Category:African Americans in Lane County

From Lane Co Oregon

Some evidence of slavery can be found in court cases and legal records of transfers of property. The most famous court case concerned the Holmes children. In the early 1850's Joseph Teal purchased a black boy and his grandmother from a man named Southworth, who lived in Lane County. Teal freed the pair, and they settled on the Long Tom River near Junction City. A black woman, Luteshia Censor, sued the estate of her former owner for wages she had earned while living in Oregon. Other less formal arrangements existed between whites and blacks who came to Oregon together, but in 1857 it became clear that some slaves were being held in Oregon in the same sense as slaves were held in other areas of the country.[1]

The black population of Oregon was small and nearly invisible. With the exception of the ban on intermarriage passed in 1866, the legislature did not pass laws that discriminated against local black people. Resistance to civil rights legislation both national and local was strong; in the five years following the Civil War any measure that promoted civil rights for black people elicited the charge that it would promote racial intermarriage;. In order to kill any legislation, opponents had only to ask the perennial question: "Do you want your daughter to marry a nigger?

The legislator's reluctance to endorse the Fourteenth Amendment was the subject of debate in the local press as well. In 1867, the Eugene Weekly Democratic Review printed a vicious attack on black people. . . gaping, bullet pated, thick lipped, wooly headed, animaljawed crowd of niggers, the dregs of broken up plantations, idle and vicious blacks, released from wholesome restraints of task masters and overseers . . . Greasy, dirty, lousy, they drowsily look down upon the assembled wisdom of a dissevered Union. Sleepily listen to legislators who have given them their freedom and now propose to invest them with the highest privileges of American citizenship.

Because of its rabid pro-South rhetoric, this paper had been suppressed during the Civil War.[2]