reposted from KBOO
In the 1980s, before gentrification, before Portlandia, Portland, Oregon was a sleepy city that existed outside of the national spotlight.
Skinheads had always been part of the local punk scene. In the late 1980s, punks and skins started being recruited by national white supremacist organizations, and that organizing work took off.
Portland became known as skin city. Racist skinheads roamed Portland , in groups, looking for victims and fights. Late one night in 1988 a group of Ethiopian friends were attacked in front of their apartment building in Southeast Portland. Mulugeta Seraw, a twenty eight year old Portland state student, was beaten with a baseball bat and left for dead. Their attackers were skinheads,members of East Side White Pride, a Neo-nazi street gang.
Following this, disparate groups in Portland came together to organize against this white supremacist threat. Activists started to work with anti-racist skinheads and politicized punks to confront and fight Neo-nazis in the streets and at punk shows.
By the mid 1990s neo-nazi skinheads had disappeared from the streets of Portland..
It Did Happen Here is a historical short form documentary podcast that chronicles how immigrants, civil rights activists, and militant youth worked together sub-culturally and cross-culturally with a diversity of tactics and ran white supremacist street gangs out of Portland.
reposted from KBOO
In the 1980s, before gentrification, before Portlandia, Portland, Oregon was a sleepy city that existed outside of the national spotlight.
Skinheads had always been part of the local punk scene. In the late 1980s, punks and skins started being recruited by national white supremacist organizations, and that organizing work took off.
Portland became known as skin city. Racist skinheads roamed Portland , in groups, looking for victims and fights. Late one night in 1988 a group of Ethiopian friends were attacked in front of their apartment building in Southeast Portland. Mulugeta Seraw, a twenty eight year old Portland state student, was beaten with a baseball bat and left for dead. Their attackers were skinheads,members of East Side White Pride, a Neo-nazi street gang.
Following this, disparate groups in Portland came together to organize against this white supremacist threat. Activists started to work with anti-racist skinheads and politicized punks to confront and fight Neo-nazis in the streets and at punk shows.
By the mid 1990s neo-nazi skinheads had disappeared from the streets of Portland..
It Did Happen Here is a historical short form documentary podcast that chronicles how immigrants, civil rights activists, and militant youth worked together sub-culturally and cross-culturally with a diversity of tactics and ran white supremacist street gangs out of Portland.