The fact that they even bothered to bring millions of blacks over here as slaves even thought they absolutely hate us and want this to be "a white country" continues to dumbfound me.
Today Portland is one of the most multi-cultural small cities our country has from what I saw.
The south and mid-west have always been racist and still are for the most part. In the same time period as the article in the op post and prior to the Civil War there was also racial violence in Chicago, Boston, and New York. It's not news to anyone.
Would you like to compare Portland to cities in the south today? I don't think so.
The fact that they even bothered to bring millions of blacks over here as slaves even thought they absolutely hate us and want this to be "a white country" continues to dumbfound me.
Having g been born and raised in New Hampshire where the population is low, but has an incredibly low racial diversity rate, I am curious if their were similar laws written into other northern States. I always just assumed that since north States outlawed slavery and then places like Maine, NH and Vermont have barely any large cities/ job opportunities that it was almost natural that people who weren't from here wouldn't move here, hence the lack of blacks.
Got me wondering if it's more sinister than that after reading that.
The skinheads had been hanging around Southeast Pine Street for months. Groups with names like the Preservation of the White American Race and East Side White Pride had been recruiting teenagers from Portland’s metal-music scene throughout 1988.
Skinhead culture blended nearly unnoticed into the punk aesthetic. A few skinheads had been charged with assaults early in the year. But the city’s refugee coordinator told WW that spring that the racist gangs didn’t pose a threat to new immigrants.
Then skinheads went after Mulugeta Seraw.
Seraw, 28, had come to Portland from Ethiopia to study business at Portland Community College. He sent money he made as an Avis airport bus driver to his family.
In the early hours of Nov. 13, 1988, skinheads brawled with Seraw and two friends, also Ethiopians, outside Seraw’s apartment at Southeast 31st Avenue and Pine Street.
Steven Strasser and Kyle Brewster kicked Seraw and the other two with steel-toed shoes. A third swung a bat into Seraw’s skull: Twenty-three-year-old Ken Mieske, a metal-band frontman known as Ken Death. Mieske had become a local star in late 1987 in an experimental semi-documentary, “Ken Death Gets Out of Jail,” by an up-and-coming filmmaker named Gus Van Sant.
The killing forced Portlanders to confront the white supremacists in their midst. “It pulled the curtain back about Portland’s racial reality,” says Randy Blazak, a Portland State sociology professor and chairman of the Coalition Against Hate Crimes.
Mieske and his two co-defendants took plea bargains. But the real court fight was just starting.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate-group watchdog, filed suit in Multnomah County Circuit Court against a California white supremacist named Tom Metzger. Metzger, a TV repairman, had been recruiting Portland skinheads to his organization, White Aryan Resistance, in hopes of sparking a race war.
In October 1990, a jury decided Metzger had incited the Portland skinheads and awarded Seraw’s family $12.5 million. The verdict bankrupted Metzger’s organization. The verdict also helped set the legal precedent that hate groups could be held liable for inciting violence, even if they hadn’t directly committed the assault.
For Portland residents, the verdict reassured them the threat came from the outside. The actual lessons from Seraw’s murder are less clear.
In her 2003 book, A Hundred Little Hitlers, Elinor Langer wrote that Mieske committed the murder fueled as much by drink and a culture of street fighting as by white supremacist ideology. “Like certain noxious sulfurs bubbling up at times from beneath our Northwest volcanoes,” Langer wrote, “it was a spontaneous eruption. The death of Mulugeta Seraw did not need an ‘outside agitator’ to explain it.”
Mieske died in prison of hepatitis C in 2011. Brewster is out of prison, still proclaiming racist beliefs. Strasser quit the white supremacist movement while serving his sentence.
James McElroy, the SPLC lawyer who led the fight against Metzger, adopted Henock Seraw, Mulugeta’s son. Henock became a commercial airline pilot.
“His father came here to go to junior college,” McElroy says. “Henock ended up coming to this country and walking in the footsteps of his father’s dreams.”
That wonderful liberal diversity in Portland @88m3 tried to tell us about.
http://www.wweek.com/portland/mobile/articles/articleView/id:23424/current_page:
I'm not sure how you compare, Oregon, a sparsely populated state, to the south and the midwest, which are entire regions, but two things for sure are 1.) Oregon is a notorious hotbed of skinhead/white supremacist activity and membership and 2.) cacs caccing is not limited by state or regional borders.for reference I wasn't even alive when this altercation took place
there are racist groups in Oregon but mostly in the south and east.
I'm not sure how you compare, Oregon, a sparsely populated state, to the south and the midwest, which are entire regions, but two things for sure are 1.) Oregon is a notorious hotbed of skinhead/white supremacist activity and membership and 2.) cacs caccing is not limited by state or regional borders.
By attempting to downplay the racism of places like Portland and other northern areas and trying to pin cism on the south and midwest, you are actuallyfor cacs who would stomp you out with steel-toed doc martins if they caught you alone at night.
But I've already proven to you with statistics, links, and videos that Portland is about as diverse as a box of Saltines and is a hotbed of skinheads and white nationalists.Yeah, it's crazy how the SPLC attorney more than likely white adopted the killed man's son and his son is now a commercial pilot who will make hundreds of thousands a year,American dream and what not..
I said city, I was specifically talking about Portland. You're moving the goal posts. I've already said there are racists in Oregon it isn't a secret but to act like they're is a culture of it in Portland itself is a petty lie.
From what I saw of Portland it was a fairly cohesive, young, diverse city with a significant population of asian, black, indian, mixed race community and my point was you don't see that in most American cities.
You're clearly stretching this into something that I haven't even said or done.