Black heritage tours and archives are growing in Portland

State of play: In Portland, Black heritage revolves around stories of the Vanport flood and the nightlife of the Albina neighborhood.

The Oregon Historical Society has an online timeline tool for searching its archive by categories such as Black Americans and Black History.

• Travel Portland and The Skanner News also offer a useful guide to Black history in Portland.

Also, the Oregon Black Pioneers do walking tours of not just Albina but downtown Portland, Astoria and even the historic gold mining town of Jacksonville in Southern Oregon.

Reality check: OBP's executive director Zachary Stocks tells Axios it can be challenging to lead tourists to the sites of no-longer-existing properties.

• "We can offer that context to places that people pass every day without realizing that it's a site where something significant in Oregon's Black history has happened," he said.

Zoom in: McElroy's Ballroom hosted famous Black jazz musicians such as Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

• Today, it's the site of the city's Michael Graves-designed The Portland Building.
• Similarly, the site of the segregated Colored School from the late 1800s is now occupied by the Wells Fargo Center.

Zoom out: Stocks is fluent in the exclusion laws that attempted to keep Oregon a white state, but he notes, "By 1867, there was functionally no way to keep people of African descent from coming to Oregon."

• Some were exempted, some just "mingled in," he says.
• In 1868, the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, extending the Bill of Rights to formerly enslaved people.