Week 5 questions

1 Race, Immigration, Sexuality

and the History of Oregon, 1788-1927

compiled by Beth Hutchison (revised 2019)

Color code: National blue type, Oregon black type

1788 Marcus Lopez, cabin boy with Capt. Robert Gray,

becomes first person of African descent to reach Oregon, where

he dies, reportedly killed by Natives.

1790 U.S. Naturalization Act limits naturalization of immigrants

as U.S. citizens to “free white persons of good character” and

also confers citizenship on children born abroad to U.S. citizens

while specifying that the fathers of such children must have

been resident in the U.S. at some point in order for their

children to be considered citizens.

1805 An enslaved Black man known as York accompanies

Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery as William Clark’s servant.

1811 A published report describes a member of the Kutenai

tribe in Oregon who dresses like a man and has a “wife.”

1830-1834 Diseases, especially seasonal malaria

outbreaks, ravage the Native populations of the Columbia and

Willamette Valleys, reducing their numbers from an estimated

15,000 to less than 2,000.

1832 The first school in the Oregon Territory is established to

teach the sons of white fathers and Native mothers.

1833 First school for white students opens in the future

Marion Country, Oregon.

1811 A report is published about a woman in the Kutenai

tribe in Oregon who dresses like a man and has a “wife.”

1843 Champoeg territorial government adopts a measure

requiring that enslaved people must be freed by their owners

and stipulating that all African Americans must leave the

territory within three years.

1843 Daniel Waldo and his household, with enslaved people

including a young girl known as America Waldo (see 1863),

arrive in the Oregon Country. They settle in the area outside

Salem now known as the Waldo Hills.

1844 Slavery is declared illegal in the Oregon Country.

Territorial government, including Daniel Waldo, passes the

“Lash Law,” requiring that Black people in Oregon—whether

free or slave—receive 20-39 lashes “every six months until he or

she shall quit the territory.” A move to replace the whippings

with forced labor is passed in December 1844 but repealed

before it would have gone into effect.

1844 Robin and Polly Holmes and their daughter, Mary Jane,

arrive in Oregon as slaves of the Nathaniel Ford family. In 1850

Ford freed Robin, Polly and their youngest child, but refused to

free Mary Jane and two siblings who had been born in Oregon.

(See 1853)

1848 Oregon’s Provisional Government passes the first

Exclusion Law in the Oregon Country, making it illegal for any

“Negro or Mulatto” [now-disused terms, the second of which

refers to people of mixed white and African heritage] to reside

in Oregon Territory. After boardinghouse and saloon operator

Abner Hunt Francis becomes one of the first Black residents of

Portland, 200+ white people sign a petition urging that he be

allowed to remain.

1848-1879 Three decades of increased conflict between Whites

and Indian tribes started with the Cayuse War, continuing until

the region’s Indian tribes are forced onto and confined to

reservations on remote, semiarid land east of the Cascades;

tribes of the coast and Willamette Valley balk at the move but

only a few remote parcels of land not yet encumbered by white

claims are obtained as reservation land.

1850 A new code of law adopted by the Oregon Territorial

legislature does not include sodomy as a crime, thus technically

making it legal.

1850 The Oregon Donation Land Act becomes law, granting

free land to white settlers/occupants of public lands over 18

who were or intended to become U.S. citizens, including

“American half-breed Indians.” African Americans and Native

Hawaiians (referred to at the time as Kanakas) are explicitly

excluded from owning land, whether or not they had previously

held deeds to it. By the time the Act expired in 1855,

approximately 30,000 white immigrants had arrived and 7,000

had claimed 2.5 million acres of land, most of it west of the

Cascades.

1851 Jacob Vanderpool, a saloonkeeper living in Salem,

becomes the only person known to have been legally ejected

from the Oregon Territory because of his skin color.

1853 After a long court battle, Ford is ordered to free the

three Holmes siblings, but Mary Jane continues to live with the

Fords until her 1857 marriage. Although she had been declared

free by the court, her husband Reuben Shipley (who had been

freed upon arriving in Oregon in 1853), was forced to pay Ford

$750.

1853 A new criminal code in Oregon makes sodomy a crime;

penalty is 1 to 5 years in prison.

1854 Oregon’s Exclusion Law is repealed.

1855 Law is passed preventing mixed-race males from

becoming citizens.

2 1855 U.S. Naturalization Act of 1790 is extended to confer

citizenship to children with citizen fathers and non-citizen

mothers.

1855 After gold is discovered in southern Oregon, pro-

slavery individuals try to form a new state by joining southern

Oregon with northern California. It failed when Californians

rejected the idea of reducing the size of their state.

1856 Oregon removes remaining Native Americans in

Willamette Valley to reservations.

1857 Black Exclusion clause to the Oregon Constitution is

ratified by popular vote, making it unlawful for any person of

African descent to move to Oregon: “No free Negro, or mulatto,

not residing in this State at the time of the adoption of the

constitution, shall come, reside or be within this State, or hold

any real estate” (removed in 1926). As a result, the African

American population had the choice of leaving the state or

suffering southern-style segregation throughout most of the

20th century.

1857 Also passed: “No chinaman (sic), not a resident of the

state at the adoption of this constitution, shall ever hold any

real estate or mining claim” (repealed in 1946).

1857 Pro-slavery separatists in southern Oregon fail to carve

a new federal territory out of the southwestern region of the

Oregon Territory.

1858 Oregon elects its first state officials, many of whom,

including Governor "Honest John" Whiteaker, were well known

for their pro-slavery views. Pervasive racism along America's

West Coast inspires many Black settlers to head north to British

Columbia.

1859 Oregon becomes the first state admitted to the Union

with an exclusion law written into its state constitution.

1860 Oregon’s population increased from 11,873 to 60,000

between 1850 and 1860.

1861 The Knights of the Golden Circle, an anti-union, pro-

slavery group, opened chapters in many Oregon communities,

aiming to secede from the U.S. and create a Pacific Coast

Republic.

1862 Oregon adopted a law requiring all Black people,

Chinese, Hawaiians (Kanakas), and “Mulattos” residing in

Oregon to pay an annual tax of $5. If they could not pay, the law

empowered the state to press them into service maintaining

state roads for 50 cents a day.

1863 America Waldo marries Richard A. Bogle, a native of

the West Indies. They move to Walla Walla and become

successful ranchers; Richard Bogle later co-founds the Walla

Walla Savings and Loan Association.

1866 The Oregon Legislature passes an anti-miscegenation

law making it unlawful for any white person to "intermarry with

any Negro, chinese, or any person having one-fourth or more

negro, chinese or kanaka [Native Hawaiian] blood, or any person

having more than one-half Indian blood" [all

spellings/capitalizations per original]. This law was not repealed

until 1959.

1866 U.S. Civil Rights Act, passed by Congress, marked the

birth of the legal battle to end discrimination. Through the law,

citizenship and civil liberties were extended to all persons, with

the exception of American Indians. This made Oregon’s existing

exclusion laws unconstitutional, but they remained on the books

until 1959 when the law was formally changed.

1867 With the African American population of Oregon

totaling 128 in the 1860s, Portland assigned Black and biracial

(known then as mulatto) children to a segregated school.

1868 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting

citizenship to African Americans, passes in Oregon after failing in

1866.

1870 The 15th Amendment, granting Black men the right to

vote, is added to the U.S. Constitution despite failing to pass in

Oregon and California. The federal law supersedes a clause in

the Oregon State Constitution banning black suffrage.

1871 A Portland jury finds for a man seeking damages for

slander, having been publicly accused of sodomy.

1871 Judge Matthew Deady rejects a group of homoerotic

prints of artwork from Pompeii and Herculaneum that had been

proposed as donations to the public library. “I would not have

believed such pictures ever existed,” he confides to his diary.

1875 Named after its sponsor, U.S. Rep. Horace F. Page, who

introduced it to "end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and

immoral Chinese women". The Page Act was the first U.S. law to

specify and restrict immigration by those deemed

“undesirable”: anyone entering from Asia as a “forced laborer;

any Asian woman who might find work as a prostitute; anyone

considered by their home country as a convict. The law had little

effect on male Chinese laborers, but the ban on Asian women

was widely enforced although sex work was very common

among women of all nationalities in the U.S. West at the time.

1880 By this date, most Indians of the Northwest had been

forced onto reservations. GET THESE DATES CONSISTENT

1880 First-generation Japanese immigrants known as Issei

(after the Japanese word for one), arrive in Oregon. Although

they could legally own property, Japanese were classified as

“aliens ineligible to citizenship” under American naturalization

law.

3 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited all immigration to the

U.S. by skilled and unskilled Chinese laborers, including miners,

for 10 years. It was extended for another 10 years in 1892 and

made permanent in 1902. (It was repealed by the Magnuson Act

of 1943, when the Chinese nationalists were seen as important

allies in the World War II Pacific region.)

1880’s White mobs drive Chinese immigrants out of Oregon

City, Mount Tabor and Albina (the latter two are now

neighborhoods of Portland). By 1886, a series of threats, round-

ups, and bombings had driven approximately half of the Chinese

residents from Oregon.

1883 A failed attempt is made to amend the Oregon

Constitution to recognize the right of Black men to vote, as

provided by the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Underscoring the degree of White racism in the state, similar

attempts to revise the state constitution in 1895, 1916, and

1927 were also unsuccessful.

1884 In Elk v. Wilkins, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the

Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution does not allow a

person born into a recognized Native tribe to voluntarily

separate from the tribe and claim U.S. citizenship.

1884 Congress extends all the laws of Oregon to the Alaska

territory, making sodomy illegal there.

1884 12,000 of the Central Pacific Railroad’s 13,500

employees are Chinese immigrants, are paid $26-$45 per month

for a 12-hour day, 6-day work week and had to provide their

own food and tents. White workers receive about $35 per

month along with food and shelter.

1885 In his translation of The Arabian Nights, Sir Richard

Burton defined a “Sotadic Zone” (comprising the European and

African lands bordering the Mediterranean along with the area

eastward from Egypt to India) where, he claimed, male same-

sex sexual relationships were both common and essentially

accepted. This contributed to a heightened awareness of same-

sex sexualities among upper class whites in England and North

American while advancing the assumption that Anglo Saxons

and Northern Europeans were inherently unlikely to engage in

such sexual acts, just as those from the “Sotadic Zone”—

including Greece, Italy and southern France and Spain--were

much more likely to do so.

1886 First person is sent to the Oregon State Penitentiary for

committing sodomy, even though it has been a crime in Oregon

since 1853.

1887 A ban on interracial marriages in the Washington

Territory is lifted.

1887 The Dawes Act abolishes American Indians’ communal

land ownership. In an attempt to encourage assimilation into

white society, the act gave each eligible Indian up to 160 acres

of reservation land and American citizenship. Any remaining

land was sold to white homesteaders.

1888 In a trial in Enterprise, Oregon, three men are acquitted

of murder for the massacre of at least 34 Chinese gold miners.

(The ringleaders fled and were never tried.) Rumors claim from

$3,000 to more than $50,000 worth of gold was stolen from the

miners. The events were little-known until in 1995 a county

clerk opens an old safe in the Wallowa County Courthouse and

finds documents relating to the murders and trial.

1889 Washington State constitution includes a ban on racial

discrimination in schools.

1889 Twenty-year-old Charles Cowan is committed to the

Oregon State Penitentiary for sodomy; his record notes, “Anus

opening large & scarred from plying his trade of Sodomist.”

1890 Registration records for two men at the Oregon

Penitentiary show the crime of which they were convicted:

“Sodomy !” (No such exclamations for murderers or rapists.)

1890 U.S. Census shows 15.5 males (all ages) for every

female in the Northwest. 41% of men over 15 in the Northwest

were married; nationally, 54% of men over 15 were married.

1890s Reduction in Chinese immigration contributed to a

dramatic increase in Japanese immigrants to Oregon, typically

young males arriving without families. Many restaurants and

businesses posted signs reassuring customers that no Asian

workers were employed there.

1894 A neighbor reports a male couple in Portland to the

police and both are jailed.

1898 In his diary, Oregon-born itinerant laborer Hayes

Perkins notes a “homo-sexual” traveling with his “punk.” Perkins

states “they act like two sixteen-year-old lovers more than two

friends.”

1898 Citing the 14th Amendment, U.S. Supreme Court

decision United States v. Wong Kim Ark granted citizenship to an

American-born child of Chinese parents who had established

residence in the United States, setting precedent for subsequent

practice.

MEDICAL 1899 The Portland Medical Society hears a paper

read by a doctor concerning syphilis of the tonsil.

1890s With the further development of downtown businesses,

Portland’s vice district migrates a few blocks north to the area

bounded roughly by Ankeny, Irving, Eighth, and the Willamette

River. By 1900, the district housed 62% of the city’s African

Americans. By 1910, the area held the city’s highest

concentrations of individuals who were foreign-born, had one or

more parents who were immigrants, or were Black.

4 MEDICAL 1903 The Northwest Medical Journal reviews

Havelock Ellis’s work, Analysis of the Sexual Impulse—Love and

Pain—The Sexual Impulse in Women, and engages in its first

discussion of homosexuality.

1903 The Advocate begins publication as a weekly

newspaper for the “intelligent discussion and authentic diffusion

of matters appertaining to the colored people, especially of

Portland and the State of Oregon.” Articles and editorials about

segregation, lynching, employment and other issues help inform

readers about Jim Crow laws and the need for civil rights on the

local, state, and national levels.

1904 Neighboring downtown Portland parks, Lownsdale and

Chapman, are informally gender segregated; respectable

women and children stroll in Chapman Park, protected from

mingling with strange men, while in Lownsdale, an exclusively

male and much-used public place, men are able to discreetly

meet potential sexual partners.

1905 A Portland judge sets a national precedent by allowing

theaters to segregate customers by race.

1906 Oregon’s only recorded lynching. In Coos Bay, Alonzo

Tucker, a Black man, was arrested and charged with raping a

white woman. A mob of several hundred men shot him twice

and hanged him from the Fourth Street Bridge in clear view of

the local high school. No one was ever charged with his murder.

1907 The informal Gentlemen’s Agreement between Japan and

the U.S. eased tensions by Japan ceasing to issue passports to

those wishing to emigrate to work in the continental U.S. and

the U.S. agreeing to allow those Japanese immigrants already in

the U.S. to remain and to permit their wives, children and

parents to join them in the U.S.

1907 Theodore Kruse purchases the Belvidere Hotel at

Fourth and Alder in Portland; its restaurant, a “bohemian” place,

offers a separate “Gent’s Dining Room” with mirrored walls and

palm trees. The restaurant is cited by newspapers for frequent

liquor law violations and is called a “front” for “immoral activity”

Involving men. (See 1911)

1910 Working on sugar beet farms and on railroad, Oregon

has seventh highest number of Mexican-born migrants outside

the Southwest. Farm workers were the first Mexican families to

settle permanently in the state.

1910 79% of the residents of Portland’s Third Ward, where

transients stayed, were male. 56% of the residents were white

and native citizens of the U.S.; the other 44% were Asian,

African American, Native American, and (the term then used by

the U.S. Census) “foreign-born white.”

1910 U.S. Census shows 14.1 males for every female in the

Northwest.

MEDICAL 1911 Dr. Marie Equi presents a paper to the

Multnomah County Medical Society regarding her treatment of

a male patient who had gonorrhea of the throat.

1911 Businessman Theodore Kruse is reported missing by his

wife. When another woman is suggested, his wife responds for

publication, “I never knew of his having associated with another

woman. I laugh at such a suggestion because I had virtually to

drive him out with the young men of his acquaintance to attend

banquets or other social affairs.” Kruse later is seen traveling

with various men. Upon returning Portland after several

months, he and his wife are divorced.

1912 Five young men, including one couple, out for a

nighttime drive in what is now Lake Oswego, are accosted by a

robber on the highway. Two of the men are killed and two

others are injured. During the subsequent trial, a defense

attorney leads one of the men to acknowledge that he and one

of the deceased men were sitting intertwined on the back seat.

1912 Harry E. Allen is arrested in Portland on a Mann Act

charge. When the authorities deem the accused to be a woman

(“Nell Pickerell”) dressed as a man, the Mann Act charge is

dropped, replaced by a charge of vagrancy. Isabelle Maxwell is

travelling with Allen, who claims they are married. Portland

policewoman Lola Baldwin comments harshly on the duo in her

official records.

1912 The Portland “Vice Clique Scandal” (frequently called

the “YMCA Scandal”) names some 68 men are, including

prominent business owners, as engaging in same-sex sexual

acts. The Oregon Journal coins the term “vice clique”—implying

that the relationships are more than casual or anonymous—and

it catches on. After a few of the named men commit suicide and

a number of trials, at least four men plead guilty to charges

involving private, consensual sexual activity. Three convicted

men appeal their convictions and are subsequently freed by the

Oregon Supreme Court.

1912 In the wake of the Vice Clique Scandal, the U.S. Justice

Department orders agents throughout the country to turn over

any information on “vice conditions” to local officials.

1913 On New Year’s Day, the body of Edwin “Sid” Ghirardelli

is found in his room at the Byron Hotel in Downtown Portland.

His prominent family sent him to Portland, away from the men

with whom he had been associating in San Francisco, and

warned his Portland employer to be sure he didn’t stray. When

Ghirardelli “strayed,” he was fired, and then committed suicide

by taking poison.

1913 The Oregon legislature amends the state’s sodomy law,

broadening it to cover virtually any erotic act except the

“missionary” penis-in-vagina position and tripling the maximum

penalty to 15 years in prison.

5 1913 The Oregon legislature authorizes the sexual

sterilization of “sexual perverts” and “moral degenerates.”

Noted social activist Emma Goldman comes to Portland to

campaign for the law’s repeal; the Oregon Journal publishes a

letter from “Duncan Fraser Ph.D.” opposing the law and

defending “homo-sexualists.” A subsequent referendum repeals

the sexual sterilization law, 56% to 44%.

1913 The national publication Physical Culture describes

Oregon sex education: “In Oregon they post pertinent warnings

coupled with an offer of private instruction, in all public toilet

rooms – which is proper – but that sort of thing does not belong

in the curriculum of the public schools.”

1913 The Oregon State Penitentiary’s pharmacist is arrested

for sodomy “under dramatic circumstances” at work, but local

newspapers give no further information.

1913 A Portland newspaper reports that “an insane moral

pervert” was removed from the local YMCA.

1914 The oldest continually chartered chapter of the NAACP

west of the Mississippi River is founded in Portland.

1915 Multnomah County Juvenile Court Judge William

Gatens warns parents to be wary of “girl chums.”

1915 Portland physician and social activist Marie Equi adopts

a girl.

1915 Social activist Emma Goldman arrives in Portland to

give two speeches. She is arrested by Portland police for her

speech on birth control; but her speech defense of

homosexuality is not similarly disturbed.

1917 Immigration Act of 1917 (also known as the Literacy

Act) marks a turn from regulating immigration to restricting it

through literacy tests and guidelines for inadmissible persons.

Those deemed “mentally defective” or “persons with

constitutional psychopathic inferiority” routinely included

anyone thought to be homosexual; in addition, the act prohibits

immigration from the "Asiatic Barred Zone" including

Afghanistan, the Arabian Peninsula, Central Asia, India,

Malaysia, Myanmar, and the Polynesian Islands. Japan and the

Philippines were excluded from the ban.

1917 Residents of Puerto Rico granted U.S. citizenship via

Jones-Shafroth Act. (Note: This citizenship does not extend to

voting in Federal elections or having a representative vote in

Congress.)

1917 Ignoring the will of the voters expressed by the results

of the 1913 sterilization referendum, the Oregon legislature

passes a new sterilization law covering “sexual perverts” and

“moral degenerates.” More than any other state in the nation at

the time, Oregon uses castration on male prisoners and

ovariotomy on female prisoners convicted of a variety of crimes.

1917: Alberta Lucille Hart (born 1890) graduates from what is

now called Oregon Health and Science University or OHSU.

Afterward, Hart undergoes a hysterectomy and lives the rest of

his life as Dr. Alan L. Hart, marrying twice. Hart is among the first

female-to-male transsexuals to undergo gender-confirming

surgery. Dr. Alan L. Hart dies in 1962.

1918 Two Oregon prisoners file a lawsuit challenging the

right of the state to sterilize them. One is convicted of raping a

woman, the other of sodomy with another man. The rapist

withdraws his lawsuit and allows himself to be castrated, but

the other man convinces the state not to castrate him.

1918 The Oregon Supreme Court upholds the sodomy

conviction of a man of Greek ancestry, Tom Kapsalas, for

consensual sex in a Columbia County lumbering camp. At his

trial, the prosecution calls the jury’s attention to the “past

glories of Greece,” implying that men of Greek heritage are

more likely to engage in sex with other men. Kapsalas enters the

Oregon Penitentiary at the height of that year’s Spanish

influenza pandemic and dies from the disease shortly after

arrival.

1918 Lesbian physician and social activist Marie Equi is

convicted in Portland of sedition for opposing U.S. involvement

in the First World War. During her trial, the prosecutor refers to

her as a “degenerate.”

1919 The Portland Board of Realty approves a “Code of

Ethics” prohibiting realtors and bankers from selling property in

white neighborhoods or providing mortgages for such purchases

to people of color on the pretext that such sales would lower

property values.

1919 A white citizens’ group in Hood River pledges not to sell

land to Japanese Americans.

1920s Oregon membership in the Ku Klux Klan (or KKK) is

estimated at 14,000-20,000 white men and women.

1920 About 6,000 Jews live in South Portland--some aided by

the Industrial Removal Organization, a charity helping Jews

relocate from the slums of NYC’s Lower East Side.

1921 An informal agreement between the U.S. and Japanese

governments known as “the Ladies’ Agreement” bars the

emigration of so-called picture brides, who were often matched

with potential Japanese grooms in the U.S. on the basis of a

photograph.

1921 Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 (also known as the

Per Centum Law and the Johnson Quota Act) imposes numerical

limits on immigration and introduced a quota system on

6 immigration. The Act limits the annual number of immigrants to

3% of the number of immigrants from that country as reported

in the 1910 U.S. Census, which benefits would-be immigrants

from Northern Europe and restricts immigration from non-

European countries as well as from eastern and southern

Europe.

1921 Harry Staben, who had been implicated in the Vice

Clique Scandal, is arrested and held briefly on a charge of

murder. He is released after police confirm his alibi for the date

in question: he had gone to a Portland café, was picked up by a

man for sex and was with the man when the murder occurred.

1921 A Marion County trial court strikes down the state’s

sterilization law that had been used against 127 people.

1922-1938 Tillamook KKK chapter is active from 1922 until

1938. Their first public act, positioning them as public-spirited

citizens, is to donate to what would become the Tillamook

County Library, as noted in the library’s online history: "Six

white-robed members of the Ku Klux Klan ... walked down the

street and donated $100 to the librarian. A small article

appearing in the Oct. 20, 1922 Headlight-Herald acknowledged

the donation. 'Much surprise and interest was felt by the few

people who were about the streets when the Klansmen

appeared, for this was the first appearance of the white-robed

figures upon the streets.'"

1922 Together with the Freemasons, Klansmen spearhead a

drive to outlaw private and parochial schools, which they see as

contradictory to their drive for “Americanism” (i.e., white,

Protestant, English-speaking only). In Oregon, the Klan’s

activities were mostly directed against Roman Catholics and

Jews. The rallying cry was “One Flag! One School! One

Language!” By a margin of 11,000, Oregonians vote to make

their state the first in the U.S. to mandate a fully public school

system (and in the process outlaw Catholic schools). In 1924 the

federal court in Portland finds this law unconstitutional,

confirmed on appeal by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1925

Pierce v. Society of Sisters decision.

1923 Oregon legislature, including members of the Klan,

passes laws prohibiting "aliens ineligible for citizenship" from

owning land and businesses, then directs each county to report

all Chinese and Japanese people who own land.

1923 After Bhagat Singh Thind, an Oregon veteran of World

War I, is denied citizenship, the U.S. Supreme Court

unanimously rules that he could not become a naturalized

citizen. Anthropologists at the time defined people from India as

belonging to the Caucasian race, and a previous ruling had

affirmed that immigration law referring to “white” meant

“Caucasian” as it applied to denying citizenship to light-skinned

Japanese immigrants. In this case, Justice Sutherland argued

that the “common man’s” definition of “white” did not

correspond to all “caucasians.” By the court’s reasoning,

although South Asian Indians were considered “Caucasian” they

were not “white” and therefore could not be naturalized. Thus,

skin color became a legal qualification for citizenship. (In 1935,

after passage of a law granting citizenship to all veterans of

WWI, Thind, by then a resident of New York State, was

recognized as a U.S. citizen.)

1923 The Oregon legislature enacts a new sterilization law

that strikes the definition of “sexual perverts” while eliminating

the previous requirement that the reproductive potential of

these “perverts” had to be established before they could be

sentenced to sterilization.

1924 The Klan holds rallies in Eugene and Tillamook. The

Eugene City Band participates in the Klan parade, which ends

with burning a cross on Skinner's Butte. In Tillamook, the mayor

presents the KKK leaders with a key to the city.

1924 In part to recognize the service of thousands of Native

Americans during World War I, Indian Citizenship Act of 1924

(also known as the Snyder Act) grants full U.S. citizenship to all

Indigenous people (referred to in the bill as “Indians”) within

U.S. boundaries.

1924 Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson Reed Act)

establishes fixed quotas for immigration based on national

origin, although with no limits on immigration from Latin

America. The Oriental Exclusion Act (a special provision of

Johnson Reed) prohibits immigration from Asia, including

foreign-born wives and children of U.S. citizens of Chinese

ancestry. (The Naturalization Acts of 1790 and 1870 had

established that only people of white or African descent could

become naturalized citizens and barred immigration of anyone

ineligible for naturalization.

The 1924 quotas were also skewed against Southern European,

mainly Roman Catholic counties, and toward Northern

European, often Protestant, countries, which provided almost

86% of the total number admitted every year after 1924. For

example, in the first decade of the 20th century, about 200,000

Italians had immigrated every year; after 1924, only 4,000 per

year were admitted, in contrast to 57,000 Germans annually.

1925 The Oregon legislature broadens the sterilization law to

require anyone convicted of sodomy to be referred to the Board

of Eugenics for possible sterilization.

1926 Oregon removes Exclusionary Clause from the Oregon

Constitution.

1927 Oregon Constitution is amended to remove voting

restrictions against African and Chinese Americans.