How community organizers are amplifying Oregon’s Black music history

When Norman Sylvester was 12, long before he garnered the nickname “The Boogie Cat” or shared a stage with B.B. King, he boarded a train in Louisiana and headed west, toward the distant city of Portland, Oregon. He’d lived all his life in the rural South, eating wild muscadine grapes from his family’s farm, fishing in the bayou and churning butter at the kitchen table to the tune of his grandmother’s gospel singing. When his father, who’d gone to Portland in search of better job opportunities, sent for him, Sylvester felt he was being pulled from paradise. 

 It was the fall of 1957, and Oregon had a long-standing reputation as a hostile place for Black families like Sylvester’s. From 1844 until 1926, Oregon enacted a series of exclusion laws aimed at barring Black people from residing in the territory. The Oregon Donation Land Act of 1850 granted white settlers up to 640 free acres while prohibiting Black people from claiming any land at all. Oregon declined to ratify the 15th Amendment, and, in 1917, the state’s Supreme Court sanctioned racial discrimination in public places. By the 1920s, Oregon was home to the largest Ku Klux Klan chapter in the West. 

Despite all this, Black people were among the earliest settlers to arrive in Oregon, where they carved out lives and sought equality amid these hostilities — the Portland chapter of the NAACP, formed in 1914, is the oldest operating chapter west of the Mississippi. But the state’s anti-Black policies were powerful deterrents: By the time Sylvester arrived, fewer than 1% of Oregon residents were African American, and Portland’s Black population was the smallest among major West Coast cities. This was in stark contrast to Sylvester’s hometown, and he stepped out of Portland’s Union Station into culture shock. 

Sylvester would soon start seventh grade at his first integrated school, and he needed a haircut. So the first place he ventured in his new city was a barbershop near the crossing of Williams Avenue and Russell Street in North Portland. When he reached the intersection, he found it bustling. A handsome brick building capped with an onion-shaped cupola stood on one corner, homes and businesses lined the others: a cafe, a drugstore, a produce market. And everywhere he looked, he saw just what he’d seen in Louisiana: “African American people — in charge of businesses, driving nice cars up and down the street, strutting their stuff.” Later, he’d compare the scene to Harlem, but that day it only reminded him of the place he’d left behind. Despite the thousands of miles stretching between him and the muscadine grapes twining his grandmother’s fence lines, standing on the corner that day he felt at home. Even the air was familiar, laced with the scents of Southern cooking and carrying riffs of gospel and jazz. “The place just embraced me,” Sylvester recalled recently. “Everybody was singing the same song, if you know what I mean.”

This intersection was the heart of a neighborhood called Albina. In the early 1900s, Black Portlanders, most of whom then worked as railcar attendants, began settling here because of its proximity to Union Station. In the ensuing decades, landlord discrimination and institutionalized policies (including a 1919 Portland Realty Board ruling that declared it unethical to sell a home in a white neighborhood to a non-white buyer) excluded Black people from other parts of the city and further concentrated the community here. By 1940, over half of Portland’s Black population — at the time, just under 2,000 people — lived in Albina.

Then, the outbreak of World War II brought more than a hundred thousand newcomers — some 20,000 of them African American — to the city to work its booming shipyards. Among these migrants were Sylvester’s parents, aunt and uncle. They lived in a defense housing development called Vanport. Built behind a railroad embankment in the floodplain of the Columbia River, Vanport was the largest wartime housing project in the country. Around a quarter of its over 40,000 residents were African American, making it home to Oregon’s largest Black community, by a long shot. 

After the war, workers began leaving Vanport. Sylvester’s mother returned to Louisiana, but his uncle found work at a local hospital and the rest of the family decided to stay in the area. Barred from most neighborhoods because of their race, they remained living in Vanport. Which is where they were on Memorial Day in 1948, when the Columbia River, swollen with spring rain and snowmelt, breached the embankment and poured toward the city. Within 40 minutes, Vanport was underwater. At least 15 people died, and more than 18,000 others, a third of them Black, lost their homes. 

Sylvester’s family, like most African Americans displaced by the flood, found refuge in the only Portland neighborhood where they were welcome: Albina. By the time Sylvester got settled in the city, four out of five Black Portlanders lived in the district. Redlining, lack of public investment and negligent landlords meant that housing here was sometimes overcrowded and dilapidated, but the neighborhood was close-knit and vibrant. Black-owned businesses, churches and gathering places flourished. “Everything you needed in a community was right there,” Sylvester told me. 

One of those things, he said, was music. And in Albina, during the decades after Sylvester arrived, there was no shortage of this. Gospel choirs sang in churches, while soul bands packed the Cotton Club, then the Pacific Northwest’s preeminent soul music destination. Nearly every night, jazz, blues and funk bands could be heard in the neighborhood’s many venues, including teen clubs and all-ages spaces. Bands formed in basements, backyards, schoolrooms and churches.

“The place just embraced me. Everybody was singing the same song, if you know what I mean.”

When Sylvester was 13, his father used wages earned working two jobs — the hospital by day, the foundry at night — to buy him a guitar. It wasn’t the shiny red electric he wanted, but an $11.95 pawnshop acoustic. If Sylvester learned three songs, his dad promised, he’d buy him the electric. It wasn’t hard to find teachers in Albina: Sylvester learned his first licks from an old Creole man who owned the house his family lived in. Later, a fellow high school student mentored him in the blues. Sylvester was a quick learner, and soon the guitar became a kind of superpower for him. A country kid from the South, he often felt overcome with shyness among Portland’s urban youth. When he spoke, he stuttered. “But with my guitar in front of me, I could express myself,” he said.

Now 80 years old, Sylvester has been expressing himself through music ever since. His first band, Rated “X”, was among Portland earliest soul groups. They recorded a 45 in 1972 and were riding the momentum of its local success when the trucking company Sylvester worked for put him on graveyard shift, and he had to quit the band. But he kept playing, and before long established himself as a standout blues musician. The Norman Sylvester Blues Band has now been performing for 40 years. He’s shared bills with B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Mavis Staples, and, in 2011, he was inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame.

Sylvester’s achievements are impressive, but he’s far from the only remarkable musician to emerge from Albina. To the contrary, he’s part of a wide-ranging and deeply connected community of Black musicians, educators and arts advocates who converged here during the second half of the 20th century and made the region a hotbed for music in the West, creating a legacy that endures today. Until recently, however, the story of Albina’s musical history resided mostly inside the memories — and closets — of those who lived it, a generation of musicians now nearing the end of their lives. 

BY THE TIME BOBBY SMITH moved to Albina in the early 2000s, the place bore scant resemblance to the predominantly Black neighborhood of Sylvester’s youth. Smith was a young white schoolteacher who occasionally freelanced as a music journalist. He knew a lively jazz scene had existed here in the 1940s and ’50s — an era highlighted in Robert Dietsche’s 2005 book Jumptown — but the public narrative of Black music in Portland ended there, in 1957, and he wondered: What happened next? An avid record collector, Smith sought albums that could help answer this question. For years, he scoured used record stores and consignment shops, but few commercial recordings of Portland’s Black musicians from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s seemed to exist. One day he stumbled upon the 45 that Sylvester recorded with Rated “X” in the early  ’70s, one of the only records from those decades he could find. Meanwhile, he talked with neighbors, lingered at the park anytime he heard music, and hung around Clyde’s Prime Rib, one of the city’s only venues regularly featuring elder Black performers. 

In 2014, Smith began to DJ for XRAY-FM, a recently launched community radio station broadcasting from Albina. By then, he’d compiled a small collection of recordings from the region’s past and began inviting local musicians into the station to discuss them on air. One of his first guests was Calvin Walker. Drummer, bandleader and self-described “child of Albina,” Walker came for a 30-minute interview and left three hours later. He shared his own life story and, in the process, mapped out an entire ecosystem of musicians and educators who had shaped —and been shaped by — Albina. “If you’re really curious about this, here’s a list of people you need to start talking to,” he told Smith. “And I’ll help you.” 

Soon, Smith’s weekly radio show became a turnstile where elder Black musicians came to share their stories. Despite the barriers that had limited their access to the recording industry, Albina’s musicians had been diligently documenting their own work. A plethora of unreleased recordings survived in their hands: demos, reel-to-reels, cassettes, VCR tapes. The ever-growing cache of music and memorabilia pouring into the station revealed an extraordinary legacy of Black arts and culture in Portland and an untold chapter of Oregon history.

In 2015, Walker, Smith and Ken Berry — another local musician and community leader — founded Albina Music Trust (AMT) with a colossal task in mind: preserving thousands of obsolete and decaying media items and making them accessible to all. Elder engineers donated equipment and taught volunteers how to use the archaic machines. Each item was digitized and uploaded into a categorized database. After a decade of work, in 2024, AMT publicly launched the Albina Community Archive, believed to be the only community archive in the United States dedicated to the restoration of a Black community’s music culture. 

The online repository contains over 13,000 items from 180 sources. There’s music, of course — live recordings, out-of-circulation albums, unreleased demos — plus film, newsprint, posters, handbills and oral histories. This massive collection is the backbone of the archive, but it functions more like a seedbank than a museum, providing safekeeping for historical artifacts that are then brought to life in projects extending far beyond the website. An art installation called Wall to Wall Soul combines restored and recolored posters and photography in a series of striking images that have been exhibited around the city and now hang permanently in the dining room of Clyde’s Prime Rib. Under a record label by the same name, AMT issues vinyl albums of never-before-released music from Albina’s past as well as new work from the community’s contemporary artists. An audio tour, The Albina Soul Walk, takes listeners on a mile-long, music-infused stroll through Albina to visit the sites of former venues and gathering places while a chorus of musicians and club owners describe the neighborhood’s past. Listening feels like putting on 3D glasses: An unseen dimension is suddenly brought into focus. Even after I slipped my earbuds out and the present-day sounds of the city rushed in — wind through maple leaves, cyclists pedaling past — the voices of the tour lingered. Though I walked out of the neighborhood the same way I’d come, nothing looked the same.

ONE MORNING LAST SUMMER, I MET SMITH, Walker and Berry at AMT’s office in northeast Portland. Just a few hundred square feet, the space called to mind a walk-in closet. Shelves filled with neatly labeled boxes lined one wall and audio equipment spanning eras — turntables, reel-to-reel machines, cassette players, CD drives — crammed under and atop desks. A grid of framed record sleeves decorated a lime-green wall,  and jazz floated through the room.

Settling into one of the four mismatched chairs puzzled into this space felt more like joining a family around a snug kitchen table than meeting with a board of directors in their office. That day, I had an experience not unlike Smith’s first meeting with Walker: I expected we’d talk for an hour, but one story led to another until it was well past lunchtime and hunger drove us to a taqueria across the street where we did, in fact, sit around a table and eat a meal together.

Ken Berry was 4 when he came to Oregon from Kansas in 1953. His family settled into a house in southeast Portland near Laurelhurst elementary, where he became the school’s first Black student. But two years later, after anti-integration neighbors complained, their landlord tore the house down and Berry’s family moved to Albina. 

There, he began playing piano during Sunday school at the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, earning 75 cents a day. He joined the choir at Jefferson High, and, after graduating, began playing a Hammond B3 organ at what was then Albina’s most prominent jazz club, The Upstairs Lounge, where he met the late Thara Memory. Memory, a trumpeter from Florida who’d played with the likes of James Brown, was traveling with his band en route to Seattle when they stopped in Portland to play The Upstairs Lounge. But Albina — the big trees, the lively community — captivated him, and when his band continued north, Memory stayed. He and Berry later started a group called Shades Of Brown, one of several collaborations that would shape Albina’s music culture for decades to come.

Around the same time and not far from The Upstairs Lounge, Walker met Memory at another of Albina’s vital community hubs, the Albina Arts Center. As a teenager, Walker often played here with his jazz-infused funk band, The Gangsters. “Thara comes in one night and says, ‘Can I play your trumpet?’” Walker recalled. He passed the instrument over and listened, dumbfounded. “I never played trumpet again!” Instead, Walker continued on drums, and Memory joined on trumpet. 

In the summer of 1970, the American Legion held its annual convention in Portland. Hoping to distract potential war protesters from disrupting the event, the city planned the only state-sponsored rock concert in U.S. history: Vortex 1. The Gangsters weren’t invited to play, but they loaded their gear into the Albina Arts Center truck and drove to the festival anyway, right up to the stage. When the manager told them he’d already booked the bands, Memory retorted: “But you don’t have any all-Black bands.” Thirty minutes later, they were onstage. “We played for an hour and a half, and I think they even paid us!” Walker said, grinning.

Despite its noteworthiness, most retrospective coverage of this event — including a book and television documentary — omitted this story. When AMT asked why, the answer was simple: The researchers didn’t know about it. Like much of Albina’s history, the story was held in the community, not in institutions. “The public library and the Oregon Historical Society have existed for over a hundred years,” Smith told me. “But in the 10 years we’ve been around, we’ve become the largest digital repository of Black arts and culture in the entire state of Oregon.” Walker nodded. “People are putting their lives in our hands because they trust that their story will be told accurately,” he said.

AMT is part of a growing nationwide network of community archives working to preserve collective histories left out of mainstream repositories. More than 300 have been mapped across the country, each documenting a distinct slice of American life: LGBTQ people in the Deep South; radical Indigenous women activists; communities impacted by the death penalty. As control over historical narratives becomes an increasingly exploited political tool — as evidenced by the Trump administration’s attacks on the National Museum of African American History and Culture — community-based archives like AMT broaden the spectrum of voices authoring history, creating a story of America that is less like a monologue, more like a choir.

The Gangsters lasted a few years, during which they recorded some tracks at a studio in Vancouver, Washington. After they disbanded, several members found success elsewhere: Two toured with B.B. King, another played with jazz icons the Crusaders, and Memory won a Grammy. But The Gangsters’ recordings were never released. Instead, the tape sat in a closet for 40 years. Even Memory’s own daughter, Tahirah Memory, didn’t know about the recordings until AMT rediscovered them in 2017. 

Tahirah herself is an acclaimed Portland-based vocalist and songwriter who sings melodic, lyrical songs influenced by jazz and soul traditions at some 90 shows a year. Though she grew up immersed in Albina’s music community — “at our house, musicians were always coming and going, Mel Brown, Ron Steen, Janice Scroggins” — she didn’t fully understand all the obstacles they faced, or the extent of their perseverance. “The archive fills in a lot of gaps,” she told me, both personally and publicly. “In this country, there hasn’t been a huge invitation for Black folks to have a history.”  In 2018, AMT released The Gangsters’ album on vinyl, accompanied by a booklet of oral histories and photographs telling the band’s story. To celebrate, the trust hosted an album-release concert that reunited historic groups alongside contemporary musicians and sold out the 300-seat Alberta Rose Theatre within hours.

Watching the story of Albina’s past emerge through AMT, Tahirah told me, has been healing. “The archive is as much about social change as it is about music. It’s a record of how Black people have leaned on art to make a way.” When faced with hardship, she said, “this is what people with brilliance and light and determination do. Some of the best magic has come out of Albina because it was a place where not-great things happened.”

By the time The Gangsters recorded those tracks in the 1970s, major changes had come to Albina. Following WWII, Portland, like cities around the country, embarked on something called “urban renewal.” Using federal dollars allocated for clearing “slums,” local governments tore down neighborhoods and repurposed the land for commercial and institutional uses, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Black and minority neighborhoods were disproportionately deemed “blighted” and razed under the banner of renewal. In a 1963 interview, James Baldwin laid bare the reality behind the euphemism: “Cities now are engaged in something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negros out. It means Negro removal; that is what it means.” Portland was no exception.

In the late 1950s, the city demolished hundreds of homes in Albina to make way for Interstate 5 and Memorial Coliseum. Then, in the late 1960s, Portland applied for federal funds to bulldoze 76 acres for the expansion of Legacy Emanuel Hospital. The land contained hundreds of residences, gathering places, including a teen club called the Seven of Diamonds, and the commercial heart of Albina: the intersection of Williams and Russell.

Black leaders organized to resist the city-sponsored destruction of their neighborhoods. Even where housing was rough, “the community was thriving,” Walker told me. Advocating for repair rather than clearance, organizers formed the Albina Neighborhood Improvement Project in 1961 and successfully halted the destruction of some areas slated for demolition, rehabilitating hundreds of homes and building a park instead.

“People are putting their lives in our hands because they trust that their story will be told accurately.”

But other projects continued regardless. Neighborhoods in lower Albina were razed and replaced with the Portland Public School District’s headquarters and the Water Bureau. Then, in the early 1970s, the city approved the hospital expansion. The intersection of Williams and Russell was condemned and bulldozed to the ground. A single physical remnant survived: The onion-shaped cupola was relocated to a gazebo in Dawson Park a few blocks north. The project displaced 171 households, three-quarters of them Black. But the hospital expansion never happened. Instead, the land lay vacant for the next 50 years. Altogether, more than 1,100 housing units in Albina were destroyed through “urban renewal,” along with dozens of businesses and community hubs. 

Soon after, banks further redlined what remained of the neighborhood, denying residents access to mortgage and home improvement loans. Those seeking to buy a house or invest in a business could either leave Albina or borrow from private, often predatory, lenders. This drove more people out, and by the ’80s, vacant buildings had begun to proliferate. One neighborhood activist, calling on the city to intervene, counted 900 abandoned structures.

As Albina’s businesses and clubs were shutting down or being demolished, racial tensions rippled across Portland in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Downtown venues excluded Black bands for fear of alienating white audiences. Competition from other forms of entertainment — late-night TV, disco — and new drunk driving laws paired with police brutality meant that fewer people were going out to see live music. All this converged to make it harder for musicians to earn a living playing gigs, and problems caused by chronic disinvestment grew — unemployment, gang violence, the drug trade. Still, music remained vital: “It was a way of maintaining camaraderie, a connecting piece for people’s spirits,” Berry told me. During these years, Albina’s musicians, educators and community leaders doubled down on efforts to keep Black music culture alive in Portland. 

In 1976, Berry co-founded the World Arts Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to celebrating African American culture through community choirs, orchestras, marching bands and after-school programs. An annual event called “Keep Alive the Dream” showcased these ensembles and is now among the nation’s longest-running tributes to Martin Luther King. Endeavoring to bring musicians who’d lost their way back to the stage while exposing new audiences to Black music traditions, Thara Memory helped establish a concert series called TimeSound. The first show, in 1981, was performed by a 24-piece ensemble at the Civic Auditorium in downtown Portland, transcending the color line that often restricted access to downtown venues.

Inspired by TimeSound, Albina’s musicians started a similar big band and choir program for kids. YouthSound brought together hundreds of students for weekly practices at the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church. Many were Black, but the program was inclusive and spanned genres from jazz to classical. For many white kids, it marked their first experience of gospel music. The project led to a series of programs providing music education to Portland children who otherwise had no access. Several alumni of these programs have since become internationally acclaimed musicians, including Domo Branch, Charlie Brown III and five-time Grammy winner Esperanza Spalding, widely considered the most accomplished female jazz bassist alive.

Though developing musical skills was the focus — and often the outcome — of these projects, their creators had a greater end in mind. As Berry recounts in an oral history included with YouthSound, an AMT album of the ensemble’s 1982 performance at Jefferson High, “Each person in the choir is an individual, and when we sing, we’re making sure to let one another know that, even though we’re different individuals, we’re all connected. We have to deal with the same things together. I’m talking about social justice. I’m talking about peace, joy, happiness. That’s what the music did for all of us that were in the choir.” 

That day in AMT’s narrow office, Walker, Smith and Berry wove together the Trust’s story with the kind of intimate rapport born from long hours spent dreaming and problem-solving together over the course of years. Despite their differences in age and race, the respect each held for the others was palpable, evident in the way the conversation flowed seamlessly between them: one man recounting an anecdote, another clarifying the timeline, the third offering context. Only later did I realize what the experience reminded me of — music, of course. Listening to these three converse felt like watching a great band jam: Each player contributing a distinct element without overstepping, creating a whole much greater than the sum of its parts. 

Before I left, Berry handed me a copy of YouthSound, then asked me to text him when I got home so he’d know I’d arrived safely. That evening, I put the album on my turntable and flipped through the liner notes while a cascade of voices — dozens of children and adults, singing together in a high school auditorium four decades ago — tumbled into my living room. “It was all about listening,” one student recalled. “Anybody could put out a tune. But your tune gotta match the person standing next to you. This was about teamwork. We needed to sound as one.”

THOUGH THEIR WORK OFTEN INVOLVES the literal preservation of the past, AMT’s true focus is on the future. “In another 50 years, we don’t want a couple of guys like me and Ken sitting around talking about the good old days,” Walker said. To this end, the Trust is partnering with Portland schools and nonprofits to expand access to arts education while connecting students with Albina’s Black music legacy.

Last June, I drove to the school district headquarters for “Rhythms of Tomorrow,” one of 38 public events AMT hosted in 2025 alone. A collaboration between AMT and Portland Public Schools, it marked the first district-wide celebration of Black Music Month. On the way, I stopped for lunch on Mississippi Avenue, in historic Albina. There, I stood in line for tacos among throngs of lunch-goers wearing Blundstone boots and fine-line tattoos, mostly 30- and 40-somethings, mostly white. Nearby, a cafe advertised boba tea and handcrafted donuts. A boutique nursery sold mounted ferns for $150 each. Yoga studios and brewpubs abounded.

Decades after city bulldozers tore through Albina, another wave of displacement struck what remained of the neighborhood. In the 1990s, the area’s cheap housing began to attract white people priced out of other districts. The city began investing previously withheld resources into Albina, cracking down on predatory lending and housing abandonment. These changes primarily benefited middle-class white newcomers, and soon gentrification pushed housing prices out of reach for many longtime residents. By 2000, less than a third of Black Portlanders lived in Albina and, for the first time since the 1960s, the area no longer had a Black majority. “A lot of folks are out in The Numbers now,” Sylvester told me, referring to the far reaches of East Portland. “I used to cruise around in my 1974 Dodge Charger — it had a sunroof and an 8-track,” he said. “I could wave at 50 people, stop and talk to 30. Now, I can drive from my house in Kenton, all through Albina, and never wave once.” 

A mile south of Mississippi, the school district’s headquarters sits on a sprawling 10.5-acre campus. One of the “urban renewal” projects that displaced residents in the 1960s, it’s a drab industrial building, brick-pink and resembling a parking garage. But the day I visited, the banal exterior stood in sharp contrast to the scene inside: Kids raced around, eating watermelon slices and salami from a long table heaped with snacks. Adults exchanged hugs and handshakes. A DJ stood behind a spread of turntables and mixers, catching the eyes of many 11-year-olds and filling the room with buoyant tracks.

Norman Sylvester started off the event, the first in a line-up of musicians and speakers that spanned genres and generations: blues to hip-hop, high-schoolers to elders. He stepped onstage carrying his guitar more like an extension of his body than an object in hand. Though Sylvester has played across many genres in his career, he remains rooted in the blues. When I asked what drew him to that music, he told me, “I can only imagine a man like Muddy Waters or Son House, plowing a field, driving a tractor all day, and still being able to play a guitar and sing at that quality. Where did that come from?” Before I could wager a guess, he answered: “From the dedication they had to doing something better. Those journeys just mean something to me, so I want to keep that going.” 

Listening to him play that afternoon, bending notes into riffs equal parts aching and sweet, I thought of his words and their implication: A song is not only a thing to be archived, but a kind of archive in itself. Here, preserved in melody and lyric, rhythm and pitch, a record of life is stored for future access.

After Sylvester’s set, four women — MaryEtta Callier, Arietta Ward, Nafisaria Mathews and LaRhonda Steele — took the stage to sing a set of gospel songs. Ward and Mathews are sisters. Their mother, the late Janice Scroggins, who died in 2014, was another Albina music legend. Best known as a virtuoso pianist, Scroggins was also a beloved educator and composer.

“My mother started playing when she was 2 or 3,” Ward told me. According to family lore, Scroggins was thought to be a sickly child, always crying. Then one day someone found her staring at a piano, silent. They lifted her up to the instrument and placed her hands on the keys. After that, her ceaseless crying stopped. A few years later, Scroggins was playing at church in Idabel, Oklahoma, when a wealthy parishioner noticed her talent and offered to sponsor formal lessons. Her teacher explained the fundamentals — scales, notation — but more importantly, Ward said, “she showed my mother that music was something a woman could do.”

When Scroggins came to Albina in the ’70s, she became one of many exceptional female musicians central to the community. Some have passed on — such as the acclaimed singer Linda Hornbuckle and bassist Marianne Mayfield — while many others, including Steele, Callier and Shirley Nanette, are still performing today. But the music industry was largely dominated by men, a reality that can’t be missed when browsing the archive where male faces far outnumber those of females. Underrepresentation of women in the music industry is certainly not unique to Albina, nor is it confined to history: According to USC Annenberg’s study of 2024’s chart-topping songs, 62.3% of recording artists — and more than 94% of producers — were male. “Making it as a musician has always been more difficult for women,” Ward told me. They often handled the administrative and domestic responsibilities that supported their male partners’ music careers and many faced discrimination, something that remains prevalent. “I’ve been offered way less money than a male performer for the exact same show,” Tahirah Memory told me, an experience Ward shares. “It takes tenacity,” Ward said. “But it makes you stronger.” 

Performing as Mz. Etta, Ward has built a dynamic music career in Portland as a  genre-fluid singer and bandleader. Her powerhouse vocals brim with joy and an easeful muscularity, drawing crowds to shows around the city. Ward credits her perseverance to the Albina community. “People talk about the Great American Songbook,” she said. “Well, my great American songbook looks a lot different, because growing up I was exposed to all these Black composers. I was shown that we can do anything in a time when other people said we couldn’t.” Her mentors — Ken Berry, Linda Hornbuckle, Norman Sylvester, LaRhonda Steele, her mother — gave their students more than the skills needed to master difficult compositions. “We were taught to honor the music, but also to honor ourselves,” she said. “It’s freedom that was instilled.” Ward continues that tradition of mentorship today, collaborating with AMT on programs like this public school event as well as jam sessions and community concerts that amplify the legacy of Albina’s female musicians. “They may not have been at the forefront, but their imprint was very poignant.”

“We were taught to honor the music, but also to honor ourselves. It’s freedom that was instilled.”

In the school auditorium, Ward and the gospel quartet began with Walter Hawkins’ song “Be Grateful.” Their voices twined around one another, building a sound so full and layered it felt thick enough to touch. A young girl eating a cookie a few seats down stopped mid-bite and stared at the singers, mouth agape. The song filled the room the way water floods a vessel, immersing us.

The event closed with Portland-based producers Tony Ozier and Jumbo, two of the five artists who remixed recordings from the archive to create contemporary, beat-based tracks for AMT’s 2025 album Soul Assembly. “We figured we could be the bridge, not just to take the old to the now, but to pass the torch so the youngsters can take it from us and walk forward,” Jumbo told the crowd.

Soul Assembly takes its name from a 1968 musical theatre production created by the Black Student Union at Jefferson High in response to the rising racial tensions surrounding MLK’s assassination. Performed around the city, the show illuminated African American history while celebrating the culture and creativity of Portland’s Black community. 

When Ozier encountered this story in the archive, he was struck. Portland doesn’t have a great reputation for Black culture, he told me, and when he moved to the city 19 years ago as a young funk musician, he was not expecting to find a deep-rooted Black music scene. But before long, he met Janice Scroggins, who introduced him to a wealth of local funk musicians. “I thought I was funkin’,” Ozier told me laughing. “She said, ‘You are funkin’ — but Portland ain’t new to funk.’” Ozier now teaches youth music classes for the Bodecker Foundation and hopes AMT projects like the Soul Assembly album can help connect young people to the music and stories of Albina’s past. “This is Black history in Portland — where else do you hear that?” Culture is shaped by the music youth engage with, Ozier told me. “Listening to ‘say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud,’ when you’re 15 is different than listening to ‘you usedto call me on your cellphone.’ Those words, they get stuck in your head whether you want them to or not.”

That day, Ozier and Jumbo played two tracks. The first, “Searchin’ for Love” was recorded in the ’70s by Shades Of Brown and released in 2024 on AMT’s label. With a laid-back groove and piercing vocals, the song is irresistibly catchy and, at the same time, shot through with anguish. Described in the liner notes as a “cry for decency,” the track reflects the Albina community’s dismay at the city’s disregard for their neighborhoods. Next, Jumbo played a remixed version in which he layered samples of music from his own coming-of-age years over the original track. A thumping beat and electronic torque lend fresh potency to the original vocals, which reverberate relentlessly throughout.

The song seemed to collapse time, and the crowd listened, head-nodding and mesmerized. Its effect, perhaps, was especially powerful here — inside a building constructed atop the razed homes of a once-thriving neighborhood, now filled with members of that displaced community who had returned to the same ground to celebrate the fruits of their still-flourishing culture. The place mirrored the sonic landscape Jumbo had created, where histories layered atop one another and ghosts mingled with dreams. Like the song, the event was both tribute to the enduring impact of history, and, simultaneously, testament to a person’s capacity to create something new from all that they’ve been given. 

BEFORE THE END OF SUMMER, I attended one more AMT event: the latest performance of TimeSound, Albina’s historic concert series, recently revived by AMT after a three-decade hiatus. It was part of the grand reopening celebration for the expanded Albina Library. Located on Russell Street, the library sits just a block east of the intersection where Norman Sylvester found himself that fall day in 1957, a young boy in search of a haircut. Before the show, I walked over to the crossing.

There, afternoon sun pooled atop asphalt, cut by the shade of street trees. Cars passed. A woman carried a toddler down the sidewalk. I imagined Sylvester standing here all those years ago. If that 12-year-old kid returned today, I wondered, would he recognize anything? Apartments occupied two corners, and a commercial complex on the third housed a civil rights nonprofit, the Urban League of Portland. On the fourth corner, where the brick building with the onion-shaped cupola once stood, a chain-link fence enclosed a rectangle of bare land. 

The space has sat vacant since it was bulldozed in the ’70s. Now, a half-century later, that’s finally changing. Last February, a collaboration guided by a Black-led nonprofit, the Williams and Russell CDC, broke ground on a residential and commercial development that will prioritize access for people with generational ties to the neighborhood. The city of Portland — which, last June, agreed to a settlement that will pay $8.5 million to 26 descendants of displaced Black families — is among the partners. The project is funded in part by the 1803 Fund, an organization that invests in Black Portland and has supported several restorative development efforts underway in Albina. 1803 also funds AMT’s work, because, as Juma Sei, the organization’s community partnership manager, told me, “You can have a bunch of buildings, but it doesn’t matter if there isn’t a culture to put people into those buildings.” 

Sei first encountered AMT soon after he moved back to Portland in 2024. He’d grown up in the area, but his parents immigrated from Sierra Leone, so he lacked generational connections to Portland’s Black community. Seeking to better understand local Black history, he began looking into archives and stumbled upon AMT. He was stunned. Sei has lived in Atlanta, D.C. and Detroit, all places lauded for Black culture. “Portland isn’t on that list,” he told me. “But here was this living, breathing thing — the largest archive of its kind in the U.S. — right here in Portland. To me, it was a treasure trove.”

Demographically, Sei said, Albina is no longer the center of Black life in Portland. Most Black Portlanders now live farther east or outside the city. At the library celebration events thus far — puppet theatre, 3D printing demos — Sei couldn’t help but notice that there weren’t many Black people present. But at the TimeSound concert, the scene was quite the opposite. 

In a large meeting room, a dreamy mural backlit a stage and glass doors opened to a courtyard where people stood in the sun licking complimentary horchata oat-milk popsicles. The space was flooded with light and filled to near capacity with predominantly Black families, though plenty of others were also present in a crowd that spanned generations: seniors, 40-somethings, babies in arms.

Calvin Walker stepped to the mic first. “Is this not a miracle?” he said. “To have this beautiful facility, the second-largest library in Portland, right here?” The room swelled with applause. “There was a time when nobody wanted to live in Albina,” he said. “After Vanport, this is where we landed, and we made it vibrant. Now, it’s going to come back, and it’s going to come back with all of us.”

The concert was directed by Ward, who, in the TimeSound tradition, led an intergenerational ensemble performing work by Albina’s Black composers. When Berry asked her to direct, Ward felt some trepidation. “It’s hard not to get imposter syndrome. These musicians are my heroes, my teachers. They’ll always be legendary to me.” But on stage that afternoon, no trace of her worries could be seen, only her admiration for Albina’s musicians — past and present — resounded. To showcase the community’s female artists, she’d selected a set composed primarily by women and began with a song by her mother. The crowd fell silent. Some, like me, had never before heard this particular composition. Others had listened to it many times, even played it themselves. For them, perhaps, the song unlocked a chest of memories, evoking people and places of years past. The courtyard doors hung open, and I wondered: If a young boy were standing on the corner of Williams and Russell just now, might he catch a riff drifting on the wind?

Near the end of the show, Ward invited Berry onstage to sing. He approached the mic, shaking his head with mystified delight. “I was just having a flashback,” he said, and described an evening some 35 years ago. He was on stage at another Portland library, performing another community concert. Ward and her sister Nafisaria were there, just children. “Arietta was right here,” he said, glancing down at his ribs where he held a hand to indicate her height. When he looked up, his eyes were wet with tears, but he was smiling. “It’s just so good to see that we are still whole when there’s been so much to break us apart.” He started to say more, then turned to the band, signaled them to begin, and let the music speak for itself.   

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This article appeared in the February 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The sound of black history in Portland.”  

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