About two years ago, the coastal town of Waldport celebrated one of its most prominent citizens with a bronze sculpture and a park named after the 19th-century Black sailor. But if you don’t live on the central coast, your thoughts of the seafaring world are probably pretty white. The Pacific Maritime Heritage Center in Newport aims to broaden that perspective with the recently opened exhibit Take Me to the Water: Histories of the Black Pacific.
“The exhibit is way more robust that I could possibly have imagined,” said Jeffrey Syrop, executive director of the maritime center. “Though, initially, I thought it was mostly about sailors and fishermen, I was surprised to see it includes a lot of aspects — community, leisure, swimming …. It really covers a broad spectrum.”
According to details of the exhibit, which runs through Jan. 12, “Most accounts of the United States’ maritime enterprises are disproportionately populated by white seafarers.” Why Black sailors are often overlooked is unclear, said Zachary Stocks, executive director of Oregon Black Pioneers who gave a talk at the exhibit’s opening reception last month.
“I think that when we think of the Black experience in this country, and in the West in particular, we have very specific images in our mind what that looks like, and it doesn’t often involve occupations that today you don’t find very many Black people participating in. But the truth is that all of Oregon’s traditional industries have had people of African descent working in them at some point, which includes fishing and longshoremen, and things like that.”
The exhibit was curated by Caroline Collins of the University of California-San Diego and presented by Exhibit Envoy, also of California. Syrop and his staff gave the exhibit a local touch with panels featuring Waldport seafarers Louis Southworth and his stepson, Alvin McCleary.
Born into slavery in Tennessee, Southworth traveled the Oregon Trail with his mother and later volunteered to fight in the Rogue River War. In time, he was able to buy his freedom and eventually homesteaded on the Alsea River in Waldport, where he operated a ferry for passengers and cargo across the Alsea Bay.
In 1883, he donated land for the first school in Waldport. Southworth was known for his fiddle playing, his support of Abraham Lincoln, and his determination to vote in every election, “including the 1880 presidential election…” when he “fastened two large oil drum cans to his boat and rowed across the bay to the polling place during a severe storm. He was the only man from the south side of the Alsea Bay to vote that day.”
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In 2022, a life-sized bronze sculpture of Southworth with this fiddle was unveiled in his Oregon hometown, and the next year a park was dedicated in his name on the site of the former Waldport High School.
His stepson, Alvin McCleary, was a gillnet fisherman for local canneries in Waldport before opening his own market and raising cattle. He later served as a city councilman from 1920 to 1940. He died in 1951, having spent 71 of his 85 years in Waldport.
A third seafaring family made their home in Oregon, at least for a short time. In his opening talk, Stocks shared the story of William Shorey.
“Captain William Shorey was the last Black whaleship captain in the Pacific when he retired from service in 1909,” Stocks said. “He and his family were part of the Black upper class in Oakland, California.” In researching the family, Stocks discovered that after William died of influenza in 1919, his widow, Julia, and their two children lived in Hammond, Oregon, for about two years.
Beyond the mariner tales, the exhibit details the lives of individuals at work and play, including surfer Nick Gabaldón, considered “the first documented African American surfer,” and Juan Garrido, an Afro-Portuguese conquistador who was the “first documented Black person in what is now the United States.” Garrido’s story is part of the exhibit panel on Black conquistadors of the Pacific “who could gain land, stipends, and limited stature for their service.”
Black women also are featured in the exhibit, including thousands who worked in the Pacific shipyards during World War II, and WAVES officers Harriet Ida Pickens and Frances F. Wills, the first Black women to be commissioned into the women’s branch of the U.S. Naval Reserve. WAVES, the acronym for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, did not allow Black women to join until 1944.
While much of the exhibit underscores the firsts of the Black Pacific, many displays are simply snapshots of life, not all ending well.
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During Jim Crow — laws enforcing racial segregation that lasted from the 1880s into the 1960s — when some West Coast cities segregated public beaches, Blacks created their own beach retreats. In 1912, Willa Bruce “established an oceanfront resort that would come to be known as Bruce’s Beach in Manhattan Beach, California.” The resort offered numerous amenities, including lodging, a café, and a dance hall, soon attracting other Blacks to purchase vacation homes in the area.
“Many White residents resented this burgeoning community,” according to the exhibit. “In 1927, the city of Manhattan Beach used eminent domain to seize and destroy the properties belonging to the Bruces and other African Americans.”
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The Pacific Maritime Heritage Center will hold its Third Annual Artisan Market and Holiday Open House from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 7. The free day at the museum includes local artisan wares for sale, music, and video presentations.
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