Resources
Albina History and Culture
This Resonance Ensemble short film features an Emmanuel Displaced Persons Association roundtable, Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani, composer Darrell Grant, and singer Damien Geter at Dawson Park.
Artist Cleo Davis screened Root Shocked at PICA’s exhibit last spring. Read the OPB article to learn more, and watch the trailer below.
A brief, very top-level history of the neighborhood.
An audio, self-guided walking tour with music and oral history, focused on the Black churches and congregations of Northeast Portland.
A Black history walking tour of Portland. There are multiple dates in June-August, 2025. Tickets need to be purchased in advance.
Albina Music Trust offers a self-guided Albina Soul Walk, which includes music and oral history.
A community archive of historical audio, photographs, film/video, printed materials, etc.
“Bleeding Albina: A History of Community Disinvestment, 1940‐2000”
Using census data, oral histories, archival documents, and newspaper accounts, this study analyzes residential segregation and neighborhood disinvestment over a 60-year period.
- “Helping Each Other to Help Ourselves”: Viviane Barnett, the Green Fingers Program, and Black Agrarian Upbuilding in Albina
- “Black and Blue: Police-Community Relations in Portland’s Albina District, 1964–1985”
- “The Case of Cheryl D. James: Institutionalized Racism and Police Violence Against Black Women in Portland, Oregon (1968–1974)”
- “’A Menace to the Neighborhood’ : Housing and African Americans in Portland, 1941-1945”
“Troubled Waters in Ecotopia: Environmental Racism in Portland” by Ellen Stroud
This piece is not directly about the Albina neighborhood, but addresses environmental racism around the Columbia Slough and the impact on Black Portlanders who were displaced from Albina in the 1950s-70s.
Current/Past Student Projects, Course Materials, or Other L&C-Developed Materials
Students in ENVS 160 (Introduction to Environmental Studies) in 2023-24 and 2024-25 visited Albina to engage in structured dialogues with members of First A.M.E. Zion congregation, one of the oldest Black congregations in Oregon. The dialogue involved EcoTypes, an online self-survey and initiative exploring differences in underlying environmental motivations and U.N. Sustainable Development Goal priorities, ultimately promoting dialogue and respect across difference. Documentation from the courses include data visualizations, photographs, and student writing.
Graduating Environmental Studies Program seniors did a team capstone spring semester 2025 in collaboration with residents of Albina, starting with a needs assessment, then focusing on one neighborhood priority: Tree of Heaven, an official nuisance tree in Portland—a “plant out of place.” Their capstone expanded this focus to consider historic race- and class-based displacement of people from the neighborhood as well—thus their project’s final title.
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All resources students shared with Albina neighborhood