Oregon Multicultural Archives Blog

Jeremy Davis and Loretta Milton

On February 19th as part of the OSU Lonnie B Harris Black Cultural Center’s Black History Month celebrations, the BCC hosted an incredible event that included Loretta Milton, along with the artist Jeremy Davis. Davis painted a magnificent mural entitled “Predicting a Movement” for the BCC’s gathering hall featuring the OSU Black Student Union Walkout of 1969 – a protest sparked in support of OSU student athlete Fred Milton, Loretta Milton’s husband. After the event, Loretta along with her daughter and grandson, shared a family oral history interview with the OMA.

Fred Milton Family Oral History Interview

Date: February 19, 2016
Location: Oregon State University Lonnie B Harris Black Cultural Center
Length: 01:04:02
Interviewees: Loretta Milton, Zalika Gardner, and Isaiah Adams 
Interviewer: Dwaine Plaza

Interview Audio and Transcript

Milton Family Bios

Loretta Milton grew up in Roseburg, Oregon, and attended OSU in the late 1960s. She met her husband, Fred Milton, at OSU. They married in 1969 and moved to Utah where she worked as a teacher’s aide at the Edith Bowen Lab School while Fred completed his degree at Utah State University. For a short time, while Fred Milton played for the Montreal Alouettes, a Canadian football team, Loretta worked as a waitress. Loretta and Fred moved to Portland, Oregon, in the early 1970s, had several children, and were married until his death in 2011. Zalika Gardner, born 1973 in Portland, Oregon, is daughter to Fred and Loretta Milton. Isaiah Adams is Zalika Gardner’s son and Fred and Loretta Milton’s grandson.

Interview Summary

The Fred Milton family interview begins with Loretta Milton, Fred Milton’s widow, sharing her experiences while attending Oregon State University during the 1969 Black Student Union (BSU) Walkout, her relationship with Fred Milton, including their struggles as an interracial marriage, and their lives in Utah, Montreal, Canada, and eventually Portland, Oregon. Loretta describes Fred’s dissatisfaction with the Canadian football team and his subsequent jobs in Portland as a community liaison for the police, his employment at IBM, and his work for the city government. Zalika Gardner, Loretta and Fred’s first child, then shares some recollections of her father including: his wisdom, sensitivity, and sense of humor; his love to share stories; his talent as an athlete; his very humble personality; and his values. Gardner then describes her grandfather, a sharecropper who worked in Arkansas and then moved with his family to the West and worked on the railroad; his personality and influence on Fred’s life. The conversation then returns to Loretta who describes in more detail the circumstances and events of the BSU Walkout at OSU in 1969, the students who led the Walkout, and the campus reaction. Isaiah Adams, Loretta and Fred’s grandson and Zalika Gardner’s son, shares his perspective on his relationship with his grandfather, his admiration for his grandparents, and the values that he learned from Milton. The interview turns back to Loretta who describes some of the personal aspects of her marriage with Fred including his talent for letter writing, the evolution of their relationship with her parents, and his integrity. Loretta then shares her knowledge regarding the relationship between Fred Milton and football coach Dee Andros including their time while Fred attended OSU and their reconciliation during Fred’s candidacy for Portland County Commissioner. Both Loretta and Zalika describe Fred’s intellect and love of learning and the environment in addition to his athletic abilities, and Isaiah shares how those characteristics within his grandfather affected him. The family recollects on Milton’s many talents as an athlete and his passion for coaching. They conclude the interview by reflecting upon the positive impact that Milton had on the OSU campus and the significance of his story and legacy.

For more information about the 1969 Black Student Union Walkout, check out the 1969 BSU Walkout Flickr Set and, here are two links for the OSU Pauling Blog that also discuss the Walkout: The 1969 Black Student Union Walkout and A Lecture Interrupted and a Campus Torn Apart

“Predicting a Movement” by artist Jeremy Davis

And, to see the BCC event, click here for the video recording!

Black History Month honors the significant role African Americans have in our society that is often overlooked in traditional history lessons. On Wednesday, February 17^th, 2016, the OMA and the OSU Press hosted a book reading and talk by author Max G. Geier about his book The Color of Night: Race, Railroaders, and Murder in the Wartime West. The book highlights the murder trial of Robert Folkes who was charged with murder in rural Oregon. Folkes’ trial, controversial conviction, and resulting execution provokes thought about race, class, and privilege in Oregon.

And, Natalia Fernández, Curator and Archivist for the OMA, presented a new collection of Oregon African American railroad porter oral history interviews. The Oregon Cultural Trust awarded a $5,000 grant that will enable the OMA to transfer the histories to digital form. This grant project will include the creation of a website for the interview audio and transcripts, which will be made available to researchers, students, teachers, and the general public.

“The information gained through the interviews can be used to broaden the level of understanding of how African Americans played a significant role in the social and economic changes to the Portland area and the state as a whole during the 20th century. The stories shared have the potential to deepen public knowledge and appreciation of the African American experience and perspective in Oregon.” Natalia Fernández, Curator and Archivist, Oregon Multicultural Archives.

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Working, Race, and Homeland : Divided Lives in the Wartime West

By Dr. Max G. Geier, Professor of History, Emeritus, Western Oregon University

Professor Max Geier Book Talk

Murder trials, as one social critic famously observed, often reveal more about the community that stages them than about the case on which they are focused. This book (The Color of Night: Race, Railroaders, and Murder in the Wartime West) focuses on a murder and subsequent trial in the mid-Willamette Valley, and those events open a window on how wage-earning workers experienced life in the pre-war and wartime period in the rural northwest. Executioners working for the state of Oregon killed Robert E. Lee Folkes in January 1945, but in the process of killing Folkes, investigating officials working toward that end gathered and preserved information that helps us peer into the background of that man’s life as a common worker in a community of organized labor and political activists. Folkes first attracted public attention in Oregon as a murder suspect who faced trial in Albany during 1943 and then execution in Salem in early 1945. Before that, however, he was a wage-earning man who spent much of his life in Oregon as an employee of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Like many railroad workers, he lived with a foot in two worlds: a home life in the southern California community of South Central Los Angeles, and an away life on the road aboard trains travelling through northern California and Oregon, terminating in Portland, Oregon, and then returning via the same route. As a Black man born in rural Arkansas, he was a survivor of Jim Crow America. As a railroad worker in the early 1940s, he joined an organized labor movement that pushed back against legal segregation and demanded equal employment opportunities and better working and living conditions for people of color. As a young man who made a living cooking meals for railroad passengers and crew during a period of wartime mobilization, he was a service worker who was not considered a “serviceman” by the people of Linn County who sat as jurors as his trial. As a Black man working in a service job designated defense critical, he was protected from the military draft, but he was not protected from the suspicions of those who assumed he was a shirker or a troublemaker. As a member of a labor union local that was in the midst of contentious contract negotiations with the railroad at the time of the murder, he was a symbol of organized resistance to the wartime speedup and dangerous working conditions that he, and men like him, daily confronted. As a self-starting, accomplished young man with demonstrated success working autonomously and with minimal supervision, he was targeted for special treatment by railroad investigators who were engaged in an organized campaign to break the union and control worker unrest in a period of unprecedented profits for the company. In the campaign to make an example of Folkes, the railroad found ready support among state and county officials, and among local jurors drawn from the farm-owning families of Linn County, Oregon. In killing Folkes, however, they also brought African American men and women into the heart of the county seat. The experience of those men and women in that mid-Valley setting opens a window on race and labor relations at mid-century in and beyond western Oregon.