Behind the Bastards - Episode 1: Uprising: A Guide From Portland: Why Portland?

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

New, from Robert Evans and his team: a complete history of the Portland Uprising, aimed at preparing you for the battles ahead.Link to Series: Uprising: A Guide From Portland Host: Robert EvansExecutive Producer: Sophie LichtermanWriters: Bea Lake, Donovan Smith, Elaine Kinchen, Garrison Davis, Robert EvansNarration: Bea Lake, Donovan Smith, Elaine Kinchen, Garrison Davis, Robert EvansEditor: Chris SzczechMusic: Crooked Ways by Propaganda Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the NFL! Download to your mobile device today at nfl.com slash mobile or in your app store. You can watch the NFL playoffs like a fan or you can prep like a scout if you listen to the award-winning Move the Sticks podcast. Subscribe now and listen to the Move the Sticks podcast on the iHeart Radio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Executive producer Paris Hilton brings back the hit podcast How Men Think, and that's good news for anyone that is confused by men, which is basically everyone. It's real talk, straight from the source.

The How Men Think podcast is exactly what we need to figure them out. It's going to be fun, informative, and probably a bit scary at times because we're literally going inside the minds of men. Listen to How Men Think on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the Portland Police Bureau. This has been declared a riot. All persons must immediately leave the area by traveling to the east. At around 10.30 p.m. on May 29, 2020, a crowd of more than a thousand people gathered in North Portland's Peninsula Park and marched downtown to the Justice Center, headquarters of the Portland Police Bureau. The direct inspirations for the march were the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Many in attendance also had a strong desire to express solidarity with protesters in Minneapolis. That's what brought Chris Wise, a volunteer protest medic, out into the streets that first night. Initially, I came out because as an African American, you know, it was that straw that broke the camel's back on just like one death too many. We are murdered by police and other law enforcement agencies at a rate of three to one when compared to the average white American. And those numbers get a little funky because, you know, obviously more white people die a year than black people in police related shootings. But there are also, you know, six times as many white people than black people. Tristan, another black Portlander, didn't go out that night, but he watched everything that happened on the live streams. And honestly, like my first impression was that it probably wasn't going to be much, you know what I mean?

I didn't expect it to blow up the way it did. I kind of felt like, because I've seen it happen in the past where, you know, there's will be some kind of like something happening like nationwide or another city. It will kind of like, you know, show up in solidarity for it and it might become something but usually it's kind of like a one off. So that's kind of what I was expecting. And so I was pretty surprised to see like how quickly it grew and then also how like how the police were responding like in like a very tear gas kind of way. Mariah is a photojournalist and a lifestyle photographer. She was out at Peninsula Park for the very start of the March. It was the beginning to, you know, something that not a lot of us knew we were going to get into, you know. But gosh, I remember being at Peninsula Park and it was really great to see everyone there.

And like it just reminds me of some, I hate that it's like a routine thing for us because it's, you know, why we're still fighting and why we've been fighting so strong. But, you know, when someone gets killed by, you know, via police brutality, everyone meets up, you know, maybe we protest for a few days and like, you know, quote unquote, we go back to like normal life. But, you know, we already haven't been in normal life since it's been a pandemic this whole freaking year. But it was really beautiful to see all the people and all the signs and the speeches. The sidewalks bordering Peninsula Park were filled with different slogans and exhortations written in chalk. One of the most striking statements was make the moment count. As it turned out, the city of Portland took that to heart. The crowd at Peninsula Park marched nearly five miles to downtown Portland. There they merged with a crowd that had gathered around the Justice Center.

The moment both groups met was powerful. You could taste the energy in the air. Portland's 2020 Black Lives Matter protests had actually started several days earlier before that mass gathering on the 29th. A handful of activists of color had begun occupying the steps of the Justice Center immediately after George Floyd's murder. One of them was Tracy Molina, an indigenous Portlander better known as Koska. Well, I remember it wasn't not long after the George Floyd story broke. A lot of us wanted to do something here, but I think most of the regular organizers kept saying, wait, you know, let's wait. Let's wait for this. Let's wait for that. And then finally, then Danielle James.

I mean, I think she's a pretty prominent Black activist in this community and stood up against Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys and other white supremacists for years. It was kind of the spark for that. You know, she said, like, we shouldn't wait in the night. The Porter said, I don't think we should wait either. I think we should do something now. And then ended up on the 27th at 1030 all meeting at ICE and starting to protest there. And then we moved sometime after midnight. We moved over to the Justice Center and slept on the steps there and plan to occupy it as long as we could. And so we stayed there. There was only maybe like four of us that slept on the steps. And then the next day, like at ICE, we had about 30 to 40 people. And then the next day after we stayed on those steps, I would say there was about 40 or 50 people that showed up in the afternoon and they did a direct action or blocked off the streets in front of the steps of the Justice Center.

And I think they did it also did a diet. And that night there was also impromptu direct action where some people, some young women sat in the doorway of the Justice Center and they brought riot police out for that. And there was at the time there was only about 20 of us and only like six people participating in the sit-in. But they still brought riot police out and they were violently removed. That made the news because one of the women, one of the women that was hit with a baton, she was actually pregnant, a black woman. And the only way I know that for sure is because after she was in the ambulance, she came, I don't know if she went to the hospital, but after she was in the ambulance, she returned paperwork from the ambulance, proving that she was pregnant and was, you know, showing some of the police officers that were still standing around. But yeah, that's how the first few days went and then we all, we're going to have a rally at Peninsula Park and then I agreed to do part of the opening and when I was there, more and more people kept coming and I was surprised that there were so many, I don't know, maybe a thousand people there. There was a lot, there was a lot of people there. I was surprised and it just kept getting bigger and bigger. The now merged crowd, which numbered at least a couple of thousand people, marched back to the Justice Center.

For a few minutes, they stood outside chanting George Floyd's name. The police were nowhere to be seen. While most of the crowd stood out in the street, a hundred or so people gathered in front of the windows of the Justice Center. They started spray-pating slogans on the glass. A few people peed on the doorway. Someone lit a small fire out in front. And then, quite suddenly, one person broke a window. The first broken window set off a frenzy and soon people were using their feet, rocks, and any tools they could find to shatter every exposed piece of glass on the building. With the windows shattered, protesters ran into the Justice Center, ransacking police offices and setting small fires. The Portland police arrived a little bit later and began showering the crowd with tear gas and flashbang grenades. Though no one knew it at the time, events had just been set into motion that would lead to more than a hundred consecutive nights of protests and tear gas. The Portland uprising had begun.

We should probably start by talking a bit about the definition of a riot. Legally, anything the cops declare a riot is a riot. May 29th is generally referred to as riot night, because after the crowd was dispersed from the Justice Center, hundreds of people ran through the streets of Portland's luxury shopping district, smashing up high-end chain stores while the police chased after them. It certainly felt like a riot, but a number of the folks that we interviewed actually disagreed. Alan Kessler, a Portland-based lawyer, pushed back on that description. I guess I disagree that even the first night was a real riot. I mean, there were some shops got burgled. There were something stolen. There was a fire in the IJC. I'm not sure that that... I don't know the intent there. Looking at the fire, looking at the piddly fires I've seen, I don't know if anybody means to burn the buildings down or to... Yeah, I don't know. It didn't seem like it. It doesn't seem... If I were going to burn down a building, I would use a hell of a lot more accelerant than it seems like people are using. I don't know. I was struck by... Even on that night, I was struck by... Excuse me. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Time to clip that. Use a lot more accelerant than context.

Yeah, please don't. Alan Kessler says. I'm trusting you all. The freedoms in your hands. We're piping this straight to Andy. You know, even that night, I was struck by Commissioner Fritz, who I have absolutely no love for, who seemed just horrified that Gucci got robbed, and didn't seem able to put that in any kind of context. I didn't see that as a riot. I didn't think that people wanted to just break shit. I think even then, it was still... It's political. It was a protest. I wouldn't recommend that people break stuff or steal stuff or set stuff on fire, but I understood the upset, and I just didn't see them in those terms. I didn't seem like... I don't remember that anybody died. I'm sure somebody was hurt, but I don't remember that it was particularly severe that evening.

I don't remember that as a violent night. I remember it as a night of property damage. Yeah, and I wasn't making a legal distinct... There was more of a moral argument. I think people put a moral import behind riot, and I don't think it was that. I don't think it was a breakdown in civilization. I think it was an extremely heartfelt frustration with a system that wasn't meeting people's needs. Max Smith, a Portland-based activist and live streamer, called it a riot light. I called it a riot light that night, I think. That seems like a riot light. They broke a couple of windows. They sacked the Apple Store, of course. Students are going to take that opportunity. If things are getting broken, someone's going to rob the Apple Store. It's dumb because you're going to get caught, but go ahead and rob the Apple Store. That's what I thought of it. Some stuff's going to get broken. That's what happened. I actually thought there was going to be some change, which we saw a couple of things. They started talking about canceling DVRT in the cops and schools and things like that. Since then, it's been fairly tame, and we haven't seen a whole lot of progress.

I felt like it worked a little bit. The point Mac made is one that a lot of activists would agree with. Property damage, they argue, is not nearly in the same moral realm as injuring or killing human beings. Mac himself was not out on the 29th, but he was most directly inspired to start protesting because of something else that happened that day, hundreds of miles south of Portland, in San Jose, California. There was a guy named Derek Sanderlin in San Jose. He was protesting against the murder of George Floyd in Solidarity with Minneapolis. And I remember waking up and getting on my phone and just flicking through things and seeing that this man had been shot in the testicles with a rubber bullet, and it required emergency. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. A surgery and he's probably never going to have kids.

And I'm looking at this dude and he's like 27 years old. He's like a black dude. He's got dreads. He wears glasses. He's got a scrappy-ass beard like mine. And I'm looking at this guy like, man, that could have been me. And then I keep reading and he was like, he was like a teacher. He taught the police about like, not targeting people or whatever, like, you know, de-escalation tactics or whatever. And I'm like, you're telling me they shot a dude that trains them? Like, this has got to be one of the craziest things I've ever heard in my life. And he could have died from this, you know, and that just made me so mad.

And I was like, it's even if it wasn't, you know, it wasn't me. It could have been me if I would have been out there. And so I was just like, that's insane. Like, this should not be a thing at all. This can't be real. Many protesters and some journalists will argue that most of the riots Portland saw this summer were not cases of protesters rioting, but were instead cop riots. After all, if people breaking windows and looting an Apple store is a riot, then police driving into crowds, throwing grenades at random and tear-gassing hundreds of innocent motorists,

probably counts as a riot too, right? This is the Portland Police Bureau. This has been declared a riot. We crook it. When P.T. Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in 1865, what rose from its ashes would change the world. Welcome to Grim and Mild Presents, an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual, and the fascinating. For our inaugural season, we'll be giving you a backstage tour of the always complex and often misunderstood cultural artifact that is the American sideshow.

So come along as we visit the shadowy corners of the stage and learn about the people who are at the center of it all. In a place where spectacle was king, we will soon discover there's always more to the story than meets the eye. So step right up and get in line. Listen to Grim and Mild Presents now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more over at GrimandMild.com. We'll always deliver it from your standpoint. We want to know what you want to know.

We talk to the legends of business sports and entertainment about how they got their start and most importantly how they make their money. Earn Your Leisure is a college business class mixed with pop culture. Want to learn about the real estate game? Unclear as how to stock market works? We got you. Interested in starting a trucking company or a vending machine business? Not really sure about how taxes or credit work? We got it all covered. The Earn Your Leisure podcast is available now.

Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Roxanne Gay, host of the Roxanne Gay Agenda, the bad feminist podcast of your dreams. Now, what is the Roxanne Gay Agenda, you might ask? Well, it's a podcast where I'm going to speak my mind about what's on my mind and that could be anything. Every week I will be in conversation with an interesting person who has something to say. We're going to talk about feminism, race, writing in books and art, food, pop culture, and yes, politics. I started show with a recommendation. Really, I'm just going to share with you a movie or a book

or maybe some music or a comedy set, something that I really want you to be aware of and maybe engage with as well. Listen to the Luminary Original Podcast, the Roxanne Gay Agenda, the bad feminist podcast of your dreams. Every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. May 29th was not the first night of Portland's BLM protests, but it was the night that set the tone for the next hundred plus nights. There was tear gas, flash bangs, armored cops, fighting demonstrators who were armed with, in the beginning, cardboard signs and water bottles. Now, we're going to cover a lot of ground in this series and it's probably best to kick this off by giving everyone an overview of what exactly happened in Portland from late May to the end of September,

because the mainstream media only really showed a portion of this story. Late on the night of the 29th, the people of Portland learned that their mayor, Ted Wheeler, had actually been out of town visiting his mother. His first response to what had happened was a tweet that started with the word, enough in all caps and ended with a promise that he was coming back now. Now was also in all caps. City Commissioner Joanne Hardesty, who was acting president in the mayor's absence, declared a state of emergency and enacted a curfew from 8pm until 6am. At this point, Portland was in the same boat as many other American cities, including New York and Los Angeles. In Portland, the curfew was not enough to clamp down on unrest, quite the opposite in fact.

Local activists like DSA member Olivia Cutby-Smith were inspired. I just thought that it was not like anything I'd ever seen before. I'd never seen that level of destruction happen at a protest before. It was exciting. I was like, we're going to start. This is huge. This is going to take off all across the country. It's happening in Portland. It's happening in Minneapolis. This is the start of a revolution.

Even knowing that that might not be true, that's the feeling that I had that night. Several thousand people gathered again on the 30th and on the 31st, nearly 10,000 Portlanders marched to the Justice Center. We actually sort of organized the protest behind the scenes and got like 10,000 people across the bridge with this author. It felt like the sky was a limit at that point. I can't believe there are 10,000 people showing up every single night. This has never happened before. We have to turn this into something. Both times, police eventually dispersed the crowd with indiscriminate tear gas use and liberal clubbing with truncheons. Thousands of protesters were gassed, but so were hundreds of motorists who happened to be out on city streets.

And dozens of houseless individuals who were gassed in their tents for no apparent reason. The curfew was rescinded in early June. It clearly hadn't helped. Next, the city began to build what would become a massive fence around the Justice Center. The protest movement started to splinter between a large group of demonstrators who engaged in daily marches that avoided police contact and a smaller group who repeatedly confronted police at the fence. At first, Portland Police would gas and grenade any group of people that drew close to the fence, along with any motorists who happened to be driving nearby. Protesters started calling it the sacred fence because law enforcement seemed to value it more than the physical well-being of Portlanders. The first fence war between protesters and police lasted most of June.

There were occasional protests at other police buildings like the PPA, headquarters of the Portland Police Union, and the North Precinct. Smaller groups of activists also engaged in what was briefly a nationwide practice of pulling down statues of famous white supremacists. On June 18th, a small number of mostly teenage Portlanders toppled a statue of George Washington. This prompted President Trump to create an executive order to protect statues, monuments, and federal property. He sent dozens of federal agents to Portland to enforce this new order. The first time the feds made a large appearance was on July 4th. That night was a turning point for a number of reasons. After weeks of declining numbers, more than a thousand Portlanders showed up outside the Justice Center to shoot commercial-grade fireworks at its windows.

They fired a few at the adjacent federal courthouse as well. The police LRAD, a car-mounted loudspeaker, started warning everyone not to shoot the courthouse. So of course, the entire crowd swarmed around the building and continued shooting it with fireworks. Suddenly, wooden hatches opened up on the front of the Fortress-like building, and the federal agents inside began tossing out tear gas grenades and shooting impact munitions into the crowd. For a few minutes, the scene resembled a cross between an acid trip and a medieval siege, with protesters bombarding the courthouse with fireworks while the feds inside pumped out gas and riot munitions. This is the oldest Jesus Christ. Yeah.

Party night, everybody. Eventually, the fights spilled out into the street, and for several hours, Portland Police and Department of Homeland Security agents engaged in a running battle with hundreds of protesters. Fireworks provided the activists with their first weapon that could disrupt a police riot line, while law enforcement responded by escalating physical violence even further. I was walking up from the JC up towards the park blocks, and there was a person who was essentially having an asthma attack and a cloud of tear gas, and they had one buddy with them, and it was just such an impossible project for that one buddy to sort of haul them out of tear gas

while they're having an asthma attack and like a panic attack and really having a rough time. Everything got more serious after the fourth. Federal agents started responding to protests downtown more often than the Portland Police Bureau. A week later, federal agents almost killed a protester named Donovan LaBella by shooting him in the forehead with a less lethal round. Slowly, the mainstream media began to realize that something strange and terrifying was happening in Portland. The national interest was finally peaked a few days later when camo-clad feds in a rental van started kidnapping people off the streets. In early July, the fourth accepted, most nightly protests only numbered a few dozen to a hundred or so protesters, but national media and the specter of federal snatch fans panicked Portland's liberal majority.

By mid-late July, thousands upon thousands of protesters were showing up in the street every night. The time between July 18th to the 30th, dubbed the Fed War, is the stuff most Americans saw from Portland in the news. Moms and dads, veterans, doctors, chefs and students gathering in front of the federal courthouse, chanting demands, banging on doors, setting fires, ripping off plywood covering the windows, and repeatedly tearing down that massive fence. Whenever the federal agents came out, a shield wall of protesters would form, deflecting metal tear gas canisters and flashbanks up into the air. People armed with leaf blowers directed gas back at the feds. In response, the feds started using experimental new weapons, including a pesticide sprayer, Jerry Rig Dispute Poison Gas. Seeing the police attack people, especially the feds, when the feds came,

they came and started attacking people in the smoke after I got a gas mask and started going into the smoke and seeing what was going on in there. I was pretty disturbed by seeing the way that they were beating people under the cover of tear gas. That was a surprise for me. I'd heard people saying, I got my eyes kicked in there, but I didn't know it was going down like that. As July came and went, so did the visible federal presence downtown. Most of the more liberal types packed it up, calling the protests a success. But while the days of walls of camouflaged feds had temporarily ended, despite reports of their withdrawal, federal presence in Portland lingered on for weeks. Dedicated activists were not fooled by the faux withdrawal. They knew the work was far from over. Throughout August, protesters gathered in front of police precincts, city buildings, and Portland's ICE facility.

Sometimes they engaged in property damage, but more often they just stood in the street, yelling at the cops until they were inevitably charged by riot lines. It was in August that Portland first saw right-wing counter-protests, generally framed as back-the-blue or MAGA gatherings. Sometimes these escalated into street brawls between proud boys and left-wing activists. On several occasions, proud boys and other right-wing vigilantes threw homemade explosives and shot paintball guns into crowds. Five rounds were even fired into the air and into crowds. The escalation continued until a Trump caravan of vehicles waving flags drove through Portland in late August. Several Trump supporters fired paintball guns and mace into the crowds as they drove by. The whole awful day ended with a member of the right-wing street gang, Patriot Prayer, being shot and killed by a white BLM activist after charging him with a can of mace.

Throughout all this, Portland's BLM marches occurred every single night, right up until late September, when a series of devastating wildfires overwhelmed Oregon and blanketed the city of Portland in a thick haze of poison. The nightly marches were halted, and the various mutual aid organizations that had started up to service the protests turned their efforts to meeting the needs of evacuees. Meanwhile, right-wing activists blamed the fires on Antifa and spent several days setting up illegal armed checkpoints and threatening people with rifles. When the rains came and the air cleared, the protests started up again. There were no longer nightly affairs, but they've remained regular occurrences ever since. And all of this begs the question, why Portland? All 50 U.S. states hosted Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020.

Many cities saw mass demonstrations, and while 93% of BLM protests were considered peaceful, numerous cities saw rioting, exchanges of gunfire, and even had buildings burnt down. But no city in the United States had as many continuous nights of protest as Portland. No city saw thousands of its citizens lay a weeks-long siege of a federal courthouse. No city experienced a thousand-person street fight between right- and left-wing demonstrators. Perhaps most importantly, no city earned the ire of President Donald Trump in the same way as Portland. It seems bizarre that this all would happen in Portland, a small city of about 653,000 people. How did it grow to become one of the most active front lines in a national battle for Black Lives and against white supremacy? It actually makes a lot of sense once you scratch beneath the surface a bit.

Here's Tristan again. Oregon was kind of founded as something of a white utopia, a place for the white man to really find his destiny and conquer this continent. And I think that's just kind of like, it's just like baked into the culture here where even like the love of the outdoors isn't like a love of keeping the environment healthy and balanced. It's just like a very commodified, we deserve this. We deserve to live in this beautiful place and we're the only ones who know how to take care of it. And obviously that's mellowed out a little bit over the decades. But I think that's still basically like what it's like the undercurrent that's like behind most of what goes on in Oregon. You can learn a lot of what you need to know about Oregon's history of racism by studying one of the state's founders, Peter Hardman Burnett. As a young man in Tennessee, he murdered a black person with a booby trap as revenge for petty theft. In 1843, he helped organize the first great wagon train of white people that headed to the Oregon territory.

He was elected to the provisional legislature and served as the territory's first Supreme Court justice. In 1844, he worked to pass what became known as Burnett's Lash Law. This stated that all black people were required to leave Oregon under penalty of being whipped in public, not less than 20 or more than 39 stripes. This punishment was to be repeated every six months until they moved. The law did include a grace period, three years for black women and two years for black men. Burnett also pushed to ban Chinese immigration into Oregon. While there are no documented instances of the Lash Laws being used, it set a clear tone for the state. Burnett's Lash Law reflected the values of the first white people who moved to Oregon. They were abolitionists in that they hated slavery, but they only hated slavery because they were revolted by the thought of living near black people. In 1848, the Oregon territorial government passed a law that banned any, quote, Negro or mulatto from living in Oregon. In 1850, the Oregon Donation Land Act gave whites and half-breed Indians their, quote, 650 acres of land from the government. All other people of color were banned from the land grants. Oregon was finally made a state in February, 1859, under its constitution, quote, No free Negro or mulatto, not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall ever come reside or be within this state or hold any real estate or make any contract or maintain any suit therein.

And the legislative assembly shall provide bipenal laws for the removal by public officers of all such free Negroes and mulattos and for their effectual exclusion from the state and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state or employ or harbor them therein. Oregon remains the only state in the union that ever banned black people from living there. Now, things have gotten better since 1859, but better is a low bar and Portland remains the whitest metropolitan area in the United States. 77% of the population is white, less than 6% is black. Today, Portland owns the distinction as one of the most gentrified cities in the United States. Oregon continues to report some of the worst graduation rates for black students in the nation and the wealth gap between white and black Oregonians over the last 50 years has widened, not shrunk. I moved to Portland like, like five and a half, six years ago, I think. And from where?

I definitely, I did from Northern California. Gotcha. Bay Area. And I didn't really, I didn't have a idea of what the city was per se, like, I'd never seen an episode of Portlandia, for instance, I just kind of moved up here. I had to be closer to family. And, and yeah, when I kind of first got here, it was like, you know, hanging out with a bunch of like hippies, a bunch of like people who love trees and to ride bikes and go hiking. It's like, oh, they love the environment and they love progressive, you know, politics and, you know, and everything's just chill. But then like, the longer I stayed here, the facade started to like fall away. And, yeah, and it's, I mean, like, I've been here for, you know, almost 60 years now, and I still, I don't quite know what to make of it still, you know.

But like recently, like with the passage of, or like with the most recent like election, you know, like, so the local measures that passed and what didn't pass. It's like, like, Oregon loves to have a black friend. That's what they like. They like to have somebody they can point to and be like, look, I'm not racist, but they don't. They're not interested in actually like challenging the like white supremacist like power structures that actually like benefit them. And, and if you like, if you agitate them on that, they just, you know, that's that's when like the Pacific Northwest like passive aggressiveness like kicks in. And they just like kind of like try to ignore you. But secretly, they're totally fucking pissed off that you dare to like insinuate their racist. But yeah, that's like, it's a really complicated thing. And I still quite haven't figured out like what makes white people take care, but it's, you know, it's messy. Another activist we interviewed Courtney is an indigenous Hawaiian person who moved to Oregon when she was 17. She recalls being stunned by how white her school was.

I like ended up going to Oregon City High School, which was like, insane. I was the only non Hispanic person that was at that school. And nobody talked to me for a really long time. And I just was kind of like, it was a culture shock because there were so many white people that I had never seen this many white people in my entire life because everyone in Hawaii is like mixed races. The majority of them are Asian or Polynesian. So I definitely was nobody really talked to me for a while and I kind of like found my little niche of people to hang out with. But yeah, like just even living in that area, I would get a lot of weird looks. And yeah, just not the most friendly people to to be around. Yeah, that's basically it's just a culture shock to just see how white Oregon is. Yeah, I didn't expect it at all. I didn't. And I was like, I knew that they were going to be like Hispanic people, but I just didn't realize that I thought maybe I would see more after like black people and especially living in a city, you know, important when you're from Hawaii and you're like Portland is just like a major city in the United States. And then coming here and not really seeing the mix of cultures was just kind of shocking. Tristan described the racism in Portland as unique in a subtle way. Because it's very, it's very covert, or, you know, tries to be very covert. And it's very like, like, well, part part of what it is is that for a very long time now they're barely been any people have come here at all like, you know, it's one of the

major cities in the country. It's wise major city in the country. And so like, to a certain extent people are, they just don't actually know what like, you know, like what like a micro aggression is or what that would be. Like, you know, I had to experience, like, just like a year, year and a half ago, maybe I was out with this group. I was like forced defender type people. And every year they go out, post this big camp out, and, you know, like, go out into the woods and do like surveys and stuff like that and try to collect data they can use to fight temper companies and shit. Like, someone just dropped the n word, like, just five feet from me, just like in casual conversation. And then I had to like, address the camp, like at breakfast I was like, Okay, so just just don't don't say that word. Like, there's no, like, even if you're just telling a story that there's no appropriate context for a white person to say that. And, and that's one of the reasons why I don't go to those fucking campouts anymore. But like, it's like that it's like they just don't they haven't been around black people, or people of color in general, and they just don't know what to do. And of course, the racism that pervades Portland is present in the Portland Police Bureau. Despite black people making up again, less than 6% of the population, Portland police use force on black people more often than people of any other race. Portland police are five to 14 times more likely to shoot impact munitions at and to forcibly restrain black residents.

At one point in the late 60s, black Portlanders accounted for nearly half of PPB's arrests. Portland's black community has been fighting against this kind of racist violence for decades. Here's Max Smith again. For me, the battle with the police began, you know, in the hip hop field. There was an event here in Portland that happened, maybe six or seven years ago, that happened at a venue called the Blue Monk. And it was a pretty big deal. I was there and I had friends who were performing at the show and the police essentially came under the guise of a capacity of a violation and brought like a seven cars and 20 something officers and shut the whole street of Belmont down. And that bar eventually actually ended up closing shortly after that. And it was a huge deal. They made a huge deal about a small thing and it went like into like national news. And even prior to that, we had been really combating the efforts of the police to kind of shut down or stifle a hip hop events in the city. Every time we wanted to have a hip hop event, it became like, you know, like a world war. And to the point that it ended up actually being a protest about the hip hop community here. And so that was a fight that we had as far as hip hop music and clubs as far as hip hop events as far as live music. They really just use the city's resources that the police, the fire marshals and the OLCC to really like shut down hip hop and really any black led events.

Alan Kessler has done a lot of digging into the early history of the Portland police. His research has revealed a century long history of Portland police involvement with hate groups, most particularly the Ku Klux Klan. I think it was the last memorial that I spent the whole weekend in the Oregonian archives basically living through World War Two. It wasn't fun. And it's outrageous. Like the Klan was on, there was a front page column, talk to a Klan's man every day for like a week. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And every other day they had the Klan on the front page anyway, but that, you know, it was like, it was, yeah, it was incredible. During the war, basically everybody, every adult white dude had a little star badge. The police would basically deputize anybody or people just go get badges made. So everybody in town had a badge. There were lots of articles in that timeframe about fake police officer polls over so and so when they sue. In 1923, a Portland Telegram article reported that the Portland Police Bureau was, quote, full to the brink with Klansmen.

The police bureau actually deputized 100 Klansmen, handpicked by the local grand dragon, and designated them Portland Police vigilantes. This was before the PPA existed, but the tradition lives on. In 2010, Portland police officer Mark Kruger was suspended for erecting a memorial to five deceased Nazi soldiers on city property. The PPA successfully sued for him to be reinstated and given an apology. When he quit in early 2020, he was the highest paid police officer on the force. I asked Mariah, a lifelong Portland resident, what her earliest memory of the police was. Here's what she told me. I would say it was when I was a child, honestly. I've had some family stuff and a family member have to go to prison. So I remember some vaguely stuff, like remember then as far as like police brutality wise. The very first like murder I remember was Kendra James that would happen like a mile from my house. And I want to say I was like 10 at the time. Kendra James was a 21 year old black mother of two. She was killed under suspicious circumstances during a traffic stop.

Her killer, Officer Scott McAllister, fired a single shot when James attempted to drive away from the traffic stop after the motion of the vehicle caused him to fall. A number of the statements he made in court were inconsistent with physical evidence required from the shooting and we don't really know exactly what happened. Among other things, the police argued in court that Portland police were trained to quote, shoot as they fall. Honestly, F the police is how I grew up. My dad is a huge like Tupac fan. So like I would grow up on hearing Tupac lyrics all the time. I'll screw the police and everything. So yeah, no screw. Yeah, no, that's how I like grew up. Yeah. Is to like not interact with them. Yeah, I've grown up, you know, how a lot of us, you know, people who are black feel like, you know, when we're being followed, profiled all that. I mean, I got profiled today in a store. Like it's still happened. It's been going on since the kid. I don't know if I don't know when it will stop. But you know, still goes on. Officer McCollister was acquitted in federal court. He got to keep his job. But even if he had been fired for the shooting, the firing might not have stuck. Nationwide, 25% of police officers fired from his conduct are reinstated because of union mandated appeals. Over the years, this has included an officer who challenged a handcuffed man to a fist fight for his freedom, and a cop who sexually assaulted a young woman in his patrol car.

In many cities, the number of police reinstated by union appeals is much higher than 25%. 70% of fired San Antonio officers are reinstated because of union appeals. The number is 62% for Philly cops and 50% for Minneapolis cops. This is part of why the people of Minneapolis burnt the third precinct to the ground after George Floyd's murder. They knew from experience that it was extremely likely Derek Chauvin, Floyd's killer, would not just avoid prison, but would soon be back on the street with a badge. In fact, as soon as Derek Chauvin and the other officers responsible for George Floyd's death were fired, police union head Bob Kroll started fighting to have them reinstated. He was concerned that they had been, quote, terminated without due process. Kroll was oddly unconcerned that the same thing was true of Mr. Floyd. The fact that police officers are extremely difficult to fire, even when they commit murder or rape on the job, is a national problem. But it is a national problem that traces back to a single place. Where else? The city of Portland, Oregon, and more specifically, to the Portland Police Association. This is one music podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network. Host N-O-R-E and DJ E-F-N sat down with artist and icon, Yay, which Vulture called one of 2021's most significant interviews. I literally had to go like Thanos and I don't want to have to be the villain. But when I went and did the Donda thing, Yay returned. And everybody had to sit back and watch the real leader. Here's our drink champs conversation with Yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

From Cavalry Audio comes the new true crime podcast, The Shadow Girls. I always wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody as he started laughing. Prosecutors described him as a serial killer, so far, kicking up these girls, getting him in a position of vulnerability when he got a hold of their neck. That was it. I'm Carolyn Osorio, a journalist and lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest. I grew up near the banks of the Green River and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name. How many times did you bring the camera to the river? One time. Just one time. He started fantasizing about having sex with his mother, then he fantasized about killing her. But this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer. It's about the victims. We stayed in the woods. He always liked to go in the woods, to all of the kind of frames.

Do you know how he feels about prostitutes? Listen to The Shadow Girls on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The Portland Police Association, or PPA, is Portland's police union. And in a way, it's THE police union, because the PPA is actually the oldest functioning police union in the United States. Police had attempted to unionize several times before the PPA was established in 1942, but Portland was the first city to get it right. And the PPA has served as a model for the rest of the nation's law enforcement ever since. Every other police union in the United States is based off of the Portland Police Association. And one of the many trends the PPA set was in suing to reinstate fired officers.

This story starts on the night of March 12, 1981, when two Portland police officers from the North Precinct dumped four dead possums in the doorway of the Burger Barn, one of Portland's few black-owned businesses. The use of the word possum as a derogatory term for black Americans dates back as far as 1830. The owner of the Burger Barn, George Pau, called the police commissioner to report the incident and claimed that it was only the latest example of police harassment his business had faced. An internal investigation was opened and the officers responsible, Ward and Galloway, admitted their guilt immediately. Their identity was initially kept hidden thanks to a clause in the PPA contract with the city that protected officers from having their names disclosed during disciplinary proceedings. This is another one of the innovations that the Portland Police Association brought to police departments nationwide, by the way. The possum incident happened at an awkward time for the Portland Police. Several officers had just been fired and convicted of faking evidence and using illegal drugs on the job.

Nearly 100 criminal cases had to be thrown out because of falsified evidence. Public opinion of the police bureau was low, and when Portlanders started marching and demonstrating to demand that officers Ward and Galloway be fired, the police commissioner was only too happy to oblige them. Enter Stan Peters, the most powerful union president Portland has ever had. Peters took to every local news show in town. He circulated petitions. He even organized a mass protest march made up of Portland police officers and their families. He forced the city government into arbitration, which ended with both officers being rehired and given back pay. There's actually a book about the Portland Police Association. Pickets, pistols and politics. Alan Kessler informed us of its existence. Here's what it says about the court case that resolved the possum incident. Quote, the city of Portland versus Ward and Galloway case is still the leading police discipline case in the United States and in labor law circles is the arbitration decision referred to the most often.

Its legal nomenclature is simply City of Portland. And so in the end, it really isn't that odd that the city of Portland wound up as ground zero for a battle against white supremacy and police brutality and a battle for black lives. It's actually been that for a very, very long time. As much as people have just kind of started to contextualize how Antifa has been fighting against these chuds here for years, you know, it actually isn't just the last couple of years where it's been in the news. It's been going on for decades in Portland. It's always been a level, especially like in Southeast Portland, it's always been like even like in the 80s, it's been like, you know, these white skinhead groups and the sharps. It's always kind of been like a race war between the white folks in Portland, especially in the southeast. Over the course of the summer of 2020, Portland's wounds were exposed to the world. After George Floyd's gruesome murder accelerated long brewing unrest across the country and even the globe, the Northwest's liberal bastion was forced to reckon with its own deeply anti-black traditions, while also becoming an unlikely epicenter in a movement for black lives that had taken the world by storm.

Thousands took to the streets in a battle that would be fought against a corrupt police force, Trump's federal agents, right-wing vigilantes, and even at times between protesters themselves. Through it all, people banded together to support each other and build the infrastructure that would propel the city to 100 plus days of protests that even the strongest tear gas couldn't end. In the next episode, we will delve into how a disorganized crowd of angry Portlanders turned themselves into a movement that could stand up to the worst violence the Trump administration could throw at it. This is Roxanne. This is Roxanne. This is Roxanne Gay, the host of The Roxanne Gay Agenda, the bad feminist podcast of your dreams. Each week, I talk to an interesting person about feminism, race, writing and books, and art, food, pop culture, and yes, politics. We can't escape politics. Listen to the luminary original podcast, The Roxanne Gay Agenda, every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space, with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Welcome to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.