Black Educational Center Building and Murals Demolished to Make Way for New Albina Headstart School
By Leo Newman | Contributing Writer
The recently abandoned LifeWorks Umoja Center on the corner of NE 17th and Alberta Street, which bore a well-loved mural of Malcolm X was quietly demolished in May during the week of the Civil Rights icon’s 100th birthday. This marks the second time this year that a historic brick building on NE Alberta was demolished for safety concerns, (the first being the Cowley building on 28th Ave., which was demolished in January.) Since the 1970s, LifeWorks Umoja Center has been a nexus point in specialized education and community outreach for Portland’s African American youth.
In the 1970’s, the Albina Mural Project produced several murals depicting scenes from African American history across NE Portland. Artist Lewis Harris and students of the Black Educational Center painted two such murals on exterior walls of their school in 1984. The murals depicted Civil Rights leaders; one of Malcolm X and one of Marcus Garvey. Also painted on its walls were murals of Harriet Tubman and images of a few bygone neighborhood institutions like the Cotton Club and the Alberta Streetcar. At the time of its demolition, the piece, officially titled “Black Pride,” was the second-oldest surviving mural in Portland.
The Black Educational Center
The Black Educational Center School (BEC) opened in May of 1970 as a full time summer program under the direction of veteran Portland educator and activist Ron Herndon.
Born in Kansas, Herndon moved to Portland in 1968 to attend Reed College, where he successfully pressured the faculty to create a Black Studies program after organizing 30 others to occupy the college’s financial office shortly before Christmas.
Shortly after graduating, Herndon set out to design a school tailored to the needs of Black children. Majority Black schools in North Portland, like Jefferson High, suffered low test scores and faced threats of closure. In efforts to desegregate, the district kept a tight cap on the number of Black teachers in majority Black schools and bused a growing percentage of Black students into SW and SE to attend majority white schools. Early education programs and the neighborhood’s only middle school were both desegregated in this way.
The district pressured parents who volunteered their children for the busing program to sign forms pledging that they wouldn’t return their students to local high schools like Jefferson or Grant. Black students were purposefully scattered across the district. The strict bus schedules to and from school prevented them from getting involved in afterschool programs at their new schools and estranged them from their neighborhood friends. Former board member Lolenzo Poe says this left them isolated and defenseless against cruel classmates and teachers.
“The whole notion that somehow you were going to learn more sitting next to White kids than Black kids is almost humorous,” says Poe. “We are still suffering from the tragedy that was busing and integration… it broke up our community.”
Operated out of the historic Vernon Library building on NE 17th (just south of the recently demolished structure), the BEC emphasized academic excellence, self-confidence, and a thorough awareness of Afro-American history and culture. In the Fall of 1973, the BEC welcomed its first class of full-time grade school students.
“Black parents trusted us enough to work with their children that first summer,” Herndon remembers. “Parents had to pay tuition, because we weren’t getting funding from anybody. It just strikes me, the confidence Black parents had to allow us to work with their kids.”
At the same time, Herndon expanded the BEC’s operations in several directions. The organization obtained the adjacent brick building on the corner of Alberta as well as the building directly west for use as an administrative building. In 1971, the Black Educational Center Bookstore (later the Talking Drum) opened on N Williams Avenue.
Herndon took Public Portland Schools to task for busing and test scores but the Black Educational Center soon outperformed the district. The 70’s and 80’s were an era of worsening economic and social turbulence for Portland’s Black community. Most other community outreach organizations that cropped up around the same time withered away, but the BEC weathered the ensuing decades through the 1990s.
“The Black Male: An Endangered Species?”
Portland’s violent crime rates peaked in the early 1980s as more of its male youth became entrenched in a growing gang culture. Oregonians generally viewed gang violence as a California problem that creeped up the Willamette valley. Local law enforcement posited that L.A.-based gangs, particularly the Crips, expanded from Southern California’s saturated drug market into the Pacific Northwest to sell crack cocaine, where they would make double or triple the profit.
In 1988, state troopers were assigned to ride TriMet buses and trains to “curb gang violence.” The next year, Gov. Neil Goldschmidt sent three dozen National Guard troops to help police “crack down on Portland’s ‘drug-driven’ street gangs.” The Black community was rattled by a series of police killings of Black men. Most prominent among them was the killing of ex-marine and father of five, Tony Stevenson, who was choked to death by a Portland police officer. ‘The Black male: an endangered species’ became a catchphrase among columnists, professors and social outreach workers to describe the deepening crisis of gang violence.
Inspiration from the East
In January 1989, educator and advocate Lolenzo Poe attended the Hope For Youth Conference in Downtown Portland, where he saw Philadelphia journalist and activist Falaka Fattah deliver a speech on nonviolence and gang outreach. Fattah had founded a gang outreach program with her husband, David in 1968 after they learned one of their six sons had joined a gang. After working with their son, they worked to rehabilitate the members of his gang. The Fattahs created a safehouse in West Philadelphia called House of Umoja, Swahili for ‘unity,’ where they encouraged rival youth gangs to arbitrate disputes through direct communication.
The Fattahs aimed to provide “culturally-specific intervention services” for gang-affected youth. Drawing on the values of Kwanzaa, the Fattahs sought to replicate the structure of a tight-knit extended family. Fattah served as its matriarch and was eventually known as the Queen Mother. The Umoja program emphasized family and community principles, self-worth, hard work and education. “We utilized our culture, our African heritage,” Fattah said. “We showed them that they had a greater heritage than the legacy of slavery.”
The Fattahs did not make their residents give up their gang affiliations, conscious to not deprive local youth of their strongest social bonds. This allowed them to gain the trust of members of several rival street gangs and earned them the credibility needed to arbitrate disputes between them.
By 1970, House of Umoja was a fully functioning residential treatment program for gang-affected youth, several of whom had nowhere else to go. The Philadelphia courts were soon sentencing boys to at Umoja’s residential center, which paved the way for government funding and expansion.
In 1974, David Fattah, a veteran Philadelphia educator, authored the fabled Imani Peace Pact, a gang truce signed by over 400 gang members representing 30 different groups. The pact was credited for dropping Philadelphia homicide rate from a record high to a record low in the space of four years.
House of Umoja in Portland
When the Fattahs agreed to help Poe establish the Portland House of Umoja, corporate and city leadership were quick to cosign. In March 1990, Nike, the City of Portland, the Portland Police Bureau Sunshine Division, and the Oregon State Drug and Alcohol Office pledged a combined $199,000 to support the project. Washington Federal Savings and Loan donated two properties amounting to a similar value. In May, the Fattahs were welcomed back to Portland with a press conference attended by mayor Bud Clark, Ron Herndon and others.
However, businesses around the neighborhood were not all supportive of the project. “If I had known that 16 former gang members were going to be my next door neighbors,” Jeff Parks, owner of the Royal Esquire Club across the street, said, “I would still be at City Hall today, possibly as a resident.”
House of Umoja Inc., with Poe as its chairman, obtained the building from the Black Education Center. Like most Streetcar Era buildings along our stretch of Alberta, the two story brick building was built to accommodate commercial spaces on the street level and apartments above them. Poe poised to renovate the space to accommodate eight to ten youth and two live-in staff.
While a funding shortage delayed the renovation of the Umoja building, Poe sent Portland’s first House of Umoja cohort to stay at the Fattahs’ residential facility in West Philadelphia, where they and their sons also lived. “They came so they could experience it themselves and take it back and be antibodies,” Fattah says.
By mid-1991, the residential program was in full swing. Some of its residents were mandated by the court to stay there, while others came in off the street seeking respite from gang life and a safe place to sleep.
“The only family they had was the gangs,” former House of Umoja intern Charles Hannah says, “so, we had to change that.” Hannah, who now operates Third Eye Books on SE Division, came to Portland in 1992 after studying law enforcement administration at Western Illinois University. “I did not want to be the police, but I knew I wanted to work with my community,” Hannah said.
Walking down Alberta one Summer day, Hannah ran into Johnny A. Gage, known as ‘Biggie’, playing basketball with some neighborhood boys. In need of an internship to complete his degree, Gage began working at House of Umoja that Fall. Gage eventually became the Executive Director, lived upstairs and adopted the role of house parent.
Hannah found that the space gave its residents a family atmosphere that most did not have. According to Hannah, the residents generally moved as a unit, eating home-cooked family meals together and doing most other things as a community. “The space itself was conducive to conversations,” Hannah says.
Hannah frequently helped supervise Midnight Basketball, an effort between multiple youth outreach programs to keep the youth off of the street on Friday nights. “We get them into the gym, we turn the lights on and we start talking,” Hannah said. “And we talk for 5 to 10 minutes and then we play basketball.”
One night, Midnight Basketball came to a screeching halt when police cars surrounded the gym and two teenage boys were arrested in connection with a murder that took place the night before. Hannah remembered how the boys seemed quieter than normal as they accompanied him on his errands earlier that day. “That’s the memory I have; two young men who were ready to do good things,” Hannah said, “But earlier that evening, they took a fateful car ride and somebody died.”
The moral of this story, in his own words is, “everyone needs a place to go.”
Loss of Funding and Closure
A declining juvenile delinquency rate in the late 1990s as well as a 1997 county report alleging a high gang-recidivism rate of Umoja’s residents led the organization to cut its residential program and pivot to job training and outreach. Poe was dismayed by the change but hoped the program would return.
But Umoja faced another logistical problem: even though gang violence was back on the rise by the mid 2000s, especially affecting young Black males, gentrification had significantly pushed its clientele of gang-affected youth out of the burgeoning ‘Alberta Arts District,’ prompting it to expand its focus to east Portland and east Multnomah County.
In the early 2000s, the program struggled to maintain programs and funding sources until its administrative functions were taken over by Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare, which collapsed in 2008. In 2009, Umoja merged with LifeWorks NW, a mental health and addiction services program with several other locations around Portland.
The House of Umoja was forced to close in September 2011 after funding for the program was cut entirely. When Multnomah County moved to direct its new $4.5 million grant towards intervention-based outreach programs, supporters of House of Umoja wondered why they had been passed over.
“We have gone from prevention to intervention, and there needs to be both,” says Tina Glover, a former program director at House of Umoja.
New Albina Head Start Center
In February 2012, LifeWorks purchased the building from Umoja Inc. It operated as the LifeWorks Umoja Center until 2020, when the chapter moved into an office on Alberta and M.L.K., leaving the building vacant.
In a full circle moment for Herndon, Head Start took ownership of the historic brick building in August 2022, with plans for a facility equipped with classrooms and offices. However, the cost of retrofitting the building’s unreinforced masonry proved costlier than constructing a new building.
A New Building
After receiving a grant from Nike CEO Phil Knight-backed 1803 Fund for $25 million in April of this year, Head Start got the greenlight from the city to demolish the building. “It shows corporate responsibility,” Fattah said about Knight’s contribution.
The new facility, the McKinley Burt Center, honors African American inventor and author McKinley Burt Jr., who once lived in an apartment on the second floor of the now-demolished building. Herndon has stated that Head Start took high-resolution images of both remaining murals and plans to incorporate them into the design of the new center.
Reflecting on the new center, Hannah says, “hopefully it is going to be something the community can be proud of.” Fattah feels that Herndon’s new project is excellent. “As Malcom X said, ‘education is the passport to the future.”