Three newspapers specifically served the black community in Portland. The Advocate, New Age, and Portland Times operated during this period, the Advocate being the last to fold, in 1933. As extraction industries contributed to the growth of Portland in the early 1900s, black businesses prospered as well. The rising tide of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ indeed lifted all boats. African-Americans owned saloons, restaurants, and barber shops, ice cream and candy stores in Portland. Furniture stores, the Golden West Hotel and laundries also operated under black ownership and management. Professionals were represented by the first practicing black dentists, physicians and attorneys. Perhaps the greatest symbolic of acceptance of blacks in Portland was the appointment of George Hardin, the city’s first black policeman. All of the above successes were built on, and ran concurrently with, African-American employment in the hotel, service, and railroad industries in Portland. Black success seemed incremental but sure as October of 1929 began. Black professionals and business proprietors, entrepreneurs and service workers, could not know what was to come. As the Great Depression set in, black businesses in Portland would be hit hardest of all.

The following excerpt is taken from an interview collected by Lincoln High School student Roshawn Davis of Mrs. Daisy M. Dickson. Mrs. Dickson moved to Portland, Oregon, as a young woman and worked in the area as an elementary teacher for twenty-five years. She remembers how the Great Depression affected Portland's black community: RD: Tell me about the Depression. DD: By the time I was 22, I remember my mother was the only black woman working in the jewelry shop by our house. Black women usually worked as nannies for white people or cleaned houses, usually for white folks. My mother was one of the few black women in our community who had what we called a 'real job.' I think that the Depression was most hard on blacks. We were the last hired and the first to go. I remember being terrified that my dreams of being a teacher would be flushed down the toilet after hearing that women were being discriminated against and men were getting the good jobs likes teaching, civil service, and secretarial work. Women were mostly getting low scale factory jobs. It was the worst!. . . . During the Depression, a lot of people were poor. Many young people didn't get married because they couldn't afford it.

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