Honoring Senator Mark O. Hatfield's Legacy: A Journey Through Portland's Civil Rights History
On Sunday, July 12th, the Hatfield School of Government hosted its fourth annual Civil Rights History Tour across the Portland area. Held each year on the birthday of Senator Mark O. Hatfield, the tour honors his enduring legacy of advancing civil rights and social justice. Throughout his career — as Governor of Oregon and later as a United States Senator — Hatfield championed equality, civility, and public service, making the annual tour a fitting tribute to his lifelong commitment to justice.
Guided by Ron Silver (former U.S. Attorney) and Ed Washington (Vanport survivor), participants heard powerful stories, personal reflections, and historical context at each stop. Attendees included Portland State University faculty, staff, and students, as well as community members and their families.
The stops included the following locations:
● The Golden West Hotel - the first hotel in Portland to welcome African American guests. Opened in 1906 by entrepreneur William D. Allen, the 100-room hotel at NW Broadway and Everett Street served as a home base for the Black railway porters, cooks, and waiters who were turned away from every other hotel in the city. Its ground floor housed Black-owned businesses, including a barbershop, an ice cream parlor, and an athletic club, and it hosted performers and civil rights figures such as A. Philip Randolph. The Depression forced its closure in 1931; the building still stands and today provides low-income housing.
● Portland Expo Center - used during World War II as a temporary detention site for Japanese Americans prior to their forced relocation to incarceration camps. Following Executive Order 9066, more than 3,600 Japanese Americans from Oregon and southwest Washington were held from May to September 1942 in animal stalls at the former Pacific International Livestock Exposition building, before being sent on to camps including Minidoka, Tule Lake, and Heart Mountain. The site is marked today by Voices of Remembrance, an installation of wooden torii gates near the Expo Center MAX station.
● Former Vanport City - a community built to house wartime shipyard workers, many of them Black families, later destroyed by the 1948 flood. Built in 110 days in 1942 to house workers at Henry Kaiser's Portland-area shipyards, Vanport grew into Oregon's second-largest city, with a population that was nearly 40 percent African American at its peak. On Memorial Day 1948, a break in the railroad-embankment dike sent the Columbia River through the city in a matter of hours, killing at least 15 people and leaving roughly 18,500 residents homeless. Vanport was never rebuilt; the site is now Delta Park and the Portland International Raceway. Mr. Ed Washington, a survivor of the Vanport Flood, shared his firsthand experiences of living in Vanport and surviving the devastating flood.
● Albina District - a historic center of Portland's Black community, deeply affected by redlining, displacement, and the fight for civil rights. After the Vanport flood, discriminatory banking and real estate practices confined most displaced Black families to this North and Northeast Portland neighborhood, which became the heart of Black Portland for decades before urban renewal projects, freeway construction, and gentrification displaced much of the community in the latter half of the twentieth century.
● Fred Hampton Memorial People's Free Health Clinic (former location) - an important site for community-based healthcare and activism. Opened in 1969 by the Portland chapter of the Black Panther Party at 109 N Russell Street, the clinic offered free medical care five evenings a week to anyone regardless of race, staffed by volunteer physicians, nurses, and lab technicians. It was named for Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old Illinois Black Panther Party leader killed by Chicago police in December 1969. The Portland chapter's clinic operated for a decade, closing in 1979; its companion dental clinic continued for years afterward and is now run by the OHSU School of Dentistry.
● NE 31st & Pine - where Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian immigrant, tragically lost his life to a racially motivated attack in 1988. Seraw, a 28-year-old Portland Community College student who worked as an airport bus driver, was beaten to death with a baseball bat by three members of a local skinhead group in the early hours of November 13, 1988, steps from his Southeast Portland apartment. The killing led to Oregon's hate crimes statute and to a landmark 1990 civil verdict, brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center, that held white supremacist leader Tom Metzger liable for $12.5 million in damages and bankrupted his organization. A memorial street sign topper now marks the intersection.
This year's tour for the first time included a seventh stop honoring a community whose history in the city has long gone unacknowledged:
● Lone Fir Cemetery - one of the region's oldest cemeteries, where a memorial is now under construction for the Chinese and Chinese American graves that Multnomah County desecrated in the mid-twentieth century. Since 1868, as many as 2,892 Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans were buried at Lone Fir, most in a section known as Block 14. After the county took ownership of the cemetery in 1928, it halted burials and traditional cultural practices there, and by the early 1950s had bulldozed the graves without culturally sensitive collection practices or any record of names to make way for a maintenance building and, later, a parking lot. On June 26, 2025, the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners unanimously passed a resolution formally apologizing to the families and descendants affected, alongside a budget allocation of at least $1 million toward a new memorial at the site, now owned by Metro. Construction on the memorial began in the spring of 2026, and county leaders read their apology aloud on site for the first time at a ceremony marking the start of that work.
The Hatfield School's annual tour not only commemorates Senator Hatfield's dedication to justice, but also serves as a call to action, reminding us of the words once posted at the Portland Assembly Center:
"May the principles inherent in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights be kept alive in the hearts of all Americans so that similar injustices will never be repeated."