The Black Portland Neighborhood That Refused to Be Erased

A neighborhood inside Portland, Oregon, has been hiding in plain sight on the Willamette River, full of ancestral memory: it’s name is Albina. The state of Oregon was a destination for Black people who didn’t stop in cities like Cleveland, Chicago, and St. Louis. They kept going to the water, the rain forest, and opportunity in a place farthest from the South they could go. In Portland, that opportunity meant the Kaiser shipyards and the neighborhood of Vanport. Until a railroad berm failed on Memorial Day 1948 and the Columbia River drowned it in a single afternoon.

Redlining funneled the Black survivors of that flood into Albina. By the 1950’s, Albina was the critical mass of Black Portland: a community that had decided to belong to itself and was building towards owning itself.

However, Portland’s political and economic forces worked to keep Black people in a place of confinement, not ownership. The construction of Memorial Coliseum in the late 1950s, Interstate 5 in the 1960s, and Legacy Emmanuel Medical Center expansion in the early 1970s uprooted Black Portland twice in one generation. First by water, then by concrete.

A highway also cut through Greenwood in Tulsa, Rondo in St. Paul, and countless communities across the US. Displacement doesn’t just rob people of homes, but also of the compounding of community wealth.

But if that were the end of the story, Albina would not be a place I’d be interested in telling you about. 1803 Fund was created to invest in and for a prosperous Black Portland, honoring this community’s legacy through its investment philosophy and its work. As America marks 250 years, 1803 Fund is planning the next 250 and beyond, proclaiming “Tomorrow begins with us.”

Today, Albina has a reimagined vision. 1803 Fund calls one area of their investment platform, The Low End, a district in historic Lower Albina. Walking Russell Street this July, I saw a classroom of students imagining their future in a place they’ll own, art installations on land the highway once emptied, and music moving through blocks meant to stay silent.

Roughly 20 events have brought thousands of people through a part of the city that, a few years ago, was no longer a destination for the Black community. At The Albina Riverside, another District 1803 fund has deployed capital toward ownership; they are executing a vision to reconnect Black Portland to the river.

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I have spent 30 years as an activist, storyteller, and strategist. In full transparency, I work with 1803 Fund. But in all my years as a consultant, I have never written an article about a client. I am writing this one because Albina holds the beginning of a model I think is the future of our power.

Rukaiyah Adams, 1803 Fund’s CEO, grew up in Northeast Portland. She holds a Stanford law degree and MBA, was chief investment officer of Meyer Memorial Trust, chaired the Oregon Investment Council, and is part of a family that is seven generations Black Portland. She brought an investment vision and strategy home and assembled a team primarily of Black Portlanders.

In 2023, Phil and Penny Knight made the founding financial commitment of $400 million. Adams: “The next 250 years in this country, we are not guests or others. What we’re doing is not just to have a place from which we cannot be pushed out or sold or migrated out, but a shield: to protect us from policies that can destroy our communities, and to create an economy of our own.” This is disruption rooted in ancestral wisdom.

Adams doesn’t wait for permission or petition institutions that were never built for us. As she told a national audience just last week, the change comes “not because we crawl inside institutions and ask them to change, but because we build other ones that force change.” 1803 Fund answers the call to this moment with sequencing, not charity. About $8 million in investment to Black-serving organizations, beginning in late 2024, is building the foundation for future stewardship of the zip code they Invision building.

Portland joins the Bay Area, Tulsa, St. Paul, and others, where communities are done treating philanthropy as the vehicle of economic transformation and are building the vehicles themselves. Albina means bright dawn, and 1803 Fund and its partners are the bright future proclaiming that tomorrow was always destined to be here.

Remember the name 1803. Even if you never plug in, I promise you: you are going to hear it again.