Thikertown Research Paper

How does it feel to have the city you call home look at you like a pest? The minority populations of Denton and Portland know the feeling all too well. Both environments, while being incredibly hostile to them, had accumulated small African American communities- for Denton it was Quakertown and for Portland it was Vanport- which were displaced by larger forces. By the 1920s, a small African American community had accumulated in Denton and named it Quakertown. However, the growing College of Industrial Arts didn’t see Quakertown as a small community filled with hardworking citizens and decent businesses. They saw it as an embarrassment. The unpaved streets and even more dangerous playing children were threatening the reputation of the College of Industrial Arts. A vote ended to create a park where Quakertown was ended up displacing

Vanport was home to many working class people both black and white. Similarly to Quakertown, Vanport was condemned by the state. However it was not a vote that ultimately displaced the residents, but a flood that resulted in many deaths, missing persons, and the ultimate destruction of the city. The African American population, unlike Quakertown, did not have the option to create an entirely new community in Portland, but instead integrated themselves in another predominately black community: Albina. Class and race on the surface doesn’t seem to be a factor in Vanport citizen displacement, but looking deeper one must question why the state of Oregon would allow anyone to live in such a flood prone location and insist that the dikes would protect the housing there. If it were a community of wealthy white people that decided to settle there, the state would either insist on a safer location or allocate more resources to the area to ensure