- This is a neighborhood in Beaverton, Oregon, but let's not call it a typical neighborhood, because it's not.

A Black family lives here.

They live down there in that house with a moving van out front.

That's right.

They're moving.

They claim they've been terrorized and harassed by their white neighbors.

- [Crew] Cleo, scene one, take one.

(slate clanking) (Cleo laughs) - [Interviewer] Do you think that Black people are safe in this country?

- Dang, you gonna ask me a question like that.

That's very difficult.

(tense music) When these people were dispersed all around the planet, what was the purpose?

Was the purpose to make fun of them?

Was the purpose to kill them?

Was the purpose to belittle them and make them feel less than?

That wasn't the purpose.

The purpose was exploitation.

We were never to participate within this economy.

We were an instrument and a tool for this economy.

- So the Scotts are moving.

The neighbors I talked to didn't seem particularly glad or sad about their leaving.

One white neighbor did comment, "It's too bad, but there probably won't be any more trouble now."

(pencil rasping) (pensive music) (air whooshing) - What happened in Jackson, Mississippi, is indicative of the fact that unless we organize ourselves and prepare ourselves to defend our communities against any forms of repression, the same thing will happen here in Albina this summer.

We say all power to the people.

Well, the people have the power.

- My areas of study are, well, urban poverty, racial economic inequality, so that's residential segregation, the concentration of poverty.

The city of Portland used to be only on the west side of the river.

Albina, which is on the east side of the Willamette River, was a railroad town.

Portland has a very small Black community, and they maintained an idea, with Black people in a neighborhood, property values declined.

It was in 1919 that the Portland Realty Board declared that it was unethical to sell homes to Blacks or Chinese.

So that's why they segregate people, keep us out of white neighborhoods so that we don't bring their property values down.

We don't mingle with their children, okay, that we don't have integration.

Around 1945, they designated between Oregon Street, which was the Steel Bridge, and the Broadway Bridge as the area where the Black population would live, and that was about 60% of the Black population was concentrated there.

(pensive music) (air whooshing) - We have the criminal telling the victim it's okay.

"It's okay if I hit you on your head.

It's okay if I shoot you in the back of your head."

It's the criminal telling the victim this.

And we as a community, if we're ever gonna take a stand, the time now is to take a stand, and to stop being victims, and to stop reacting, and start acting, and speak up with the voice and the power that we have now before we won't even have that.

- [Interviewer] How did you become involved with the Black Panthers?

- I became involved with the party in 1968, '69 in the summertime.

We were revolutionary socialists.

We started that because of the police brutality.

If Blacks do anything wrong, jail or prison you go.

We were all from the community we built, and it was already in the heart.

- [Protestor] What do you want?

- That's how we partly won the hearts and minds in the community.

(laid-back jazz music) This was the area where the city had completely written off this area.

This is where we decided, you know, to come down and start doing community work.

Portland chapter was the only chapter that had a dental clinic.

After we started the health clinic, which was right here, a lot of dentists came forward and said, "We wanna help out the community, too."

That was started in 1970.

The clinic was called the Malcolm X People's Dental Clinic.

(birds chirping) (mellow music) - You put Black people in a particular area, and then you withdraw all services.

That area gets written off as not worthy of any expenditures because we're not deemed citizens.

We don't get the same investments for the cities in libraries, schools, police, fire, you know, public safety, whatever, so that's disinvestment.

But the flip side of disinvestment, though, is what?

It's exploitation.

It's not just that we don't invest.

It's that we extract the wealth from that area.

- My grandparents, they came to Portland and purchased a property.

(pensive music) That particular property on Sacramento Street, it had two structures on it, a seven-unit apartment building in the front and a two-roomed servant quarters behind it.

And the city had slated that for demolition.

At the city council hearing, my grandmother said that, you know, "This property is no good to me if you destroy the structures."

And so, we ended up keeping the structure in the back, and we were forced to demolish the seven-unit apartment building.

(equipment beeping) (building clattering) (equipment whirring) (building clattering) - So they never intended for us to get Albina together, you know, and the city had completely written off that area down in there, completely written it off.

And the minute the Black Panther Party moved down in there with this and the Survival Program, oh, they took an interest in it.

The party spread to 28 chapters, and was required for each chapter to have a Breakfast Program.

Breakfast was gonna be served at the church up here, you know, every morning.

The first morning, I think the first week we were serving over 125 kids a week.

Nationwide we fed over 30,000 kids.

(laid-back music) (air whooshing) (film reel clattering) - The Black Panthers are recruiting criminals and hoodlums, and encouraging them to engage in a broad range of terrorist activities.

They're the greatest threat to the internal security of this country.

We want to make it clear to Black youth that if they want to be revolutionaries, they will be dead revolutionaries.

- That was a big deal, you know, declaring the Black Panther Party the biggest threat to the internal security of the United States.

And they raided us in Portland here.

They raided us in LA the same week, Oakland, Chicago.

The raids were happening all over the country.

Well, anyway, the rest is history with the total gentrification of the neighborhood.

(pensive music) (pensive music continues) - How do you change institutional racism?

When the racism is not even necessarily just embedded in the individuals that even work there.

They might have good intentions, but the whole rule structure that's set up is unfair.

We should be demanding this federal money, this reinvestment.

It's not just about redistributing local police budgets, although those are huge.

It's about the whole federal budget that should be redistributed.

So a lot of it isn't even about us.

It's about them correcting things.

- [Interviewer] Do you think that Black people are safe in this country?

- I feel like it's a catch-22 type of a question.

Within the United States, wherever you have Black love, you're safe.

Wherever you have Black love, you're safe.

So maybe we should start working on spaces of love, of Black love and joy, and prosperity, versus safe spaces.

(pensive music) - Haven't met the Scotts, we've tried on past occasion, but there seems to be little desire on their part to become acquainted with the social strata here in the area.

- I never wanna appear prejudiced or anything else.

I just honestly have not taken the time to go over and meet her.

I did not know that there has been harassment, and I feel very bad about it.

- [Interviewer] They're going to leave.

Do you feel one way or another about that?

- No comment.

(laughs) (pensive music continues) - We feel that this document which we are presenting represents the feeling, sentiments, analysis, and intentions of Black people in Oregon.

We've attempted to show self-determination by identifying our problems without attacking superficially, by defining our interests without being dogmatically critical.

Our programs are real, not visionary.

Our concerns are based upon empirical data, not subjectivity.

With further refinement and implementation of this agenda, we will see the constitution of justice for all Black Oregonians, as well as hope for everyone else in this state.

- [Narrator] In 1981, white police officers pulled up to the Burger Barn, a restaurant in Portland's historically Black Albina neighborhood.

They threw several dead opossums at the doorstep of this small, Black-owned family business, and sped away.

(car engine revs) (police siren wails) (disembodied scream) Black Portlanders were furious at the act of racist intimidation.

And the white police officers?

They just shrugged.

"It was a prank," they said.

Hmm.

A prank.

What you think?

"I swear, on my badge, it was a prank."

(forlorn hip-hop music) Oregon had the largest percentage of KKK membership, including a Governor of the state.

♪ It was a prank ♪ 25% of every white Oregonian was a proud member of the Klan.

♪ It was a prank ♪ Domestic terrorists who tried to create this white utopia in the West for racists, they use tactics to harass and accost us, burning crosses and dead animal carcass.

Ya'll play'n' possum.

♪ Ya'll play'n' possum.

♪ When the light shines on your racism, you act like you're not conscious.

It's obnoxious, but more important, it's dangerous to ignore the history of how you've harmed us.

From Oregon's ban on Black people, they would whip every six months until they split to the constitution of the State that said only white people were legit, making Black folks undocumented.

♪ It was a prank ♪ But despite the racism, we thrived, built the Black Broadway of the West.

♪ Because we are great ♪ Maxville to Vanport, we nested, built Black businesses and investments.

♪ Because we are great ♪ It's someone in Oregon to be albinistic but black Beople brought the pigment, and Black Albina fought back the system in the Black tradition.

This is Black resistance.

In 1948, the Columbia River flood destroyed the neighboring city of Vanport, displacing thousands of Black shipyard workers.

(upbeat hip-hop music) Because Oregon was strictly segregated, they had nowhere else to go but Albina, which was already bursting at the seams.

Despite the red-lining and the bigotry, ♪ In Albina ♪ a thriving arts and entertainment industry, ♪ In Albina ♪ businesses and middle class amenities, ♪ In Albina ♪ we took the crumbs we was given and we made it a meal, laid the steel 'cause we had the skill.

And after we revealed the land had value, they tried to steal.

♪ In the city of roses ♪ The Portland Real Estate Board of Ethics made it illegal for agents to sell to Blacks and Asians.

Slowly they began to dislocate us like a broken bone.

And when that wasn't fast enough, they came and broke our homes.

I-5 and Memorial Coliseum are a mausoleum of Black death for white convenience.

Jim Crow was abolished, so 476 churches and homes were demolished.

♪ In the city of roses ♪ Portland was not unique.

All over the states, urban renewal became the strategy to erase Black people from place.

The policy's starting change from segregation to gentrification, a different name, but the results were the same.

And it's intentional, so don't try to claim that race didn't mean a thing.

Like, "Whoops, we made a mistake," like it's a prank as you walk us off the plank ♪ In the city of ♪ roses in Albina ♪ But we still here.

♪ In Albina ♪ Black folks resisted the violence of urban renewal.

Just like we resisted Jim Crow and slavery.

Just like we resist police brutality and intimidation, and just like we're resisting gentrification.

We are resilient.

We are our ancestors' vision.

♪ In the city of ♪ roses in Albina ♪ ♪ In Albina ♪ ♪ In Albina ♪ (gentle music plays) (sign buzzes) (phone buttons click) - [Automated Voice] You have four saved messages.

Main menu.

- Dean's Barber Shop is the oldest Black business in the state of Oregon.

And it's my family's business.

We opened between 1954 and '56.

But, there's no other Black businesses that have been standing as long as we have been in the same location in Oregon.

(phone ringing) The community of Dean's is people that have had a long-standing relationship with the salon.

A lot of them are third, fourth generation family members whose grandmother, great-grandmother, aunts, uncles, parents, came to the salon.

And this is just home to them.

When is your birthday?

- April 30th.

(unintelligible) - Okay, your birthday, mine's April 10th, 1953.

- You '53 too?

- We do have a few clients that come from Beaverton, we have clients that come from Salem.

People that are new to the community, the microcosm of Portland.

- ...Live with my mom.

- Your mother's down in LA?

- Yeah.

She will not leave, no matter what.

She loves her Kenyan community there.

Oh wow!

That looks really good!

- And as a Black beauty salon and a barber shop you also have that sense of home, you have that sense of community.

You have that sense of pride in only things we know about ourselves and stuff that makes us comfortable.

- I had to be by myself running and we ran all the way home.

And, uh - At midnight?

- At midnight.

- Vivienne you was fast!

(laughter) - Oh, most definitely.

You saw my hair when I came in here!

- Uh huh.

- Isn't she something?

(chuckles) - (singsong) That's what I do!

- In a beauty salon and a barber shop, is probably the only place where they can have a conversation about how their coworkers are treating them, how somebody, you know, treated them at a stop light.

How someone gave them a bad time or was disrespectful.

This is probably the only place that they feel safe that they can say what they want to say and there's no repercussions.

The bigger Portland gets and the more people are here, lot of times they don't know anywhere else to go to find other resources, but the beauty salon and the barber shop.

It's important for beauty salons and barber shops to be recognized for what they actually are.

(door opens) (laughter) - Hello!

Is she walkin' around yet?

Oh hey!

Go in the living room, mama.

She likes to look out the window and see the wildlife that walks around here, right mom?

(soft music plays) My path was to go live in Europe for a couple of years, meet the people that I know there, have a fabulous time living in Europe, drinking wine on the balcony in Italy.

My mama came to see in Italy and she was so, so, so past jet lagged.

I'm like, girl, what's wrong with you?

Why you this tired?

And she said that she didn't have any help at the shop, but she had operators, but everything was on her.

So, I said, I guess I'm gonna have to go back and help mama.

And, so, came back and helped mama.

Yeah, this is a good one.

Cool pictures, mama!

Nesha, Grandma Brown, Big Daddy.

You remember this one?

It's the same man as my daddy.

That was your husband, girl.

What's her name?

Is her name Gloria?

Mhm.

That's a cute picture of you mama.

My grandparents are Ben and Mary-Rose Dean.

They were married in Birmingham, they had three children in Birmingham.

Then moved to Portland in the 1940's.

My grandfather, while he was in highschool, he saw a story about the Oregon Trail.

So, he was really fascinated with the Oregon Trail.

He didn't know how he was ever gonna end up in Oregon, but for some reason he was just taken by the landscape and so he had made a promise to himself that he was gonna make it to Oregon one day.

(jazz music plays) During the 40's, during the World War, they started having people come to Oregon to work at the shipyards and so, he came out here and got a job, and my grandmother had already finished beauty school back in Birmingham so she was doing hair there.

And my grandmother came out, and those three little children, they bought the house on Hancock.

And they had to pay cash for that house because of redlining, and you know, they couldn't get a normal mortgage like the other people.

There's an empty lot where the salon sits now.

And my grandmother and my grandfather were able to purchase that property.

In 1954 my mom was about 14 when the salon broke ground, and they actually opened in 1956.

My grandmother and grandfather ran the salon together.

My grandfather ran the barber shop, my grandmother ran the salon.

My mom was their daughter and their employee.

You helped clean up the shop, and do whatever grandma- Nana wanted you to do, mom?

After my grandmother passed away suddenly, in 1979, her and my grandfather ran the salon together and then my mom took over after my grandfather retired.

She's the most important part of the salon, you know, in the 21st century, so people get real excited when they see her, like she's a celebrity.

And she is, she's a Dean's celebrity.

Right, Gloria Dean?

Gloria?

Right?

- Mhm.

- Are you famous?

(Overlapping chatter) - Today is Dean's day!

(laughing) We're celebrating 68 years of continuous service in the same location.

Recognizing our national historic registry confirmation that we're the oldest Black business in the state of Oregon!

- Let's give a big jump-up shout-out for Dean's, for 68 years!

(cheering) - This is a wonderful example, and this is the beginning of the city of Portland documenting history that belongs to the community, to the people of color.

- Thank you for inviting me, to be part of the celebration.

I'm Susheela Jayapal, I'm a Multnomah County Commissioner.

At this point, most of Portland knows about the history of displacement in this neighborhood, but I think what they don't really realize, even now, is how intentional it was.

And it was intentional that Black folks and Brown folks couldn't live in a lot of Portland, and so ended up living here in North and Northeast Portland.

There's a narrative out there that the process is complete.

That is not true.

We are here, Black communities here, Black businesses are here, and Dean's is a testament to that.

- We've been here all these years, and the only reason why we're here is 'cause people that come in our shop supported us.

And we wanted to say thank you to the community, and thank you to our neighbors and thank you to Black people all over Portland that just have come in this shop!

So thank you!

(applause) - Don't forget where you come from.

Like why we don't forget Dean's.

Love is sometimes all we have so Dean's is where we dream.

Dream to dare.

Dream to fly.

Dream to fiend for ways to try.

Not just try, but do.

Not just do, but be.

Not just be, but share.

Not just share, but trust.

Trust that this new 'do can give me community.

The community that I need to make it true.

True?

I know the answer for me, but ask, what can Dean's do for you?

This is no commercial but I hope you now get the point, see sixties, seventies, and eighties, I'm talkin' beauty shops, hair, heritage, heirs, heiresses, flare, Dean's it is.

Portland, where are we, redlining.

Clearly, you don't know what's backin' behind me.

That's us, B.

Black and proud, P-pride, is hair, see braids.

No box can keep this hair untrained.

Trained to be a goddess-made-queen.

A legend-made-king.

If racism had a face and lips it must kiss the ring.

Don't forget where you came from.

Like why we don't forget Dean's.

Love is sometimes all we have, so Dean's is where we dream.

Dream to dare.

Dream to fly.

Dream to fiend for ways to try.

Not just try, but do.

Not just do, but be.

Not just be, but share.

Not just share, but trust.

Trust that this new 'do can give me community.

The community I need to make it true.

True?

I know the answer for me, but ask, what can Dean's do for you?

(applause and cheering) Thank you all so much, appreciate it, thank you so much, thank you Dean's.

(applause) - Kim, you did a wonderful job cause you are fabulous like we raised you to be.

That's what I think they would say.

(chuckling) (music continues)