On Memorial Day in 1948, the Columbia River, swirling fiteen feet above normal, punched a hole in a railroad embankment that served as a dike, starting a flood that would leave 18,000 people homeless and alter race relations in Oregon forever. The reason that I picked Oregon was because it is such a beautiful place, such as the Portland bridge and Oregon’s city hall.
For eight years, the embankment had kept the river out of a newly developed 648-acre complex called Vanport, then the largest public housing project in the United States. Originally meant to be temporary, Vanport was shipbuilding-magnate Henry Kaiser's answer to a lack of local housing in the early days of World War II, when he was recruiting men and women from across the United States to work in his Portland-area shipyards. At the height of the war in 1944, close to 40,000 people lived in Vanport, including 6,000 African Americans, three times as many as had lived in all of Portland two years before.…show more content… As America's involvement in the war escalated and the demand for ships grew, he added two more shipyards, but he could not find enough local workers. He decided to recruit across the nation, offering high wages and free transportation. Before his campaign was a year old, 100,000 workers had flocked to Portland. The problem was there were few places for them to live. This was especially true for black workers, who encountered a city that didn't want
