In some of the discussion around the horrific hate crime in Portland over the weekend, I ran across people discussing Oregon’s odd Constitutional stipulations upon joining the Union in 1859. With the debate raging over slave vs. free states being added to the nation, Oregon decided to try to formally ban African Americans–slave or free–from entering its territory. From the Wikipedia entry on Oregon’s statehood,
In December 1844, Oregon passed its Black Exclusion Law, which prohibited African Americans from entering the territory while simultaneously prohibiting slavery. Slave owners who brought their slaves with them were given three years before they were forced to free them. Any African Americans in the region after the law was passed were forced to leave, those who did not comply were arrested and beaten. They received no less than twenty and no more than thirty-nine stripes across their bare back. If they still did not leave, this process could be repeated every six months. Slavery played a major part in Oregon’s history and even influenced its path to statehood. The territory’s request for statehood was delayed several times, as Congress argued among themselves whether it should be admitted as a “free” or “slave” state. Eventually politicians from the south agreed to allow Oregon to enter as a “free” state, in exchange for opening slavery to the southwest United States.
Oregon was admitted to the Union on February 14, 1859. Founded as a refuge from disputes over slavery, Oregon had a “whites only” clause in its original state Constitution.
Oregon’s original 1857 Constitution included a Bill of Rights modeled after the federal Constitution which included,
Section 35
Restrictions on rights of certain persons.
No free negro, or mulatto, not residing in this State at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this State, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; and the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws, for the removal, by public officers, of all such negroes, and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the State, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state, or employ, or harbor them.
According to an article by the Oregon Historical Society,
The clause was never enforced, although several attempts were made in the legislature to pass an enforcement law. The 1865 legislature rejected a proposal for a county-by-county census of blacks that would have authorized the county sheriffs to deport blacks. A Senate committee killed the last attempt at legislative enforcement in 1866. The clause was rendered moot by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, although it was not repealed by voters until 1926. Other racist language in the state constitution was removed in 2002.
The Oregon Historical Society also claims that the 1844 law mentioned in the Wikipedia article that called for the lashing of free blacks who remained in the territory was also never enforced. But that doesn’t mean that they didn’t serve their purpose. Again, according to the Oregon Historical Society,
Although the exclusion laws were not generally enforced, they had their intended effect of discouraging black settlers. The 1860 census for Oregon, for example, reported 128 African Americans in a total population of 52,465. In 2013, only 2 percent of the Oregon population was black.