Portland in Three Centuries: The Place and the People

Chapter 7: The Portland Revolution

139 Chapter 7 The Portland Revolution Proper Portlanders got a scare when they opened the May 1, 1968, edition of the Oregon Journal. “Hippies Might ‘Make Scene’ in Portland This Summer ” was the headline over a story that warned that 20,000 longhairs from San Francisco, already tripped out from 1967’s Summer of Love, were planning to head to the Rose City for the summer. An Oregon Journal reporter passed the story along to Newsweek, whose May 20 item on Portland as “The Hippie’s New Nirvana” seemed to validate the fear. The new Haight-Ashbury was supposed to be Lair Hill, another neighborhood where an aging population that made for housing vacancies, low rents, and proximity to downtown had already attracted many of Portland homegrown hippies. The story was false, the result of a planted rumor, but city officials took it seriously. Lair Hill Park was a hippie hangout and a site for countercultural events. The staff at Neighborhood House and the Junior Museum (now the Children’s Museum and then located in the park) were not happy when hippies ran children off the softball field or tossed firecrackers at kids. The director of the museum wrote Parks Commissioner Frank Ivancie to complain about the “disgusting talk and exaggerated lovemaking” that drove away families and children. Ivancie had already targeted hippies with a “no wading” rule for Lovejoy Fountain, recently opened to grace the urban renewal area in 1967. Now he acted in July 1968 to impose a curfew at Lair Hill Park. The result was a summer of arrests, court challenges (the curfew law had to be rewritten twice), and local tourism as suburbanites cruised the neighborhood to ogle the longhairs, and maybe to score some weed. Ivancie’s response may have been over the top, but 1968 was a tense and bitter “year of the barricades” across the globe. The Tet Offensive in February had shaken confidence that the United States could win in Vietnam. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4 had ignited riots in cities across 140 portland in three centuries the country. Radical students shut down Columbia University in late April. Across the Atlantic, students took to the streets in Italy, Spain, and Berlin. French students fought police in the Paris streets in the first days of May, radical industrial workers called a general strike, and the government nearly toppled before the disturbance subsided. Still to come were the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the police riot at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that crushed the democratic reforms and hopes of “Prague Spring.” City Hall officials didn’t face Soviet tanks like Alexander Dubček, but they certainly felt like they were surrounded by assaults on the city’s comfortable equilibrium. While hippies and their supporters in Lair Hill confronted city officials over lifestyle preferences and free speech, African Americans in Albina were challenging the Portland establishment about basic opportunities for life and livelihoods. The federal Model Cities program, created in 1966, gave local leaders more than they had bargained for. The program was intended to concentrate federal and local resources on a few selected neighborhoods that would become “models” for revitalization. It also required community participation in setting goals and priorities. The city picked a set of north and northeast neighborhoods with large African American populations and let residents shape the action plan. Delivered in December 1968, the plan was a shocker because it spoke openly about racial discrimination in a city whose white leaders maintained that Portland did not have a race problem. City Commissioners Frank Ivancie and Stanley Earl carefully edited the word “ghetto” out of the document. The Portland Development Commission was furious that the report called out the unequal impact of urban renewal on poor neighborhoods. The Portland School Board was outraged, calling the problem analysis “vicious,” “irresponsible,” “erroneous,” “prejudiced,” and “bitter” (this last adjective was certainly true). The city council took four months to accept an amended report, which launched a five-year neighborhood improvement effort that would bolster social services and build community leadership. The Black Panther Party added radical voices to the advocacy and social service work of the Model Cities staff, the Urban League, and the Albina Ministerial Alliance. Never numbering more than a few dozen, the Panthers preferred direct action to committee meetings. They offered a free breakfast program out of the Highland Park United Church of Christ in 1969, opened the Fred Hampton...