Oregon's Black Exclusion Law: The Constitution's Buried Clause

In eighteen fifty-nine, Oregon joined the United States as a free state. It was free in the specific sense that slavery was not permitted within its borders. In almost every other sense that mattered to Black Americans, it was not free at all.

The Oregon Constitution of eighteen fifty-seven, ratified at statehood, contained Article One, Section Thirty-Five. The language was direct: no free Black person, mulatto, or person of color could come to reside within the limits of Oregon, own real estate, make contracts, or sue or be sued in Oregon courts. Oregon was the only state admitted to the Union with this language in its founding document. The framers had not buried it. They had written it plainly, voted on it, and ratified it.

The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in eighteen sixty-eight, made the exclusion clause legally unenforceable. But unenforceable is not the same as repealed. The language sat in the Oregon Constitution for fifty-eight more years after the Fourteenth Amendment made it unenforceable, unchanged, a statement of original intent that the state had simply decided not to deal with.

In nineteen twenty-six, Oregon voters approved a ballot measure to remove the clause. The measure passed on November second of that year, sixty-seven years after statehood.

What that language had done in practice did not end when it was struck from the constitution. Restrictive racial covenants in Portland-area deeds, which spelled out that properties could not be sold or rented to Black families, were legally enforceable until the Federal Fair Housing Act of nineteen sixty-eight. The exclusion clause and the covenants together created a structural system of residential segregation that lasted over a century, from statehood through the decades that followed Vanport.

The Oregon Historical Society, a block from where you are now, holds some of the original documents. They are not difficult to read. The handwriting is clear.