The West Coast's racist history:
.... “Oregon was founded as a state, as a territory, as a white homeland. Folks who answered that call wanted to build their perfect white society.” And not in the same vein of a three-fifths-clause South, where black Americans would be tolerated, if in servitude. Oregon would be different. While the state remained in the Union—and actually proved pivotal to Abraham Lincoln’s nomination on the Republican ticket—Oregon’s founders mentioned racial unity in the state's original documents. To wit, the 1850 Oregon Donation Land Act allowed free land to whites alone. And during an 1857 vote on the constitution’s formulation, some 83 percent of participants voted to prohibit “free negroes” from living or working in the state. Chief Justice George Williams, who later served as attorney general for President Ulysses Grant, summed the sentiment, lobbying voters to “consecrate Oregon to the use of the white man, and exclude the negro, Chinaman, and every race of that character.” According to one researcher, Oregon was “the only state ever admitted with a black exclusion clause in its constitution.” There’s a reason, growing up in Portland, that my seventh-grade teacher informed us Oregon was often considered the most racist state west of the Mississippi.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/northwest-front-americas-worst-racists-119803.html#ixzz3fLaZqpUN
That applies to Oregon, but it's just as true of WA and northern CA. Cities like Seattle once had very violent riots against Chinese. Look up the anti-Chinese riots of 1885-1886 - the entire Chinese population of Seattle was dragged out of their homes and forced onto a steamer which eventually took them to San Francisco. These are the states where the public demanded Japanese-Americans (even children in orphanages) be confined in concentration camps during WWII. |
