Story by Pete Shaw If there are guidelines for listening sessions on hot-button issues, clearly none were deployed during the February 21 event at NE Portland’s Maranatha Church that was hastily arranged by Police Chief Danielle Outlaw. The listening session was called due to reports in Portland Mercury and Willamette Week detailing a series of…
Story by Pete Shaw On Saturday August 4, Portland’s anti-fascist community held its Stop the Hate rally, bringing together a wide swathe of Portlanders and people from the metropolitan area opposed to white supremacy. The event, organized by the group Popular Mobilization (POPMOB), was called in response to the white supremacist organization Patriot Prayer’s rally…
Story and photos by Bette Lee Patriot Prayer can’t seem to get enough of Portland. Even though the Vancouver, Washington white supremacist group led by Joey Gibson claims it hates Portland because it is a “liberal” city which coddles “pinkos, anarchists, leftists, liberals, homosexuals,” and other unsavory “anti-American” groups, its members seem hell-bent on holding…
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 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,…
Story by Pete Shaw A small grin crept across Teressa Raiford’s face as the jury acquitted her of second degree disorderly conduct on Thursday April 21. It slowly got a little bigger, and she clapped her hands a couple of times. She certainly was relieved, but perhaps not ecstatic. While walking around downtown a few…
A vigil attended by over 50 people was held on January 29 at the AME Zion Church on North Vancouver Avenue to remember Aaron Campbell, the young Black man killed exactly six years earlier by Portland Police Officer Ron Frashour. A further significant aspect of the event was the opportunity to reflect upon Campbell’s death…
Story and photos by Pete Shaw Exactly one year after 12 year old Tamir Rice was fatally shot by Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann in a public playground on November 22, 2014, 50 people gathered in Portland near the corner of SE Madison and 11th for a vigil in Rice’s memory and to demand justice…
By Pete Shaw Frederick Douglass once stated that power concedes nothing without a struggle, and history certainly bears that out. The struggle to wrest power away from those who hoard it in vast disproportion is a story that is given short shrift in US history textbooks, the preferred narrative being a combination of the myth…
