Black History Month honors the significant role African
Americans have in our society that is often overlooked in traditional history
lessons. Wednesday, February 17th, 2016, author Max G. Geier will
have a reading and talk about his book The
Color of Night: Race, Railroaders, and Murder in the Wartime West. This
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.
Natalia Fernández, Curator and Archivist for the Oregon
Multicultural Archives in the Oregon State University Valley Library will also be
presenting a new collection of Oregon African American railroad porter oral
history interviews. The Oregon Cultural Trust has awarded a $5,000 grant that
will enable Oregon State University’s Libraries and Press to transfer these
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.
The Color of Night:
Race, Railroaders, and Murder in the Wartime West
Max G. Geier Book Reading
and Talk
Wednesday, February,
17th 2016
5:00-6:30 p.m.
Special Collections
and Archives Research Center
5th Floor
of the Valley Library
Free and open to the
public. Light refreshments will be served.
________________________________________________________________________
We are excited to present this event and hope that you will
join us! Thanks to Max G. Geier, here is a preview to his book talk:
Working, Race, and Homeland : Divided Lives in the
Wartime West
By Dr. Max G. Geier, Professor of History, Emeritus,
Western Oregon University
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.