1991 antiwar demonstration

Last month, Portland State students disrupted a university governing-board meeting, forcing board members to retreat to a bunker -- er, unmarked basement conference room -- to vote on a proposed tuition increase. Was it one of the more memorable protests in our local history? No, but that’s because Portland sets a high bar. The Rose City is known around the world for its demonstrations. On the pages that follow we offer up some of the most interesting, strange and meaningful Portland protests ever.

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This "flipped" image shows police at the port

In 1934, striking Portland longshoremen protested efforts to bring in replacement workers. They surrounded the hiring hall and disabled buses that were there to take the new hires to the port. “The strikebreakers never even got near the docks,” The Oregonian reported. (Port operators responded by turning an old ship into a “floating hotel” so the replacement workers wouldn’t have to cross picket lines, but strikers infiltrated it, tossing guards into the water.)

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All photos are from The Oregonian's archives

Stereotypers for The Oregonian and The Oregon Journal walked off the job in November 1959 to protest stagnant pay and the impact of increasing automation. Other newspaper union members joined them. Five months later, several hundred strikers staged a long, funeral-procession-style march through downtown Portland to keep the strike in the public’s mind. The labor dispute included bombings and other violence before it finally ended in 1965, with the two dailies becoming open shops.

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Criterion Collection

Portland Mayor Terry Schrunk, Police Chief William Hilbruner and the Rev. Richard Steiner were among the Portland movers and shakers in 1960 who protested The Guild Theatre’s decision to show Louis Malle’s film “The Lovers.” Schrunk called the movie “filth for filth’s sake -- and for dollars.” Guild manager Nancy Welch was later convicted of violating the city’s obscenity ordinance, but the state Supreme Court overturned the conviction.

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A solemn march, both against segregation and in mourning for the recently assassinated Mississippi civil-rights leader Medgar Evers, weaved through Portland’s neighborhoods in 1963. The demonstration picked up participants as it progressed through the city, growing to hundreds of people.

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In 1965, Portland State hosted a National Security Seminar featuring army officers warning of the dangers of world communism. The campus Committee on Democratic Education -- “armed,” wrote The Oregonian, “with beards, babes and banjos” -- protested with its “Insecurity Seminar.” Folk musicians played in the Park Blocks while more than 100 students carried signs with messages like “This is a College Not a Kindergarten” and “Muscles No Substitute for Mentality.”

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In 1967, six Reed College students blocked entry to Portland’s U.S. Selective Service office by chaining themselves to the front doors. A dozen more students marched in front of the “chain gang” with signs. Police had to borrow a large bolt cutter from the Bonneville Power Administration to cut the main padlock as the protesters chanted “Hell no, we won’t go.” The students went -- to jail.

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The “Battle of the Park Blocks” in May 1970 pitted Portland State students, faculty and other protesters against police. A police tactical unit charged the protesters, who had barricaded streets as part of a nonviolent nationwide student strike. The confrontation led to more than 30 injuries. A photo in The Oregonian showed a young woman sobbing on the ground, her shirt spattered with a friend’s blood. A grand jury was convened but ended up refusing to issue indictments.

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During the final years of the U.S.’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Portlanders held a weekly antiwar vigil at Pioneer Courthouse. In 1972, Hawaii Congresswoman Patsy T. Mink and Wayne Morse, a former U.S. senator from Oregon, joined the observance.

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Long-time Black Panther Party leader Kent Ford (left) and another local activist carried a casket during a 1977 Portland City Council meeting to highlight what they considered the Metropolitan Steering Committee's destructive policy priorities and methods. Seven years earlier, Ford had led a group of protesters to the city council after the shooting of 19-year-old Albert Williams.

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The American Revolutionary Communist Party’s 1980 May Day parade to Lownsdale Square was met by aggressive counter-demonstrators, who dogged the march, shouting “Down with communism” and “Red is for murder.” The confrontation devolved from opposing chants into name-calling and then a brawl. A week earlier, in a prelude to the melee, a bomb went off in the men’s restroom at the square.

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Dozens of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's followers sang and danced outside the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service's Portland offices in 1983 to protest what they said was harassment and physical abuse by INS investigators. Before their eastern Oregon commune collapsed two years later, Rajneeshees committed various crimes, including deliberately spreading salmonella on restaurant salad bars in The Dalles.

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About 300 demonstrators chanted in the rain before a 1991 Andrew Dice Clay performance at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, shouting “Shame!” at concertgoers entering the venue. Inside the hall, Clay riffed on the protesters and Mayor Bud Clark, who had encouraged Portlanders to skip the concert. “I'm telling dirty jokes,” the comedian said, “and they make me out to be a mass murderer.”

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President George H.W. Bush supposedly dubbed Portland “Little Beirut” after being met by determined protesters in 1991. (The actual Beirut was wrecked in the 1970s and ’80s during the Lebanese Civil War.) The writer Chuck Palahniuk says Portland “anarchists” during this time gathered outside the downtown Hilton Hotel whenever presidents came to town. They ate potatoes dyed with food coloring and “then, when the motorcade arrived, drank Syrup of Ipecac and puked big Red, White and Blue barf puddles all over the hotel.”

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What happened when Portland anarchists held a convention? Somehow they all agreed on a place to congregate -- outside the X-Ray Café -- and then they faced off with the police. The so-called “Great Anarchist Riot of 1993” followed, resulting in broken windows, black eyes and priceless memories.

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Ace Hayes, who died in 1998, was the embodiment of Portland protest. He led anti-war demonstrations in the 1960s, held monthly “Secret Government Seminar” lectures in the 1980s and published the Portland Free Press, which claimed to be “read and quoted by the CIA, among others -- not, of course, with great pleasure.”

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Charlie Hales, then a city commissioner, came around a downtown corner on May Day in 2000 and was stunned to find a wall of police "for what, to my amateur eyes, was a noisy but not terribly disruptive" rally. Later that afternoon, the large, swarming labor-rights march degenerated into chaos, and police declared an emergency, with officers charging the crowd on horseback.

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In July 2000, 26-year-old environmental activist Tre Arrow, protesting logging in the Mount Hood National Forest, spent 11 days on a 9-inch-wide, third-story ledge on the downtown Portland building that housed the U.S. Forest Service’s Northwest regional offices. He finally rappelled to the ground and “into the arms of his supporters.” (12 years later, Arrow ran for Portland mayor while in jail, where he had landed after a supervised-release violation on an eco-arson conviction.)

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In 2002, President George W. Bush met the same reception in Portland as his father a decade earlier. Police used pepper spray and shot rubber bullets to break up a surging protest that kept local Republican donors from getting into a downtown fundraiser Bush headlined. Protesters leaped onto the hoods of police cruisers to hold off law enforcement, but one activist insisted, "There was no warning, no ultimatum, nothing” before the police started pepper-spraying the crowd. The next year, thousands of Portlanders would take to the streets to protest the impending Iraq War.

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In 2012, a year after the Occupy Portland protests, college student Cameron Whitten staged a high-profile hunger strike while camping outside Portland City Hall. He wanted to raise awareness of the growing housing crisis in the city. "Hope I don't die," he tweeted after nearly three weeks without food. Whitten finally ended his protest after 55 days on the same day the Portland City Council announced it would participate in a regional "summit" on housing and homelessness.

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Johnny Nguyen

The Oregonian called it the "hug shared around the world." A photograph of 12-year-old Devonte Hart and Portland Police Sgt. Bret Barnum at a November 2014 rally protesting endemic police violence captured something special: hope. Hart, carrying a handmade "Free Hugs" sign, was among more than 2,000 people at the demonstration. His goal: to "spread love and kindness." Mission accomplished.

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Greenpeace protesters in 2015 suspended themselves from the St. Johns Bridge and paddled the Willamette River in kayaks in an effort to stop Shell Oil's icebreaker MSV Fennica from heading out to sea. "Everybody's hearts are broken," Greenpeace USA spokeswoman Cassady Sharp said after the Fennica managed to weave through the protesters and leave Portland behind.

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Bonus

This protest happened in Seaside, but it does have a Portland connection. A Gearhart activist named Kit Metke took on the persona of Miss Sex Object during the 1972 Miss Oregon Pageant. She and fellow protesters dogged and pranked attendees throughout the pageant. The Rose City connection? Portland’s Sandra Lynn Herring won the Miss Oregon title. “I don’t feel exploited, not at all,” Herring said.

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Photos: The Oregonian

Do you demand change?

Portland has had so many demonstrations over the years that we probably left out a few -- or a few hundred -- that deserve to make this list. Sorry. You’re welcome to picket our offices to protest the oversight.

-- Douglas Perry