Cast members, from left, Simone Miller, Syairah Sims, Gideon Nartey-Tokoli, Elijah Sims and Viola DeVigal sing the song "If You Can Come To Work" as part of "Vanport The Musical."
Shawnte Sims, courtesy of World Stage Theatre
The city of Vanport was hastily built to accommodate workers migrating to Oregon to work in the shipyards during WWII. After the war, many white residents of Vanport relocated to Portland, but discriminatory banking and real estate practices prevented Black people from buying or renting in most parts of the city. So, the population of Vanport became increasingly African-American as time went on. In 1948, a catastrophic flood destroyed the entire city.
Growing up in the Portland area, Shalanda Sims never heard about the lost city of Vanport. As an adult, she learned that her great-grandmother had lived there before the flood. Sims is the executive and artistic director at World Stage Theatre, and she was inspired by the stories she heard from Vanport survivors to create a show that she hopes will keep the city’s history alive. “Vanport the Musical” is part of the Vanport Mosaic Festival. Tickets are available via the Northwest Children’s Theater for weekend performances through June 5.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: The city of Vanport was hastily built in the 1940′s to accommodate thousands of workers who came to Oregon to work in the shipyards during World War II. After the war, many white residents of Vanport relocated to Portland. But discriminatory banking and real estate practices prevented Black people from buying or renting in most parts of the city. In 1948, when a catastrophic Memorial Day flood destroyed the city, about a third of its residents were Black. Now, as we near the 74th anniversary of that flood, a musical tells the story of the city and in particular its residents. Vanport the Musical is part of the Vanport Mosaic Festival. Tickets are available at the Northwest Children’s Theater for weekend performances through June 5th. Shalanda Sims wrote and directed the show. She is the executive and artistic director of World Stage Theatre and she joins me now. Welcome.
Shalanda Sims: Thank you, Dave. Thanks for having me.
Miller: Thanks for joining us. You grew up in Portland. How much did you hear about Vanport as a child?
Sims: Believe it or not, I didn’t hear anything about Vanport until I was an adult with my own children.
Miller: But am I right that you have great grandparents who lived there?
Sims: Yes, I am a descendant of Vanport. My great great grandmother lived there during the war.
Miller: And yet you were an adult when you first heard about it?
Sims: Yes.
Miller: What went through your mind when you first started hearing those stories?
Sims: A little bit of shock and disbelief, like why didn’t I know about this city that existed and the reason that my family is here in Oregon? So, a lot of questions.
Miller: How much were you eventually able to learn about your family’s story?
Sims: I was able to learn quite a bit from my mother and my grandmother who is still living and she was a child during Vanport, eight years old, when the flood happened.
Miller: Can you give it a sense for some of what they told you?
Sims: My grandmother doesn’t like to talk about it a lot. She mentions the flood and that’s something that comes up before her as a child. She said she never forgot that experience, but she also mentions that Vanport was a great place for her to live and she didn’t really experience racism until she left outside of Vanport.
Miller: What made you want to make a musical about this place and time?
Sims: Right, I was interested at first. I just wanted to do the research to learn about this place because I had some connection to it. It wasn’t until my mother introduced me to a few of the Vanport descendants. That was when I realized that this was greater than just my family history. But this is a history of people who had kind of been forgotten and that I needed … I felt a sense of responsibility to share this story with more people.
Miller: What kinds of conversations did you have with Vanport survivors when you were researching and writing your show?
Sims: There were a lot of stories actually. I will say two of the survivors I interviewed or spoke with, one had just a bunch of memorabilia with cutout newspapers, even the message that went out from Henry Kaiser about the amount that they were able to pay… that you would get paid during that time.
Miller: …the flyer saying come to Vanport?
Sims: Yes, yes. And so one of our songs talks about that. And that is the information I received from her.
Miller: The main characters in your musical come from Texas. In general, where did Vanport workers and residents come from?
Sims: So the main characters, yes, they come from Texas. The other characters are Muskogee, Oklahoma, Atlanta, Georgia. They came from all over really. But those are the three that we highlight in the play.
Miller: And what were they promised or maybe another way to put it is what drew them to come to this kind of just add water … That’s terrible phrase. This instant city, you know, in the floodplain north of Portland?
Sims: Promise, right? Hope. They were coming off of the heels of the Great Depression. So everyone was needing work. But it was this idea of the American dream, that they could achieve the American dream here in Vanport. Not only were they coming, but full families were coming to work. So you didn’t just have one person working, but you had the mother, the father and if the children were old enough, they could work as well. So they were uprooting wherever they were coming from to come to Vanport to achieve this American dream.
Miller: How much did the people that you talked to know about what they were getting themselves into … know about Oregon or Portland or Vanport itself, for that matter, before they arrived?
Sims: Not many, not many. They had no idea what they were getting into and at the time, again, their eyes were focused. They had this plan that they were going to come and make this money. And, as I’m not sure if you know, a lot of African Americans left after the war was over. They went back, but there were maybe 6,000 African Americans who stayed.
Miller: For people who aren’t familiar with the story and actually, I imagine it’s not an insignificant number of people still who live in the northwest and who maybe have heard the word Vanport, but may not, still to this day, know the story. Can you just remind us how it got started. This is also how you start your musical?
Sims: Yes, Henry Kaiser put out a call for people to come and work in his shipyards, They were building ships for the war. And there was a lot of conversation with officials and of the city housing authority of Portland, the commissioner, the mayor, all trying to figure out how they were going to produce these ships. There were not enough workers in Oregon alone to produce the ships. So he put a call out across the country for people to come. And there was no housing at the time, enough to house these people who were coming. And Henry Kaiser basically built what was going to be Kaiserville. He built this housing project, which was the first of its kind in the country.
Miller: What kinds of tensions were there between Henry Kaiser and Portland’s officials from the beginning?
Sims: From what I read and researched, the conflict was that Henry Kaiser didn’t really know much about housing yet. He was able to come in and build this housing project that they hadn’t been able to do. You know, he was getting this permission and approval to do things that had been held up for them.
Miller: You don’t sugarcoat Oregon’s racist history or the policies that lead to so many Black people living in a floodplain that eventually flooded. But the overall tone of your production is one that, at least when I was there, celebrates creativity and vitality. I’m curious how you approached balancing pain (because people died in the flood) with joy and how you thought about balancing those two together?
Sims: For me, it was important because when I did the research, I found a lot of data and that was mostly my information. It wasn’t until I began to interview the Vanport survivors that the story of Vanport was brought to life. And I feel like that was what was missing and because they were children during that time, I wanted to focus on the children and their experience. So it was really about showing the humanity of Vanport and being responsible and telling the story in a way that reflected how they were feeling at that time. It was a good experience in the sense that they were there, they were able to work. Now they didn’t necessarily make as much money as they were promised, but it was still better than where they came from and most of them were coming from the south.
Miller: What was it like working with young people for this production, having them portray something that, when you were a young person, you weren’t even aware of?
Sims: Right, World Stage Theatre has been working with youth since our inception in 2006. We are in an intergenerational company. But I would say these young people are amazing and they soak up information so quickly and we had a lot of discussions about this. One of the things that is interesting is within our play, the cast, maybe a handful of them, are Vanport descendants.
Miller: Just like you.
Sims: Yes.
Miller: You had a performance for Vanport survivors over the weekend two days ago, I think. What was that like?
Sims: I am still trying to put words to that experience. Just having them in the space. I will tell you that in a couple of the scenes that we do, we had no idea, but one of the Vanport survivors came up to us afterwards and said, ‘You know what? That really happened to me. That really took place during the baseball scene.’ You’ve seen it. So during the baseball scene a Vanport survivor came up to us and told us ‘I was really playing baseball during that time.’ So just hearing their stories align with what we put out and having them communicate with the cast afterwards. So beautiful.
Miller: Shalanda Sims who wrote and directed Vanport the Musical. There are weekend performances through June 5th. Tickets are available at the Northwest Children’s Theater.
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