhere. Vanport's black residents, though, were effectively stuck.
Speaker 2: There wasn't enough room for them in Portland's tiny, segregated
Speaker 2: black neighborhood, and they weren't welcome anywhere else. And because
Speaker 2: many of them were laid off from their wartime shipbuilding jobs,
Speaker 2: they also didn't have the financial means to just relocate
Speaker 2: to a completely different state. As the war drew to
Speaker 2: a close, authorities started talking about what to do with Vanmport.
Speaker 2: On June seventeenth, nineteen forty five, The Oregonian reported that
Speaker 2: city officials hoped that the black residents of Vamport would
Speaker 2: leave to prevent any quote racial problems. After the war,
Speaker 2: Vamport quickly developed a bad reputation, even though its crime
Speaker 2: rate wasn't statistically very different from the city of Portland
Speaker 2: and there was no disproportionate crime among its black residents.
Speaker 2: People perceived Vanport as being crime written and shoddily built.
Speaker 2: The latter criticism was valid, but as to the former
Speaker 2: Captain j Earl Stanley, head of the County Sheriff's office
Speaker 2: in Vamport, was quoted in a nineteen forty seven article
Speaker 2: on the city as saying, quote, I have been stationed
Speaker 2: at Vamport for only a year, but I am constantly
Speaker 2: surprised that we have as little major crime as we do,
Speaker 2: considering the conditions under which people are forced to live.
Speaker 2: The walls between the apartments are certainly far short of
Speaker 2: being sound proofed. This makes for trouble, particularly when two
Speaker 2: families have children. The decades that have passed since that time,
Speaker 2: there's been a lot of research on what the psychological
Speaker 2: effect is of just being constantly immersed in noise. This
Speaker 2: is a real issue in Vamport. Like it was constantly noisy,
Speaker 2: and it was noisy around the clock because there were
Speaker 2: people working literally every shift. So what he's remarking on
Speaker 2: here was later proved by science. That was probably a
Speaker 2: little surprising that, given the fact that people were immersed
Speaker 2: in a noisy, chaotic environment they couldn't escape, things were
Speaker 2: actually running along the same lines as they were in
Speaker 2: Portland in terms of things like crime. All of the
Speaker 2: powers involved in this were still debating what to do
Speaker 2: about Vamport in the spring of nineteen forty eight, when
Speaker 2: the Columbia River started to rise due to a combination
Speaker 2: of heavy rains and melting snow from the mountains. Flood
Speaker 2: stage for the Columbia River was considered to be fifteen feet,
Speaker 2: which which the river reached and passed early in May.
Speaker 2: By May twenty fifth, the river had reached twenty three feet.
Speaker 2: That was the day that patrol started inspecting the dikes
Speaker 2: that surrounded Vamport. On May twenty eighth, the river reached
Speaker 2: twenty eight point three feet and the tracks along the
Speaker 2: railroad embankment started to sink by a couple of inches.
Speaker 2: On the morning of May thirtieth, nineteen forty eight, a
Speaker 2: bulletin from the Housing Authority of Portland was placed on
Speaker 2: every door in Vanport, which ended in the words quote,
Speaker 2: remember dikes are safe at present. You will be warned
Speaker 2: if necessary, you will have time to leave. Don't get excited.
Speaker 2: The bulletin also contained information on what to do if
Speaker 2: the Army Corps of Engineers ordered an evacuation. I've read
Speaker 2: these instructions and I found them a little patronizing. They
Speaker 2: said things like don't get panicky exclamation point. Well, it
Speaker 2: probably maybe wasn't intended as patronizing. It's hard to know
Speaker 2: the intended tone of the writer on those.
Speaker 1: I always wonder. But that same day, a crew detected
Speaker 1: seepage in the railroad embankment and started reinforcing it with
Speaker 1: sand bags. But at four seventeen PM, a hole formed
Speaker 1: in the embankment and water started rushing toward Vanport.
Speaker 2: Both fortunately and unfortunately, because it certainly saved lives, but
Speaker 2: it also kept people from being able to save any
Speaker 2: of their possessions. It was Memorial Day and the weather
Speaker 2: was good. A lot of Vanport's at that point eighteen
Speaker 2: thousand residents were away from the city, having picnics or hiking,
Speaker 2: or just visiting people who lived elsewhere, so they weren't
Speaker 2: home when the flood happened. A series of muddy swampy
Speaker 2: areas called slews slowed the water down as it approached Vanport,
Speaker 2: giving the people who were home about half an hour
Speaker 2: to escape, and once it reached the town, the water
Speaker 2: knocked the wooden houses completely off their wooden foundations. People
Speaker 2: described the scene as looking like cork floating in a current.
Speaker 2: Vanport was virtually completely destroyed. Fifteen people died, although persisted
Speaker 2: that it was really a lot more, and numerous conspiracy
Speaker 2: theories swirled around the event long after, supposing that there
Speaker 2: was a giant cover up of a lot more deaths
Speaker 2: that wasn't made public. More than a thousand of the
Speaker 2: displaced families, or about six three hundred people total, were black.
Speaker 2: That was about a third of Vanport's population. And we're
Speaker 2: going to talk about the aftermath of the flood and
Speaker 2: what happened after that in Vanport. Right after we pause
Speaker 2: for a word from one of our fantastic sponsors. The
Speaker 2: city of Portland knew ahead of time that it did
Speaker 2: not have adequate emergency housing in the event that something
Speaker 2: like this occurred. The housing authority had said that it
Speaker 2: could house about fifteen hundred people, and the Red Cross
Speaker 2: said that it could house seventy five hundred. This was
Speaker 2: roughly half the population of Vamport.
Speaker 1: At the time. Overall, white families had an easier time
Speaker 1: of finding shelter than black families. Residents resisted the idea
Speaker 1: of using churches and schools in white neighborhoods as shelter
Speaker 1: for black people, and churches in the black neighborhood were
Speaker 1: quickly beyond their capacity. According to local historians. There were
Speaker 1: white families who welcomed black refugees from the flood, but
Speaker 1: according to the oral histories of black survivors, this was
Speaker 1: pretty rare. Many black families displaced by the flood wound
Speaker 1: up being housed in abandoned shipyard barracks on Swan Island.
Speaker 1: The feeling of a lot of people who were displaced
Speaker 1: a Swan Island was that it was dangerous, like a
Speaker 1: lot of the housing was right next to the water
Speaker 1: and there was no buffer between the housing and the water,
Speaker 1: and so a lot of these were families with children,
Speaker 1: and people were very concerned about the fact that their
Speaker 1: children could drown just being outside of the house, or
Speaker 1: not even the house outside of the barracks. Five days
Speaker 1: after the flood, refugees asked the housing at the Portland
Speaker 1: for non discrimination policies to be part of any plans
Speaker 1: for repairs or new housing. A Vanport Tenants League was
Speaker 1: formed to try to address former tenants issues with the
Speaker 1: Housing Authority, which, as you remember, had been basically acting
Speaker 1: as the government of Vanport. In response, city officials branded
Speaker 1: the tenants League, which had a significant black membership, as communist.
Speaker 1: Survivors of the Vanport flood also tried to get some
Speaker 1: relief in court, but they hit numerous dead ends. Several
Speaker 1: suits were filed against the Housing Authority, but were dismissed
Speaker 1: under an Oregon's sovereign immunity law, which protected the government
Speaker 1: from being sued. More than seven hundred claims were then
Speaker 1: filed against the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act,
Speaker 1: but the United States was protected under a law that
Speaker 1: the federal government couldn't be liable for flood damage. The
Speaker 1: fact that the federal government, the railroad, the state of Oregon,
Speaker 1: and a private enterprise were all involved in Vamport's very
Speaker 1: existence made the whole thing an astoundingly complex legal tangle.
Speaker 1: President Harry S. Truman visited Vanport after the flood, and
Speaker 1: cleanup was assisted by the American Red Cross. However, Portland's
Speaker 1: white community strenuously resisted additional public housing, and voters repeatedly
Speaker 1: rejected attempts to build public housing after the flood. Consequently,
Speaker 1: Portland's one segregated black neighborhood, which became known as Albina,
Speaker 1: became even more overcrowded than it had been before the war.
Speaker 1: This effect became even more pronounced in the nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: when a stadium was built in Albina's lower Tip, which
Speaker 1: displaced the people had living there who had been living
Speaker 1: there into the farther north, but into an area that
Speaker 1: wasn't really any bigger. Arguments began in a class action
Speaker 1: lawsuit against the government on August sixth of nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 1: The court issued its opinion more than a year later,
Speaker 1: on September twenty third of nineteen fifty two. The court
Speaker 1: found that the Army Corps of Engineers work at the
Speaker 1: dikes and railroad embankment was quote honest and competent. It
Speaker 1: also found no agency involved, not the Army Corps of Engineers,
Speaker 1: not the housing authority, not anyone to be negligent in
Speaker 1: the matter of the flood, the failure of the railroad embankment,
Speaker 1: or the fact that people had been told that morning
Speaker 1: that they were safe. The plaintiffs appealed, and in December
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty four, the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed the lower
Speaker 1: court's ruling on the matter. I read the original ruling
Speaker 1: and in a lot of ways it was infuriating because
Speaker 1: it had language and it about like, it's not proven
Speaker 1: that the fact that this railroad trestle wasn't really a
Speaker 1: dike was responsible for why it failed. But the legal
Speaker 1: scholar who wrote the paper on it was of the
Speaker 1: opinion that all of these rulings made sense from a
Speaker 1: legal standpoint, like the Oregon really did have a sovereign
Speaker 1: immunity law, and the federal government really did have laws
Speaker 1: protecting it against being liable for flood damage. Like all
Speaker 1: of these things really legally added up. One of that
Speaker 1: really erases the fact that the eventual response was basically
Speaker 1: to do nothing. The Urban League in the Portland and
Speaker 1: Double ACP tried to combat racist housing policies, but even so,
Speaker 1: by the sixties, four out of five black people in
Speaker 1: Portland lived in Albina, and even today the majority of
Speaker 1: black residents of Portland live in its northeast quadrant.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety, the Oregonian published a series called Blueprint
Speaker 2: for a Slum, detailing redlining and other discriminatory housing practices,
Speaker 2: as well as corruption in the mortgage lending industry that
Speaker 2: made these same neighborhoods ineligible for home loans. It was
Speaker 2: a lot of the same kind of stuff we talked
Speaker 2: about in our two part episode on redlining last year.
Speaker 2: By twenty fourteen, the focus had shifted to the concept
Speaker 2: of gentrification. At this point, housing policies have changed. People
Speaker 2: can get mortgages in those neighborhoods, but the result has
Speaker 2: been the erasure of a lot of previously affordable housing.
Speaker 2: So now the conversation is about how to improve neighborhoods
Speaker 2: without pricing the people who live there out of the
Speaker 2: neighborhood with no other place to go.
Speaker 1: That's the Vamport flood.
Speaker 2: It's the thing. I've thought about doing this before, but
Speaker 2: it is another thing that has made me feel like
Speaker 2: we need a not just in the South tag on
Speaker 2: our website for the Times that people ask us how
Speaker 2: come these things only happen in the South. That is
Speaker 2: not true. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.
Speaker 2: If you'd like to send us a note, our email
Speaker 2: addresses history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can
Speaker 2: subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.