"When Norman Sylvester was 12, long before he garnered the nickname "The Boogie Cat" or shared a stage with B.B. King, he boarded a train in Louisiana and headed west, toward the distant city of Portland, Oregon. He'd lived all his life in the rural South, eating wild muscadine grapes from his family's farm, fishing in the bayou and churning butter at the kitchen table to the tune of his grandmother's gospel singing."
"From 1844 until 1926, Oregon enacted a series of exclusion laws aimed at barring Black people from residing in the territory. The Oregon Donation Land Act of 1850 granted white settlers up to 640 free acres while prohibiting Black people from claiming any land at all. Oregon declined to ratify the 15th Amendment, and, in 1917, the state's Supreme Court sanctioned racial discrimination in public places."
"Despite all this, Black people were among the earliest settlers to arrive in Oregon, where they carved out lives and sought equality amid these hostilities - the Portland chapter of the NAACP, formed in 1914, is the oldest operating chapter west of the Mississippi. But the state's anti-Black policies were powerful deterrents: By the time Sylvester arrived, fewer than 1% of Oregon residents were African American, and Portland's Black population was the smallest among major West Coast cities."
Norman Sylvester left rural Louisiana at age 12 to join his father in Portland, Oregon. He grew up harvesting wild muscadine grapes, fishing in the bayou and churning butter while hearing his grandmother's gospel singing. He arrived in the fall of 1957 to a state with a history of exclusion laws, land prohibitions for Black people, refusal to ratify the 15th Amendment and sanctioned racial discrimination, and a strong Ku Klux Klan presence. Black settlers had nevertheless established communities and the Portland NAACP chapter dates to 1914. By Sylvester's arrival fewer than 1% of Oregon residents were African American, producing stark culture shock.
Read at High Country News
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