Interview by Cheyenne Davis and Faith Wau

OB Hill Transcript

Time: 77:38

Also Present: Audience Members, Arlie Sommer

0:00:00.0
HILL: Hey ya’ll, what’s happenin’ man, what’s goin’ on?

UNKOWN: It’s cool, it’s alright, dude.

HILL: Looks are deceiving…we are taught in this society to judge a book by its cover…you can’t always do that. If you live by the golden rule, how do you know what the golden rule is? Could someone state it for me?

[Someone raises their hand]

HILL: Stand up.
AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: So you want me to say it?
HILL: State me the golden rule.
AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Okay, um, treat others the way that you want to be treated.
HILL: Thank you. Do onto others as you would have others do onto you. Treat the other person the way you would like them to treat you. That is a very, very good standard to live by. Since I don’t want you to judge a book by its cover, I am [inaudible].

0:01:26.2

HILL: I’m Bobba OB Hill, the community historian. My roots are all over the world, but my people originated on the richest continent in the world, AKA or also known as Africa. I live in the United States and I descend from a whole line of people who were brought here. Do any of you know Lewis and Clark? Have you heard of Lewis and Clark? Can someone tell me who Lewis and Clark is? Uh, have you heard of Lewis and Clark College?

[Members in audience start to catch on, saying yes]

HILL: Have you heard of Clark College? Community College? Hmm? But have you heard of York?

[Background members respond]

HILL: This is a book, ‘My Name is York,’ that say bookscan be deceiving. There are some, and by no means [inaudible]...but I have a role of distinction in this community whether you know it or not. And unlike a lot of other people who [inaudible]….I have one little proposition: As people have said, if I could light just one little candle,the whole world may be able to see. I’m not gonna light it because I know there are regulations and rules, but I will strike a match to use your imagination, and we will sing a song that most of you have heard.

This little light of miiinnnnnee, hah!

I’m gonna let it shine, whooaaaa!

This little light of miiine, I said I’ma gonna let it shiiine,

This little light of MIIINNNEEE, IIII’MM GON’ let it shine!

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shiiiiine.

LISTEN! Hide it unda a bushel? NO!

I’m gonna let it shine, hide it unda a bushel? No.

I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Phewwwww

I won’t let Satan blow it out, I’m gonna let it shine!

I won’t let Satan blow it out, I said I’m gonna let it shine.

Woooooooo I won’t let Satan blow it out, I’m gonna let that light shine!

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shiiiiiiiiine!

[applause]

HILL: Yes sir, you know, looks can be deceiving, and so can people. The role of the community historian is to record the history of the community. Unlike the regular historian who goes into the archives and finds bits and pieces to put together and try to put a picture of what that community is about, the community historian is FROM that community. He LIVES in that community and he is in and of the people. He has to know them by name, or at least know part of them by name, and know the permanent people as well as those who are not well known. Um-

SOMMER: So, Mr. Hill before you go on, are you going to um, we’re doing an interview too, and so should we begin the interview and then go through all the artifacts?
HILL: Yes, we will do that.
SOMMER: Would you like to share your artifacts at the end maybe?
HILL: I think what happens here is that I have brought an assembly of newspaper items, and books relevant to the experience in Oregon of people of African descent all the way from York who came here with the Lewis and Clark expedition and in the back of this, I even have a chart which is a time table of black history in the Pacific Northwest. And so those persons who are interested in this type of thing, there is not a pedigree chart. That traces me, all the way back to a lady 5 generations back by the name of Polly Williams. Now, to answer your question, yes I’m ready for questions because in order for people to ask you a question, they want to know that you know what you’re talkin’ about. About two more minutes. Most historians go and try to find out how is it I can prove or disprove what someone is claiming. Now in school we are taught different things, but most of the time we’re taught what people want us to believe is important. Last night there was a basketball game on, did you see it?

[Commotion, a few say yes]

HILL: You saw that game?! Anybody know the final score? Somebody knows the final score, right? You know who won too? Do you know a play by play account of who made the baskets and when? I do. On the first quarter, I could tell you who made the first shot, how many times they shot, first quarter all the way through, and what time they took out, because it is important to know the facts. Now most people will get them from the Oregonian or the Journal, however the Journal no longer exists. Now, I’m ready.
DAVIS: Um, my name is Cheyenne Davis, I’m 13 years old, I’m at the Boise Eliot School in the Eliot neighborhood of Portland, Oregon.
WAU:My Faith Wau, I’m 14 years old, I’m at the Boise Eliot School in the Eliot neighborhood of Portland, Oregon.
DAVIS: Mr. Hill, for the record, would you please state your name, age, the year you were born, and where you were born?
HILL: My name is Orenton Bantie Hill, also known as OB Hill. I was born on July the 10th, in 1941 in Birmingham, Alabama. On my next birthday, I will be 69 years old.
DAVIS:When did your family come to Portland?
HILL: My family came to Portland doing what we know as a second world war in the 1940s. First, my father-

[tape cuts off]

HILL: But my younger brother, Clarence, he didn’t know, he thought they said ‘sookie anne’ and so Clarence and I had a great time together, uh, and my older brother, who is 3 yearsmy uh, senior, took care of my little sister while my mother worked along with my grandmother so that we could, in addition to what my father was on, make enough money to take the train back out here. So those early years were sort of difficult years. After we came back, uh, we lived in a place called Vanport, Vanport City, which is north of here. Now out there is the Expo Center, Delta Park, and the International Raceway but at one time that was the largest project housing, one of the largest ones in the United States.
DAVIS:What made Vanport City special?
HILL: Well, Vanport was uh, housed the largest number of black people and on Memorial Day in 1948, uh, a dike broke and there was a flood, and so that whole city was wiped out. I remember that very vividly, I was 6 years old. My brother Clarence and I, as well as my older brother, James, we wanted to go to the movie show, but my mother wouldn’t let us go because she heard there was some possibility of a dike breaking, and so we were basically outside poutin’ when uh, a policeman drove up on a motorcycleblowin a whistle telling everybody to evacuate, so we ran back in the house and told Mama, who was cookin. She was cookin’ on memorial day this large ham and it had pineapples on it and you could smell the aroma. She gotted all of us together and my father was still in bed, he had been out on one of his drinkin binges the night before. It was a long weekend, so this was one weekend that he wouldn’t have to work two jobs for 16 hours. And so we left, uh coming out there was a bus that was pullin up, one of the last ones. And the guy opened the door, the bus driver, and water was runnin out and we got in and he drove us up to a place called Kenton, which is out in North Portland, you know Kenton because there’s a big statue of a big lumberjack out there. You know Kenton? [Davis nods] Okay.
DAVIS:So how long did you guys stay up there?
HILL: From there, there was a lot of emergencies going on of course. All of those people needed housing now. Fortunately, the city of Portland opened its arms up and the various agencies like the Sunshine Division, the Red Cross, and churches came together to help in any way they could. We ended up stayin’ in a place called Mountain Villa with mrs. Thompson who was a (Edit: Member) small church out in SE Portland in the area of 82nd and we lived there for a while until we were able to find other places and for the next several years we moved from different projects including Giles Lake, Fessenden homes, St. JohnsWoods, [inaudible]. We lived at 7720 N. Oakley Place and 10722 N. Mapleleaf. That’s out now in the vicinity of Pier Park in North Portland out near St. Johns.
DAVIS:So what was in like going from place to place to place?
HILL: Lemme say, although a rolling stone gathers no moss, it covers a lot of territory. One of the best experiences, and the reason I do what I do today is because of the ability and flexibility to travel and go everywhere. Now, there are some drawbacks to that, but you do get a chance to experience a lot of different areas and territories. In the case of the majority of the people who lived in these projects at the time, there were some options. You could either go back home where you belong in some sense of the word, or you could stay here, and a lot of the African American people at the time posed the question of, go back to what? And so this like, in Claude Brown’s book, ‘Manchild in the Promised Land,’ as the moved to New York from the south. You either go back to the south where you weren’t being treated very nice, or stay in a place where at least you could get occupation to work and make some money. And so a lot of people chose to stay up here, and my family was one of those.
DAVIS:So how was, where you lived, how has it changed now?
HILL: Most of those places don’t exist anymore. I have a program that’s called ‘Let’s read, walk ‘n talk,’ and I take tours to these various areas. On this past Monday, which was Memorial Day, I did one of my walks, and I went down Polk Street down to Columbia and passed Mrs. Whitney’s house who lived right across the street from where we lived in the Projects. I know Mrs. Whitney very well, that house is still there because my father had a garden over behind her house. The projects themselves are not there anymore. It’s been rezoned, it’s an industrial area now, and unless you knew it was there you would never know. Walking from there to Vanport is a very good walk. It takes a little energy, and now what’s Vanport, you catch the MAX yellow line. At the end of the MAX yellow line, that’s one of the northern borders of what was Vanport.
DAVIS:Where did you go to college?
HILL: I am a graduate of Portland State University. Now, it’s very interesting because Portland State University was originally Vanport College.
DAVIS: So what did you study in college and why?
HILL: Uh, I have a degree in Sociology, I also have certificates and distinctions in Black Studies and also in Administration of Justice and Law Enforcement.
DAVIS:Why did you decide to write more about Portland’s history and document it?
HILL: I have been studying this all of my life. Historians are born, they actually aren’t made and you may not know it at the time, but you begin to accumulate a lot of things that you collect. For instance over here, I have newspapers dating back 40 years and there’s a Jet magazine I think from about 1965. In that magazine it tells about Malcolm X and his death and assassination, so I keep that along with others so that I can share it with people because most people have never seen, you hear about these people, but they physically have the documents from that time. I learned that I was a historian at Portland state. I began to take history classes and also the Black Studies program started during the time I was there and I was able to buy one term, I got the second certificate at that time in Black Studies at Portland State University and that let me know that I was a historian.
DAVIS:How is Portland’s history unique?
HILL: Compared to what for instance?
DAVIS:Um…. like-
HILL: Some other city?
DAVIS:Yeah.
HILL: Okay, now keep in mind you gotta be able to go to these other cities to be able to make a comparative analysis. Portland is a very, very well kept city because relatively speaking it’s modern. The housing isn’t as old as in some of these older cities like back east. It’s in a beautiful valley, with the confluence of two major rivers, the Columbia and the Willamette. Beautiful geography, the Columbia gorge is fantastic and then you got the mountain ranges, the coastal ranges, so it’s unique from the standpoint of its beauty, physically. Now what is different about Portland as a relation to people of African descent and African Americans is there have been, ever since I’ve been here, measuresto make sure that certain segments of the population were sorta isolated or kept in certain areas, or not being able to move as what you would call a de facto segregation. It wasn’t legal like de jure segregation by law, although it was because at one particular time when this was a territory, the law meant that people of African descent couldn’t stay in this whole territory and after it became a state, for 6 months if you came here for 6 months and you had to move on a person for instance like George Washington Bush, who is the founder of a place called Centralia, Washington had to leave the Oregon territory and moved north of the Columbia River because of these laws. Some of these laws were still on the books when I was here as a child. I think in about 1954 there was some decisions by the Supreme Court and others to take these laws off the book. So, it’s unique in the fact that it’s been able to isolate and move black people at will. In fact right now, there’s a lot of discussion about gentrification of this area that we’re in now. When I first moved here, when you cross the steel bridge, you entered what was then as the black community. Then they built the memorial coliseum and they had urban renewal projects that moved the people northward and eastward so we began to see all of these changes. As a child, there was no freeway system. Union Avenue, now known as Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, was a major highway system on the east side along with Interstate. There was no I-5 freeway, so during my lifetime, during my early years, we saw the freeways being built, now I-5. At that time we referred to it as the Minnesota freeway because it stopped right at Minnesota and took out about 3 to 4 blocks of housing and guess who lived in those houses?
DAVIS: You?
HILL: Uh, a great portion of the people who lived in those houses were African Americans. And then they had to relocate again. So all of this urban renewal at the local and federal level has made it possible and necessary that black people have to continually move around, and I’ve seen this happen over and over again and it’s happenin’ right now. You probably recalledtwo years ago, the Wonder Bread Bakery was right up the street. Now what’s up there I refer to as Wonder Bread Park, which in any other community, that would not be tolerated, where a major bakery leaves a big hole in the ground with old trees growing up. That is not tolerated in any way, in fact, a real good walk would be picketing aroundthere and insisting that those people gravel that end so it’s presentable in this community. What that is, is an eyesore and it drives the prices down and then makes it convenient for bigger people to come in and garble up the property. At the time after the coliseum, then the black community hub moved up to about Williams and Russel, Unthank Plaza and other places are up there now. The Urban League still has an organization in that although I don’t believe they own the building. The Elks club on Tillamook, you know where that is? That still exists from that time. If you go one block over to Vancouver, you’ll see an old building sitting there, that used to be the Cotton Club. That was owned by Paul and Geneva Knowles who now operate Geneva’s barber shop. And I know about both of those places because at that time I was an aspiring entertainer, and I had bands and groups and someone would tell me now that I wouldn’t have been a big record makin’ superstar I would have told them no. But, fortunately that career ended when I went to school.