The Hill We Climb
… Yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect, we are striving to forge a union with purpose, to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man. – “The Hill We Climb,” Amanda Gorman, January 20, 2021
Two weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, the hill we climb towards a union with purpose has become steeper and higher than ever. The current dismantling of DEI (the culprit, really, behind last week’s DC aviation disaster?) makes this February’s Black History Month all the more notable.
As snow falls today in the Rogue Valley, I decided to offer up two doses of historical action from a handful of brave Black Oregon women. (I learned today that Oregon’s state motto is Alis Volta Propriis which means “She Flies With Her Own Wings.”) The first shares an amazing interview by Ashland’s nonprofit BASE with local hero, Dr. Geneva Craig, who marched on March 7, 1965 with Martin Luther King across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, a day that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” Craig was a teenager then.
The second offers sketches of four Black Oregon women who raised their voices — from 1862 to the present — for women’s rights and against the racism that pervaded their lives. In Oregon, this unquiet racial history began with the 1843 “lash law” (which mandated that blacks attempting to settle in Oregon be publicly whipped) and grew to include exclusive white landownership, the rise of the Klu Klux Klan, the 1950’s urban removal of Blacks in Portland, sundown towns, and decades of white nationalism.
Against this dark story, these Black women flew.
“We were trying to figure out a way to demand attention, to get our rights.”
Growing up in Selma Alabama in the 1950s, Dr. Geneva Craig straddled her Black world and her family’s love and the “White’s Only” world that surrounded her, with its hatred and signs that she wasn’t worthy.
She was not alone. Blocked at every turn, Craig and her teenage friends sought attention. They imagined storming the downtown, aware that it would give their anger a target but put them in jail. They had heard about Dr. Martin Luther King and his calls for nonviolence, but that was a distant drum — until the day MLK decided to come to Selma, Alabama and capture the nation’s attention.
“I was all in,” Craig remembers.
In this interview, produced by Ashland’s nonprofit BASE, Craig brings us into the heart of the March 7, 1965 armed police attack on unarmed civil rights demonstrators as they attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery. Having passed the organizers’ test for prospective demonstrators, requiring them to remain nonviolent in an enactment of being roughed up, Craig and her 13-year-old brother joined the march across Edmund Pettus Bridge on what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”
Craig (“Dr. Geneva” to folks here) has been an activist ever since. She went on to earn a nursing degree and a PhD, against the odds, and took her profession and dedication to civil rights from Alabama to Alaska to Oregon. She currently serves as a clinical program coordinator at Rogue Valley’s Asante Health.
Championing the rights of women and African Americans in the same breath: four stories
Note: The sources for these sketches include the Oregon Historical Society, Black in Oregon, 1840-1870 (Oregon Secretary of State), 100 Friends of Oregon, Oregon Metro News, Women of Color in Suffrage (Univ. of Oregon), Black History in Portland (TravelPortland.com).
Letitia Carson (circa 1815–1888), a former slave, farmer, midwife, was the first woman (and likely the only Black) to successfully make a land claim in Oregon under the Homestead Act of 1862. She traveled the Oregon Trail from Missouri with her common law Irish husband, David Carson, and two children, settling in Benton County Oregon.
When Carson died suddenly, she was ordered off their land, though Carson had promised her the entire property (640 acres) but hadn’t put it in writing. Unable to claim her common law inheritance, she filed suit as a free slave, seeking $7,450 for seven years of work, plus the value of livestock and other property to which she claimed she was entitled.
In May 1855, three year’s after Carson’s death, an all-white male jury determined that Letitia was due $300 for her years of “service” to her deceased husband and another $229.50 to cover court costs and legal fees. She appealed and sixteen months later, a federal judge and local jury awarded her an additional $1,399.75, including $199.75 for the unlawful sale of her cattle.
In May 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act into law which allowed both free Black people and single or widowed women to apply for homesteads. In 1868, Letitia applied for and received the 71st homestead claim in the nation, certified by President Ulysses S. Grant.
Hattie Redmond (circa 1862 – 1952), the daughter of emancipated slaves, arrived in Oregon from St. Louis when she was six, the oldest of eight children.
At the start of the 20th century, Portland’s Black residents had built a small but well-established community of several thousand along the city’s waterfront, despite racist laws that prohibited Black people from residing in Oregon. Clubs and churches formed the social bedrock of the community, bringing people together to care for their neighbors and listening to speakers advocating the pressing issues of the day. Harriet Redmond, known as “Hattie,” became a mainstay at the lectern, championing Portland’s African-Americans and women’s rights in the same breath.
Despite low turnout for many of these early meetings and regular defeat in the polls, Hattie’s push for suffrage—and the affiliated network of coalitions and aid groups she helped found in the process—gained gradual acceptance and support from local Black churches and community leaders. Ultimately, her decades of advocacy paid off when women’s suffrage was officially ratified by Oregon’s voters. Hattie celebrated by registering to vote as soon as she was able, in April of 1913.
Like many other women of color, Redmond’s life and contributions to suffrage were virtually unknown until the 21st century. Widowed in 1907 and childless, she made a living as a hairdresser, domestic worker, and a duster in a department store until becoming a janitor for Oregon’s U.S. District Court in 1910 – a post she held for 29 years.
Lizzie Koontz Weeks (1879 – 1976) Weeks, who was born in Washington, D.C. and moved to Oregon in 1904, was an activist in Portland’s African American community following Oregon’s 1912 proclamation of woman suffrage. She invited visitors to the Portland African American community as well as building networks with activists outside Oregon. In 1912, she served as a commissioner representing Oregon on the National Emancipation Commemorative Society to recognize the 50th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
In 1914, Weeks organized a meeting for women of color in Oregon to support the Republican party, which was popular with African Americans until the Great Depression. They formed the Colored Women’s Republican Club of Oregon and elected Weeks as its president. The club’s chief aim under Weeks’ leadership was getting Black women registered to vote.
In 1920, Weeks began work as a probation officer in the Multnomah County Court of Domestic Relations, over the objections of white social workers. Little else is known about her later life. She died in Portland at age 97.
Margaret Louise Carter ( 1935 – ), the first Black woman elected to the Oregon state legislature, was a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from 1983 to 1999 and of the Senate from 2001 to 2009. Republican leaders had recruited Carter to run as a Republican, but she surprised them, running and winning as a Democrat.
Carter’s story is a tribute to perseverance as much as accomplishment. A few years after graduating as salutatorian from her Louisiana high school, Carter married and had five daughters by the age of 28, but moved to Oregon to escape her abusive husband. In 1970, while working odd jobs, she enrolled at Portland State University, earning a bachelor’s degree at age 37 followed by a master’s degree in psychology from Oregon State University two years later.
Carter served as President Pro Tempore of the Oregon Senate and Vice Chair for Ways and Means. While in the House, she worked to pass legislation that ended state controlled investments in South Africa as well as legislation that made Martin Luther King Jr’s Birthday a state holiday.
Carter resigned in August 2009 and took a post as deputy director at the Oregon Department of Human Services. In 2020, at the age of eighty-five, Carter announced, “I still have work to do.”
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