Art for "Walking Through Portland with a Panther: The Life of Mr. Kent Ford. All Power!”
Courtesy The Vanport Mosaic
The Vanport Mosaic has a unique mission. It’s all about “memory-activism.” Co-founder Damaris Webb says that means the organization is a platform to surface silenced histories to understand the present and create an inclusive future. To that end, The Vanport Mosaic and Confrontation Theatre are presenting a solo play, “Walking Through Portland with a Panther: The Life of Mr. Kent Ford. All Power!” Ford co-founded the Black Panther Party’s Portland chapter in the 1960s and continues to be a civil rights activist. He still gives walking tours of Northeast Portland, and shares his memories of activism and community service. We talk with The Vanport Mosaic Director Damaris Webb, who also directed the play about Ford’s life and legacy.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Jenn Chávez: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Jenn Chávez in for Dave Miller. Happy Friday y’all. A new play celebrates the revolutionary history of Portland’s chapter of the Black Panther Party. Kent Ford co-founded the party’s Portland chapter in the 1960s. He remains a local racial justice activist today and gives walking tours of Northeast Portland to share his memories. The play is called ‘Walking Through Portland with a Panther: The Life of Mr. Kent Ford. All Power!’ It’s being presented by The Vanport Mosaic and Confrontation Theatre. I’m joined now by Damaris Webb. She’s co-founder of The Vanport Mosaic and the director of this new solo play. Damaris, thank you so much for being with us today.
Damaris Webb: Thanks for having me, Jenn.
Chávez: It’s a pleasure. First off, The Vanport Mosaic describes its mission as memory-activism, which to me is such a rich and fascinating concept. What does memory-activism mean to you?
Webb: Ah, to me… My discipline specifically is theater, so that is my entryway into our history. But the amplification of the storytelling and the memories that we as a community, or even we as a whole global entity, have that are not necessarily being pushed into the mainstream – whether that be media or textbooks, etcetera – to keep these stories alive and our history alive, so that we don’t have to repeat some of the parts of our past again.
Chávez: The Vanport Mosaic has been working with Kent Ford for a while on his walking tours of Albina, the historically Black neighborhood in Northeast Portland. Can you start us off by describing the experience of one of his tours?
Webb: Yeah, Mr. Ford has formed this tour years ago. I think this is now the 16th year that he’s been offering this tour.
Chávez: Oh, wow!
Webb: Yeah. About, I guess it’s now six years ago, during our annual festival, we offered to just hold space. Amplification is a lot of the programming that we offer year round, meaning that other artists or educators or historians are offering presentations that the public can engage with in varieties of disciplines, whether it be walking tours or performance or documentary films or exhibits, etcetera. We, as The Vanport Mosaic, offer ourselves as a platform to do ticketing, promotion, etcetera and/or put different pieces together so that a more robust conversation can happen here in Portland.
So we offered to hold space for his walking tour and it went very well, I guess, and he’s trusted us to keep doing it all this time. His tours are offered to the public at large at various points during the year, and he also does private tours for educational organizations and communities. We start right now at Matt Dishman Center, and he takes us on three major areas ending up at King School, which used to be Highland School. [He] walks us through memories of where the Panthers had their survival programs and their offices and some of the more milestone events that happened during their time here, and he also brings things into the present. It really depends on what the questions are asked of him. He’s such a trove of memory-activism and of such deep commitment to the people here in Portland. His legacy is on so much. I’m glad that you had pointed to the protests; he was there every night. The man is 79 years old. He was there every night.
Chávez: Well let’s turn back a little bit and talk about what he was like as a leader of the Portland chapter of the Black Panther Party.
Webb: Sure. First let me say that I am not a historian or an academic, so I can’t lecture in that same kind of way or hold forth in discourse, but that my relationship with him as I consider a mentor and a friend, listening to his personal stories. And he has this wonderful way of saying, ‘Well you know about that.’ And then that makes you go, ‘Oh, actually I better go do some research.’ So, I can offer what I do know, that the Portland chapter operated maybe a little bit differently than some of the other national chapters. Part of that was the climate in Portland, Oregon’s founding as a white space. So, that our population of Blacks here in Portland is some of the smallest percentage in a state and especially in a big city like Portland. So the Panthers, how they had to go about things was a little bit different, and maybe a little less about Black history and more about the survival programs which were available for all. Although they were definitely a champion of the people of Albina, especially with the Emanuel Hospital expansion. So, they were offering programs to the people: reading groups, teach-ins, the survival programs like the Breakfast Program, the clinics. The Portland chapter was the only chapter in the country that had a dental program, and that’s something that we can all be very proud of.
Chávez: Oh yeah. That’s really interesting.
Webb: Yeah. And the women of the party here in Portland had perhaps a much more integral role in the day-to-day than many of the other chapters as well. Their alliances with the white community, especially the students of PSU [and] Reed College, to make a coalition, right, so that Fred Hampton’s vision of a Rainbow Coalition I think was strong here. The doctors who often volunteered their time at the survival programs were all actually white doctors. These kind of inroads, and also sitting in at a lot of the court appearances and reporting back to the people of what’s going on, what’s happening, and the local paper as well as the national paper of the Black Panther Party, I think really a seeded our city to be ready when these past protests came to be kind of a center of activism.
Chávez: We’re talking about the Portland chapter of the Black Panther Party specifically, but overall just personally, how much did you know or learn about the Black Panther Party growing up?
Webb: Nothing. I didn’t learn anything. There was nothing in my schools. There was very little that came across the media. It wasn’t something that we necessarily talked about in my home. Growing up here, I never even learned about the city of Vanport in any of my day-to-day. It wasn’t until listening to stories of people in the community that I was even exposed to these local milestone events. Being able to tie these things together into local history is something that I think is a very new thing in our schools, and I’m glad to see that that is starting to happen in the third grade curriculum. Props to Portland Public Schools for getting that started.
Chávez: Yeah. I want to turn specifically now to this new play, celebrating Kent Ford and his work, that you are directing. First of all, we talked about memory-activism at the beginning of our conversation. How do you feel like this play – the story it tells – fits into your idea of memory-activism?
Webb: The conceit of this play is starting us on what would be Mr. Ford’s walking tour, but then of course we move through time. The actor, La’Tevin Alexander, who embodies Mr. Ford well, very well, also becomes other characters or individuals who help tell this story. It is centered here in Portland, so all of the references have to do with that. We also used archival photos to give us some of the actual backdrop, as it were, and then literally in the play it is a projection screen as the backdrop so that we can get some of the actual history. Sometimes some of the events are a few different things pushed into one event, right, because it’s a play. The metaphor of the play takes us just hopefully enough through the real things that happened and Mr. Ford’s memories to touch you into going into your next exploration. Or to touch you, give you a little nudge, into the next way you will move forth into social justice work.
Chávez: I think what I’m getting through hearing you talk about this is that it’s just so rooted in this sense of place for Portland. It is on stage now for Portland audiences at the Portland Playhouse, but I understand you also have plans to take it on the road as a traveling work. Where do you want to go with it? And what do you hope audiences outside of Portland could get out of a play like this?
Webb: Oh, yes. Well, as I mentioned before, it’s part of a collection of initiatives. There’s these traveling, what we refer to as pop-up panels, that are exhibit pieces that Soapbox Theory, Cleo and Kayin Talton Davis, have made that give us actual: Here’s the historical series of events that happened here in Portland and nationally. There’s added curriculum that’s been developed and study guides for any community, whoever you are, that engages with it. My deep dream desires to honor Mr. Ford and his legacy and to inspire others to start to ask questions about what they can do to engage in their own community – at whatever level they are on – and how to use your own sphere of influence to move us towards a more equitable future for all. We know that here in Portland there’s a larger amount of funding for engagement with arts, to go to history or to go to entertainment or however. Developing the show so that it can be a traveling show, it can also go within Portland to communities who might not usually consider themselves a part of the theater, and be able to go into more rural or farther away towns in Oregon that might not even be engaging with these stories on the regular.
Chávez: We only have about a minute left, but I just want to ask: What does it mean to you that this Portland production is coinciding with the Juneteenth holiday this weekend?
Webb: That’s a very loaded question. [laughs] Also I will say that Mr. Ford is offering a walking tour – himself – this Sunday [June 19, 2022]. You can find out about that on Eventbrite as well, if you just ask for ‘The Vanport Mosaic’ on Eventbrite. I’m so glad that we are having more of a national conversation about Juneteenth. I’m a little wary about it just being co-opted into an opportunity to sell merchandise. But, it is a wonderful time for us to gather and look back on the things that have happened in these last 50 years, from the civil rights movement into now, and to also consider all the work that we need to do going forward and and how we might all fit into that mosaic.
Chávez: Well, Damaris, thank you so much for joining us today and talking about some of this history and this new play.
Webb: Thanks Jenn. I really enjoyed it.
Chávez: I’ve been speaking with Damaris Webb. She’s co-founder of The Vanport Mosaic and director of the new play, ‘Walking Through Portland with a Panther: The Life of Mr. Kent Ford. All Power!’ The play is on stage now through June 26 at Portland Playhouse.
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