Kaal posted:

Mmm I'd have to disagree here. Oregon has had its race issues, but they are largely overblown in popular imagination. Generally you'll find that Oregon has had a faddish approach to such things - passing short-lived laws that were never enacted or enforced. Provincial Oregon freed black slaves and banned slavery, and while it also ordered those blacks to leave the state that order was never enforced and was rescinded within a year. It later banned further black immigration, but that ban only lasted five years and it was sporadically enforced. Conservatives again tried to implement an exclusion law in the first State Constitution of 1857, but it was never enabled and was soon voided by the Civil War (although it stayed on the books until 1927 when it was repealed by popular vote). The KKK was popular in Oregon in the 1920s, but as a fraternal social organization and not as a vigilante group. When organizers began to advocate for the kind of violence and intimidation of the KKK in the South, public support evaporated and the klan fell apart.

It's true that Oregon has historically been almost entirely white, but that has largely changed over the last 40 years with the advent of urbanization. Currently the white non-hispanic demographic constitutes 77% of the population - above the national average of 64% but a far cry from the lily-white NE states like Maine (94%), Vermont (94%) or New Hampshire (92%). Oregon is fairly diverse for a Northern state - states that are far away from the black and latino populations of the South - particularly one that has been largely rural for the majority of its existence.

While Oregon has had a checkered racial history and it has a ways to go in terms of broadening its racial diversity, particularly outside the Willamette Valley corridor, the image of it as this silently racist state of whites is essentially a fiction.

http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/black-laws-oregon-1844-1857
http://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/entry/view/ku_klux_klan/