contact: Will Bennett
GOLDEN-WEST-PROJECT@AFRICAN-AMERICAN-HISTORICAL-DISTRICT.COM

Our Facebook Group http://www.facebook.com/groups/PORTLAND.BLACK.HISTORY.PROJECT/164254110340949/

The spirit and intent:
PRESERVES, PERPETUATES, PROMOTES AND INTEGRATES AFRICAN-AMERICAN HERITAGE AND CULTURE IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST

www.african-american-historical-district.com

take-note feb2011

The Pacific NW Black Pioneers Traveling Exhibit

Pacific NW Black Pioneers Traveling Exhibit Location: Portland City Hall 1221 SW 4TH Ave., 97204  Free Admission – Open Monday through Friday; 8:30 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. Guided Tours available: 11:00 A.M. – 2:00 P.M. Reservations suggested for large groups. Event sponsors: The Portland Chapter of The Links, Incorporated; Regional Arts & Cultural Council,and the City of Portland. For more information call: 971-570-3486 or Email: barbara.leonard2007@gmail.com

More Portland Black History

Abduel Hall Live at Stevies Passion, power, and soul. These three words are synonymous with the name Abduel Hall. Possessing the ability to quiet the loudest mouth and bring tears to the eyes of the hardest heart with the sound of the mightiest instrument given to man is to some a far-fetched dream that is this multi-talented singer/songwriter/producer has made his reality. Abduel’s prayerful ascension to stardom is by all standards a testament to visualization. Although distinguishably unique and original in his sound, the influences of his past and present musical heroes are undoubtedly evident. For it was Stevie that shaped his aesthetic; it was Whitney that inspired him; and the soulful spirit of the Clark Sisters coupled with his own faith and determination in the Lord that shows him that this can be done. For Abduel, music has become his lifeline. Exposing his talent to the world at the tender age of three, Abduel entered his first talent show. This was to become the first of many, earning his widespread recognition throughout the city and various parts of the country. Thus Abduel has become one of the most talented and sought after artists in the Northwest. Unlike the current trend of R&B artists, Abduel makes key contributions to both his style and sound by writing, arranging and producing his own material as well as that of other artists like him. Open your mind, your heart and lend him an ear. For he shall be the first and the last. Experience the pure and rapturous soul of man. You are cordially invited to experience the soul of Abduel Hall.

NOW ON FACEBOOK

Website:http://www.wafinc.org/

Mission:World Arts Foundation, Inc. was established in 1978 in Portland, Oregon to promote and preserve African-American contributions to the American culture, and to support community education through the interface of arts and education in interactive, visual and performing media that showcases local and regional talent. Through our year-round work, World Arts establishes linkages between artists and the wider community that provide increased opportunities for enhanced knowledge and awareness.Company Overview:World Arts Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit EQUAL OPPORTUNITY organization focusing on cultural diversity… through the promotion of visual, literary and theater arts.Products:”Keep Alive the Dream” is now recognized as the largest tribute in the State of Oregon and has official designation from the National Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission.

Author, lecturer and researcher. Member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma Genealogical Society, Choctaw-Chickasaw Freedman’s Association, Poteau Valley Genealogical Association and PAAC-Preservation of African American Cemeteries

Seek to 20:57 for Golden West Project

African Roots Podcast #72 August 13, 2010

Seek to 20:57 for Golden West Project

GOLDEN WEST HOTEL EXHIBIT IS NOW ONLINE

source: African Roots Podcast.com

I want to direct you to a great website brought to my attention this past week by a young man Mr. Will Bennett from Portland Oregon. The site is called the Golden West Project: Black in Portland History.  He is presenting the history of the city in a great way and he has also brought together other good sites that reflect this rich history of a vibrant community that thrived against the odds.

His site links to a larger site African American Historical District. Another very interesting site was Central City Concern. There is an audio file with two gentlemen recording their own memories of the hotel and life in Portland. The hotel served as a center of African American social life until the hotel’s closure in 1931.  It later reopened again and operated till 1959 as a hotel catering exclusively to a black clientèle.

I mention this site, because much of the data includes information on activities that surrounded the heart of Black social life in Portland, which was the Golden West Hotel—the only hotel that catered to an African American clientele for decades.  Apparently several years ago, the hotel reopened, and serves as a focal point for much of the black history of Portland.  The hotel was built in the19th century, opening originally as the Tremont hotel.  By 1905 it became the largest Pacific Coast hotel that hosted African Americans.  It was the only hotel in Oregon for African Americans for several decades, it was a destination site for many blacks in the community—including it becoming a place to go “after church”, catering to the local community.

I will also point out that the folks in Portland also have a Facebook community.  I found myself learning a lot about Portland and an amazing spirit that seems to come from there.  The websites as well as seeing them on Facebook and in general celebrating their history, is to me a model for others who are documenting their communities. I mention these sites in particular, because they have taken their local history, confronted  it, and presented it online, reflecting the history and challenges of a proud African American community.  It is this kind of site that can become a model for other communities to follow.

Tell the stories, bring out the old photos.  I know that there are many historically black high schools that have closed since the 1960s and many of them have active alumni organizations.  In Ft. Smith Arknasas, there was a recent Lincoln High School reunion.  In Ardmore Oklahoma there is the Dunbar-Douglas Reunion, in places like Muskogee and Tulsa there are reunions for Manual Training High School, and Booker T. Washington, and on and on, throughout the country.  These schools, these churches, these businesses such as the Golden West, were often the center of the city’s social life for the black community, and sometimes by embracing the city’s history, one can gain so much knowledge about the people who were part of those communities.  Look at your own community and wherever the community’s center of activity occurred, it’s time to research it, talk about it, tell the story, create a website, go on Facebook and create a community and celebrate who you are.

Use Golden West as a model.  Appreciate the info that is there—but then look at it again—but this time for the structure.  Look at what has been compiled—I am sure that your own communities have stories, that though unique, can be presented in a similar pattern.   I was very impressed to have a chance to admire the work of Mr. Bennett, and hope that he will inspire others to tell the stories of their hometown as well.  No matter how large, or how small.  If you live in a really large city like Chicago—then tell the story of the old family neighborhood.  You don’t have to try to become the next DuSable museum—-tell your own neighborhood history instead.  Lots of opportunities and with Mr. Bennetts’s site of the Golden West, you have a great model to follow.

Well that’s it for this week, folks.  Have a great week, and please keep doing what you do.

Keep researching, keep documenting, and keep sharing what you find!

GOLDEN WEST HOTEL EXHIBIT IS NOW ONLINE

In loving memory: Esther ‘Alene’ Grice

Esther ‘Alene’ Grice

Esther “Alene” Grice was born Aug. 30, 1923, to Henry and Patsy Bills in DeKalb, Texas. She departed this earth for her heavenly home on March 30, 2010, capping a rich and beautiful journey.

The youngest of three sisters, Alene was always referred to by family as “Baby Sister.” Because her mother died giving birth to her only brother, Henry, she and her sisters were raised by their aunt and uncle, Lecci and Elbert Graves.

During the Great Depression, the family moved north to Chicago where she completed her elementary and high school education and where she met her husband, Leroy “Chappie” Grice of Portland, who at that time was in the U.S. Army. They were married and she gave birth to her first child, Lynda, in Chicago. After Chappie was honorably discharged from the military, the family moved to Portland and established a home on North Benton Street where Memorial Coliseum now sits. Here, she joined her sisters, Margaret and Helen and their families, who had also moved to Portland.

Alene was Portland’s first African American elevator operator thanks to the good work of the famed Urban League Director Bill Berry in 1948. Portland was very prejudiced at that time, but she weathered all that because she and her husband wanted “a better life” for their children.

Her second child, Michael, was born in that same year. Her third and last child, Asaad Ali, born as Mark Steven, came into the family in 1958. By that time, she was solidly employed for Joseph’s Plastics as a shipping clerk and later served as an employment specialist for the Urban League, and then, the city of Portland during the Model Cities era in the 1960s and 1970s. She is credited for helping place many of Portland’s African-American young people in their first “career” jobs.

She was an active person and belonged to St. Monica’s Guild of St. Philip the Deacon Episcopal Church. Although she could not finish college, she highly valued education, was an avid reader of novels, and enjoyed her volunteer years at Beach Elementary.

The balance of her retirement was divided between her social and service club, the Social Odd Balls, and her grandchildren that she loved so dearly. She loved her husband and cherished the moments with her family. She was always known for her sumptuous cooking and holiday meals; and always found her home a gathering place for friends and family. She and Chappie enjoyed Jazz and traveled each year to the Monterey Jazz festival, until he passed away in 1980.

take note that this is only one of  few Historic Districts to be proposed…

Click on map for a larger image of Outline of a Proposed African-American Historic District

“Golden West Hotel AS Center Piece”

Click on map for a larger image of Our Outline of a Proposed African-American Historic District

History of the Golden West Hotel | Central City Concern

Community Practitioners, Friends =

AFRICAN-AMERICAN Historical Businesses District

Your feedback is needed on how to proceed

Outline@african-american-historical-district.com

Please Note: this is only one in few Historic Districts to be proposed…

peace

 

will b.

http://www.african-american-historical-district.com/

Dick Bogle: A celebration of the Portland native’s life will be scheduled soon, Nola Bogle told the Willamette Week.

Pdx Civil-Rights

The recent photo was taken by one of my students when she interviewed Mr. Bogle in the fall of 2008. He used this photo for his Facebook page and on his blogs and was very pleased with how it looked, so if you would like a high resolution version of this picture, please let me know.

Dick Bogle just passed away. We were able to interview him as part of the PDX Civil Rights Project in 2008 and his interview was truly outstanding. He will be greatly missed.

Sincerely,
Felicia Williams
PSU, PDX Civil Rights Project

Bogle died at Legacy Salmon Creek Hospital in Vancouver of congestive heart failure, said Nola Bogle, Dick Bogle’s wife of 33 years. She said a celebration of her husband’s life will be scheduled. He is survived by his son Richard “Buddy” Bogle; and daughters Richelle Lewellyn, Renita Byrd, Ericka Turay and Tiffany Peaks.

Here’s some of what WW had to say about Bogle in a 2007 mini-profile catching up with the former Portland city commissioner:

After Bogle lost re-election to Charlie Hales in 1992 by finishing third in a five-way primary, he left politics. The defeat freed him to pursue other loves, including jazz, journalism and photography.

For a time, he hosted a Paragon Cable show on Northeast Portland issues and took pictures of jazz musicians. Today, he’s a volunteer DJ on KMHD 89.1 FM, hosting a jazz program every other Monday from 10 am to 2 pm. He also writes a CD-review feature, “Dick’s Picks,” in The Skannerand a regular column in BOOM! Boomers&Beyond (formerly Lifestyles Northwest ), a Pamplin Media Group lifestyle magazine. And he’s the Oregon correspondent for Down Beat magazine, a monthly about jazz, blues and roots music.

This was not Bogle’s first foray into journalism. In 1968, after an eight-year stint as a Portland police officer, Bogle took a job with KATU-TV as Oregon’s first African-American television journalist. In 1984, two years after Bogle left TV to work as an aide to City Commissioner Mildred Schwab, the visibility he’d gained as a reporter and later as anchor helped him win a City Council seat. (His re-election campaign in 1992 was freighted by a couple of troubles: He reimbursed the city $20,000 for its settlement of a sexual harassment claim filed against him by a former aide, and $1,500 for unaccounted travel expenses.)

Bogle, a fifth-generation Oregonian, and his wife, Nola, moved two years ago to Vancouver, Wash.

Oregon’s black exclusion laws (which weren’t removed from the state Constitution until 1926) drove Bogle’s great-grandparents to move to Washington. Bogle says his more recent migration was driven by property taxes and cost of living.

Now he’s thinking about volunteering for the Portland Police Bureau to crack unsolved murder cases. “What,” Bogle quips, “could be a better retirement than playing jazz and solving murders?”

(~_~)

Source: jthomas@portlandobserver.com

Willamette Week has learned that Dick Bogle, the city’s second black city commissioner and first television news reporter, passed away this morning in Vancouver at the age of 79.

In the 1950s, Bogle joined the police force as a patrolman working in the detectives and intelligence divisions.

While a police officer, he worked part-time as a reporter and jazz critic for the now-defunct Portland Reporter.

In 1968, he turned in his badge when he was hired by Bruce Baer as a reporter for KATU-TV.

He later took a job as an aide to City Commissioner Mildred Schwab in 1982. He would go on to make his own bid for City Council to replace the retiring Charles Jordan, the first African American elected to City Council.

After running into some troubles after a former aide filed a sexual harassment claim against him, and allegations he didn’t account for all of his travel expenses emerged, he lost his bid for re-election.

In his later years, he returned to journalism while working part-time for the Police Bureau doing public affairs work on cold cases.

Bogle died at Legacy Salmon Creek Hospital in Vancouver of congestive heart failure, reports WW.

We’ll have a more extensive obituary in next week’s paper, and any information on celebrations of Bogle’s life.

(~_~)

A jazz historian, Bogle was a resident contributor to Down Beat magazine, volunteered at KMHD 89.1-FM jazz radio station in Portland, and maintained a Web site for his jazz reviews until last August, when his health began to fail, Nola Bogle said.

View full size Tim Jewett/The OregonianFile photo: On December 31, 1992, City Commissioner Dick Bogle gives an official farewell to Portland Mayor Bud Clark.He continued to volunteer on a police cold case unit until he was sidelined by stenosis of the spine this fall, said his widow.

No funeral is planned, she said. But a celebration of her husband’s life is tentatively set for March. He is survived by his son Richard H. “Buddy” Bogle, of Mt. Vernon, Wash.; and four daughters Richelle Lewellyn, of Los Angeles, Calif., Renita Byrd, of Decatur, Ga., Ericka Turay, of Beaverton, and Tiffany Peaks, of Palmer, Ala.

– Kimberly A.C. Wilson

(~_~)

kgw.com

VANCOUVER, Wash. — A former Portland city commissioner and trailblazing journalist for the Pacific Northwest has died of heart complications at the age of 79.

Dick Bogle – newsman, police officer and twice-elected Portland commissioner – died from congestive heart failure at a Vancouver hospital. He was survived by his wife, Nola, a son and four daughters.

A celebration of the Portland native’s life will be scheduled soon, Nola Bogle told the Willamette Week.

After attending Oregon State and Portland State universities, Bogle began a career with the Portland Police Bureau, where he served for nine years, in the 1960s. News was a passion for Bogle, according to the public record of his life available across the Internet and from KATU-TV, where Bogle began work as a journalist after his time at the bureau.

According to KATU.com Bogle was the first black journalist in the Northwest when he was hired. The Willamette Week described him as the first black television news journalist and second black person elected to City Council.

Former City Commissioner and Jazz Columnist Dick Bogle Dies at 79

The Skanner’s longtime jazz columnist Dick Bogle has died. He was 79. He died Thursday morning at Legacy Salmon Creek Hospital of congestive heart failure according to his wife, Nola Bogle of 33 years.

Bogle led a diverse life beyond his love of jazz – which he spent in his later years as a reviewer of albums and on-air personality at KMHD 89.1 FM.
Bogle was also a politician, a police officer and a television news reporter. He was the second African American to serve on Portland’s city council, a police officer for the city for eight years and the first Black reporter for KATU News.
Until this fall, when a medical condition caused him to curtail his activities, he volunteered for the Portland Police Bureau’s Cold Case Homicide Unit, helping to solve some of the city’s older, unsolved murders.
Bogle served on Portland City Council from 1984 to 1992, when an electoral loss left him to pursue his other interests – mainly jazz and photography. In addition to providing The Skanner’s readers with thousands of reviews on the newest and best jazz recordings, he was the Oregon correspondent for Down Beat Magazine and other publications.
He was a member of a family that has a long history in Oregon. His descendents, Richard and America Bogle settled in the Walla Walla, Wa. area in the mid-1800s to sprout a line that would include a number of successful community and business leaders.
He is survived by his wife, Nola; son Richard H. ‘Buddy’ Bogle of Mt. Vernon, Wa.; four daughters, Richelle Lewellyn of Los Angeles, Renita Byrd of Decatur, Ga., Ericka Turay of Beaverton and Tiffany Peaks of Palmer, Ala.
According to reports in the Oregonian, there will be a celebration of life scheduled in March.
Access Dick Bogle’s jazz reviews at www.dickbogle.com.
He will be missed.

(~_~)

SEE MORE PHOTOS

Credit: KGW.com by Eric Adams

cop, newsman, politician, dead at 79

Dick Bogle: A celebration of the Portland native’s life will be scheduled soon, Nola Bogle told the Willamette Week.

(~_~)

Related:

• Dick Bogle on what it means to be Portland mayor (1988)

VANCOUVER, Wash. — A former Portland city commissioner and trailblazing journalist for the Pacific Northwest has died of heart complications at the age of 79.

Dick Bogle – newsman, police officer and twice-elected Portland commissioner – died from congestive heart failure at a Vancouver hospital. He was survived by his wife, Nola, a son and four daughters.

A celebration of the Portland native’s life will be scheduled soon, Nola Bogle told the Willamette Week.

After attending Oregon State and Portland State universities, Bogle began a career with the Portland Police Bureau, where he served for nine years, in the 1960s. News was a passion for Bogle, according to the public record of his life available across the Internet and from KATU-TV, where Bogle began work as a journalist after his time at the bureau.

According to KATU.com Bogle was the first black journalist in the Northwest when he was hired. The Willamette Week described him as the first black television news journalist and second black person elected to City Council.

After 15 years of reporting on Portland, Bogle left the news desk but didn’t stray far from the camera. He was elected to City Hall in 1984 and even entertained a run for the mayor’s office, according to archived newsreels here at KGW Newschannel 8.

News-8 Archives: Bogle on being Mayor of Portland’

Bogle lost re-election in 1992 after two terms and retreated toward his passions — jazz, photography and policework.

Bogle enjoyed writing about jazz later in life. He kept a blog on jazz history and was a volunteer disc jockey at KMHD 89.1-FM. Bogle’s affection for news carried into his retirement – he wrote a jazz history column for Portland’s newspaper, The Skanner and was an accomplished photographer. An archive of his work may be accessed at his personal website, www.dickbogle.com.

Bogle also stayed active with the Police Bureau and continued work with the Cold Case Squad long after retiring from public life.

Despite a long, accomplished career serving the Rose City, Bogle moved to Vancouver later in life, where his wife now resides.

(~_~)

Curator’s Notes: The Coon Chicken Inn was a highly successful restaurant chain from the late 1920s through the 1950s. A grinning, grotesque head of a bald Black man with a porter’s cap and winking eye formed a restaurant’s entryway. The door was through the middle of his mouth. The restaurants sold southern fried Coon Chicken sandwiches, chicken pie, livers — and hamburgers, seafood, chili, cakes, and assorted sandwiches. When possible, Blacks were used as waiters, waitresses, and cooks. The grandson of its founder wrote a brief history of the Coon Chicken Inn chain. We thank him for allowing us to print his account. (from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia)

====

This restaurant started in Salt Lake City, UT. They also open stores in Seattle and Portland.

The irony about this is that the clientele was mostly WHITE. Yet for some strange reason, Blacks are the only ones seen as lovers of fried chicken.

h/t: Will Bennett–Probably one of the baddest Black historians for the Pacific North West out there. Here are his websites.

http://budurl.com/rew6

http://budurl.com/p753

http://budurl.com/abjc

BLACKINFORMANT.COM

(~_~)

Discussing matters of race in Portland

African American Experience in Portland & Oregon

(~_~)

http://www.african-american-historical-district.com/

Discussing matters of race in Portland

African American Experience in Portland & Oregon

(~_~)