By the mid-1990s, many of the neighborhood’s residents were white. By the early 2000s, forget about it, almost all the families from the old neighborhood were gone, which is also to say, Northeast Portland had become what most of Portland is, what most of Oregon is, a place that nurtures whiteness. While the tactics for its whitening, for the most part, didn’t involve foreclosures or blatant evictions, its transformation featured racialized expulsion nonetheless.
Though it was amended in 1849, the legal means to expel Vanderpool, the Francis brothers, and Thomas, as well as the ethos of Oregon as a white monolith, had been established in 1844 via the Oregon Territory’s exclusion law. Of the numerous people responsible for the racist writ, the lion’s share of onus belongs to a certain few: a Native surnamed Cockstock, a free Black man named James Saules, and white men named Elijah White and Peter Burnett.
So it goes, Saules had been beefing with Cockstock in a land dispute. In the resulting confrontation, two white men, along with Cockstock, were killed. A few weeks later Saules was involved in another dispute, and this time he threatened a white settler that he’d incite the Natives to violence against him. For making that threat, Saules was arrested and, in time, handed over to Elijah White, an Indian subagent. White wrote a letter to the secretary of war in D.C., calling Blacks “dangerous subjects” and arguing that Saules and every other negro “ought to be transported” and their “immigration prohibited.”
As one might guess, the secretary of war was the wrong contact for White to complain to. However, White’s cause was soon taken up by an Oregon politician named Peter Burnett. It was Burnett who had written the 1844 exclusion law and its revision, who had proposed it to Oregon’s territorial government, who had convinced the white men who composed that government to pass his racist legislation—the lone law of its kind passed by states admitted into the union.
And now, what do we have all these decades hence? The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) 2016 statistics (for the year 2015) note that the population of whites in the state of Oregon is 84.89 percent and the percentage of Blacks is 1.90 percent. In Portland, the figures are 77.37 percent for whites and 5.7 percent for Blacks. Compare those numbers to the 2016 national statistics, where whites comprise between 61.3 and 76.9 percent of the population depending on whether Hispanics and Latinos identifying as white are included (which is an essay in itself), and Blacks are 12.7 percent. You needn’t be an analyst to glean that in my fair state, in my beloved city, my people are scant, scant by design.
As it turns out, white folks, the ones who made us scarce in the NEP and who compose a majority everywhere in Oregon, love them some ice cream just as much as my old neighborhood crew did. In the new NEP, there’s a famous ice cream parlor named Salt & Straw, so famous that people sometimes line up for a block for the chance to taste its artisanal flavors. (Anyone for Mummy’s Pumpkin Spice Potion, or Black Cat Licorice and Lavender, or Cinnamon Snickerdoodle?)
Back in 2015, during a street fair just a few blocks from where I grew up that now attracts thousands, a sixteen-year-old Black boy fired a gun into a crowd, wounding two teenage boys and a twenty-five-year-old woman. Per protocol, the police taped off the crime scene. They also ordered Salt & Straw closed. One would think the would-be customers would’ve respected the gravity of the incident and set aside their ice cream hopes for the day. But on the contrary, before it was closed, two dozen or so more people approached the crime scene tape not to inquire about victims but to beseech the police to let them past to cop their frozen treats. Others snapped selfies using the crime scene as a backdrop, some cracking jokes about dessert-fueled motives. Others dined at restaurants just a few feet from where police searched for shell casings. It’s oh so obvious to me that the people who transmuted that crime scene into a collective case of blatant, damn near parodic insouciance were reflecting the ethos of that long-ago territorial government, one set on nixing eternal the presence of my people for the supposed safety, privilege, and prosperity of a great white monolith.
1854–1859
DRED SCOTT
john a. powell
The most elemental questions of American citizenship, democracy, and identity were ill defined and surprisingly undetermined by colonial, revolutionary, common law, and antebellum traditions. The Constitution itself, prior to 1868, failed to specify the precise nature of national citizenship, and how it was to be defined or acquired, despite the fact that in two major provisions (Article IV, Section 2, and Article III, Section 2), it extended to citizens critical protections and privileges that it denied to noncitizens. It was also not entirely clear about on what basis new territories might be admitted to the Union as states, or how the territories should be governed.
The period 1854 to 1859 crystallized disastrous answers to these questions with calamitous consequences, including Bleeding Kansas, the dissolution of the Whig Party and the formation of the Republican Party, the acrimonious debates over slavery in the territories, and the doctrine of popular sovereignty. The idea of popular sovereignty was epitomized by the Lincoln-Douglas debates and, above all, by the infamous Dred Scott decision, a combustible mixture that exacerbated a sectional crisis and precipitated the Civil War.
The entire tapestry of American history may contain no more singularly revealing or defining event than the infamous Dred Scott decision. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book on the case, Don Fehrenbacher asserts that Dred Scott is “a point of illumination, casting light upon more than a century of American” law and politics that preceded it. This tells only half the story. The light of Dred Scott also extends forward in time, straight through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and well into the twenty-first.
Dred Scott was, among other things, a complex, multifaceted case addressing aspects of territorial sovereignty, the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise’s prohibition of slavery above the 36° 30´ latitude line, and the meaning of American citizenship. However, the case is best known for the indelible scar etched by an overreaching chief justice, Roger B. Taney. Writing on behalf of the Court, Taney held that persons of African descent—whether free or slave—were not, and could never become, citizens of the United States. Some today still embrace this claim.
To resolve the issue of whether Dred Scott and his wife and children could file suit against John Sanford for their freedom—on the basis of their sojourn in either a free state or a free territory—the Court did not have to overturn part of the Missouri Compromise or draw a race line into American citizenship. Instead, it could easily have dismissed the case on the grounds of standing. Or it could have said that Dred Scott’s return to a slave state meant that the condition of slavery reattached. Or that a formerly enslaved person, who had won their freedom and became a state citizen, was also a federal citizen, as some Southern theories—under which federal citizenship was derivative of state citizenship—would suggest. Or it could have held that a freeborn African American, born a citizen of a state, was also a federal citizen.