The first influx of African American families moved into cramped quarters in the Guild’s Lake district and, after 1943, into the new wartime housing project at Vanport. Because of the extreme housing shortage, newly arrived black workers found temporary shelter with members of the established African American community, in local churches, at the black Elks Lodge, and in black-owned businesses. The completion of the Vanport project in 1943 and the settlement of blacks in inner northeast Portland’s Albina district eventually relieved the housing crunch. It did nothing, however, to lessen the discriminatory practices of Portland Housing Authority officials or the racially restrictive real-estate covenants that had been put in place.
Until it became apparent that realtors would neither sell nor rent property outside Albina, African Americans had few complaints about the development of Albina as a black community. Of the more than 10,000 blacks who remained in the Portland metropolitan area at the end of the war, approximately 5,000 of them lived in Vanport, outside the city's limits. Historian Rudy Pearson argues that Vanport’s destruction in the 1948 flood marked a turning point in Portland’s race relations. By the time homeless African Americans found housing in the city proper, Portland’s black population had doubled. Moreover, self-confident African Americans were also becoming more active in the fight for equal rights.
© William G. Robbins, 2002
