Story and photos by Pete Shaw “I’ll never stop believing in your smile Even though you didn’t stay, it was all worthwhile.” –Donnie Fritts This month Portland is losing two very fine activists in Alyssa Pagan and Walidah Imarisha. They will be deeply missed, but this city is all the better for the time we…
Story and photos by Pete Shaw A few weeks ago I was in New Jersey. I go there twice a year, and I should tell you now that this is not the lead-in to a joke, although I am sure you have already come up with numerous punchlines. My brother and my father live there,…
Story and photos by Pete Shaw A woman with two children walked down the stairs into Pioneer Square in the early evening of July 7 and began talking about how tired she was. Tired of seeing Black people gunned down by police. Tired of being scared every time her husband, sons, and grandsons walk outside.…
Story and photos by Pete Shaw Over 50 people affiliated with the Portland chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ PDX) gathered at the Justice Center on SW 3rd Avenue on Monday July 11 demanding an immediate end to police violence and calling upon white people to take action for racial justice. The event…
Story and photos by Pete Shaw Francisco Aguirre, the immigrant justice activist who for 81 days in 2014 took sanctuary in Augustana Lutheran Church when the US government threatened to detain and deport him, returned there on Sunday June 19. However, this time the cause was celebratory. On May 27, Assistant US Attorney Greg Nyhus…
Story by Pete Shaw The road to obtaining political power is fraught with obstacles, including a variety of institutional forms of racism. As Frederick Douglass once noted, power concedes nothing without a demand. Democracy must be wrested from the powerful through the hard work of those struggling for justice. As advocates for justice organize communities,…
“Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.” …
Lord, I’ll tell the world the water, Done crept through this town. …
Six years have passed since the Portland police murdered Keaton Otis near the southwest corner of NE 6th and Halsey. On Thursday May 12, 2016, nearly 100 people gathered at Maranatha Church in Northeast Portland to remember Otis and his father, Fred Bryant, and to keep alive the demand for justice. A mixture of past,…
Story by Pete Shaw “What have you learned here in the last year?” Ahjamu Umi poses that question to the four young people–Emmanuelle, Habakkuk, Jaiden, and Ja’waun–who have gathered around a table of food and packages just outside of Columbia International Cup coffeehouse in New Columbia. Last April, the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP), with…
