Your Reckoning with Racism team will be including brief notes in each weekly newsletter this month to highlight Black History. We begin with an opportunity to learn, explore, and follow your curiosity wherever it may take you. The theme for 2025 is African Americans and Labor, focusing on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds–free and unfree–has shaped history from 1619 to the present.
For Week 2, we’re directing your attention to the Oregon Black Pioneers website and, specifically, to their History Maps tool. Please take some time to explore History Maps, following your interests and curiosity wherever they take you. You’ll be glad you did!
Because of our work on the St. Michael’s land story, we clicked on the map point closest to St. Michael’s and followed the thread as far as we could (within reason) not knowing what more we might learn about our neighbors and neighborhood history.
Our closest historic neighbor was Gertrude Eakin, residing at 1813 NE 44th Avenue (now The Grocery Outlet). Her Black Pioneers map listing has two brief notes: USO Management Board; General Secretary, YWCA.
We googled Gertrude Eakin and found her obituary online. She was a white woman, born in Union County in 1893. Her father was a circuit court judge and later a justice of the Oregon Supreme Court. Ms. Eakin graduated from Salem High School and Willamette University. She received an outstanding alumni award from Willamette in 1962. Ms. Eakin was a Presbyterian Elder and a board and executive committee member of the Portland Council of Churches, the predecessor to Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon. She died in 1979. What does Ms. Eakin have to do with Black history in Portland?
Interestingly, it relates to labor and the labor shortages during World War II, when over one million Blacks migrated out of the South to work primarily in war industries in the North. During the war years, Portland’s Black population increased from 2,000 to 20,000, largely to meet labor needs in Portland’s shipyards and related heavy industries. Black laborers were not welcomed with open arms. They were generally consigned and confined to the most dangerous, grueling, menial, and dirty work that the factories had to offer. Housing was limited and strictly segregated. Labor unions barred Blacks from membership.
The in-migration of Black workers also affected resident Black communities. In 1906, Black women had established a segregated branch of the YWCA, constructing a new facility in 1926 at the corner of North Williams and Tillamook streets, within the segregated black neighborhoods of North and Northeast Portland. During the war, the USO approached the Williams Avenue YWCA seeking to rent their facility to serve the recreational needs of Black servicemen. The women of the YWCA agreed but would need another facility.
This is where Gertrude Eakin comes in. She was the General Secretary of the YWCA in 1944 when she decided, with other leaders, to restructure the YWCA in Portland to eliminate segregated branches altogether. Black and white women would use and share a downtown facility together. This early experiment in integration and the practice of equal human dignity was far from perfect and driven somewhat by necessity. However, a group of more or less ordinary women had the vision and took the initiative to try something radically new, engaging in voluntary desegregation a decade before the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Bravo to our neighbor Gertrude and to all of the Black women of the YWCA in Portland! You can learn more at these links: https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-records/reply-to-questionnaire-on-interracial-practices-in-the-ywca/ and https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/52672292/gertrude_margaret-eakin.
