When Norman Sylvester was 12 years old, long before he earned the nickname "The Boogie Cat" or shared stages with musical legends like B.B. King, he boarded a train in rural Louisiana, embarking on a journey westward toward the distant city of Portland, Oregon. His formative years were spent immersed in the natural beauty of the South, savoring wild muscadine grapes from his family’s farm, fishing in the bayou, and the rhythmic churn of butter at the kitchen table accompanied by his grandmother’s gospel hymns. The summons from his father, who had sought better job opportunities in Portland, felt like a departure from paradise.

It was the autumn of 1957, a time when Oregon held a formidable reputation as an unwelcoming territory for Black families. For decades, from 1844 until 1926, the state enacted a series of exclusion laws specifically designed to prevent Black people from residing within its borders. The Oregon Donation Land Act of 1850, a cornerstone of westward expansion, generously granted white settlers up to 640 acres of free land while explicitly prohibiting Black individuals from claiming any property. Oregon’s resistance to ratifying the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed voting rights regardless of race, and its state Supreme Court’s sanctioning of racial discrimination in public places in 1917, further underscored the deeply entrenched prejudice. By the 1920s, Oregon had become home to the largest Ku Klux Klan chapter west of the Mississippi River.

Despite this pervasive hostility, Black individuals were among Oregon’s earliest settlers, diligently carving out lives and striving for equality amidst these challenging circumstances. The Portland chapter of the NAACP, established in 1914, stands as the oldest continuously operating chapter west of the Mississippi. However, the state’s anti-Black policies acted as powerful deterrents; by the time Sylvester arrived, African Americans constituted less than 1% of Oregon’s population, and Portland’s Black community was notably smaller than those in other major West Coast cities. This stark contrast to his Southern upbringing profoundly impacted Sylvester as he stepped off the train at Portland’s Union Station, unprepared for the cultural shock.

Sylvester was about to begin seventh grade at his first integrated school, and a haircut was his immediate priority. His first destination in his new city was a barbershop near the intersection of North Williams Avenue and North Russell Street in North Portland. Upon reaching the intersection, he was met with a vibrant scene. A handsome brick building, crowned with an onion-shaped cupola, anchored one corner, while homes and businesses – a cafe, a drugstore, a produce market – lined the others. Everywhere he looked, he saw a familiar sight, reminiscent of Louisiana: "African American people – in charge of businesses, driving nice cars up and down the street, strutting their stuff." He would later compare this bustling atmosphere to Harlem, but on that particular day, it was the closest he felt to home. Despite the thousands of miles separating him from the muscadine grapes on his grandmother’s fence, standing on that corner, he felt embraced by the city. Even the air seemed familiar, carrying the comforting aromas of Southern cooking and the infectious rhythms of gospel and jazz. "The place just embraced me," Sylvester recalled recently. "Everybody was singing the same song, if you know what I mean."

This pivotal intersection was the heart of a neighborhood known as Albina. In the early 1900s, Black Portlanders, many of whom worked as railcar attendants, began settling in this area due to its proximity to Union Station. In the subsequent decades, discriminatory housing practices and institutionalized policies, including a 1919 Portland Realty Board ruling that deemed it unethical to sell homes in white neighborhoods to non-white buyers, systematically excluded Black residents from other parts of the city, further concentrating the community in Albina. By 1940, over half of Portland’s Black population, then just under 2,000 individuals, resided in Albina.

The outbreak of World War II dramatically reshaped the city, bringing over a hundred thousand newcomers, approximately 20,000 of whom were African American, to work in the booming shipyards. Among these migrants were Sylvester’s parents, aunt, and uncle, who settled in a defense housing development called Vanport. Constructed behind a railroad embankment in the floodplain of the Columbia River, Vanport was the nation’s largest wartime housing project. With around a quarter of its more than 40,000 residents being African American, it became home to Oregon’s Black population by a significant margin.

Following the war, many residents began leaving Vanport. Sylvester’s mother returned to Louisiana, but his uncle secured employment at a local hospital, and the rest of the family decided to remain in the area, continuing to live in Vanport due to racial barriers preventing them from residing elsewhere. It was there, on Memorial Day in 1948, that tragedy struck. The Columbia River, swollen by spring rains and snowmelt, breached its embankment and surged towards the city. Within 40 minutes, Vanport was submerged. At least 15 lives were lost, and more than 18,000 people, a third of whom were Black, were rendered homeless.

Sylvester’s family, like most African Americans displaced by the flood, found refuge in the only Portland neighborhood that welcomed them: Albina. By the time Sylvester settled in the city, four out of every five Black Portlanders lived in the district. Redlining, a lack of public investment, and negligent landlords contributed to overcrowded and sometimes dilapidated housing conditions. Nevertheless, the neighborhood fostered a strong sense of community and vibrancy. Black-owned businesses, churches, and gathering places flourished. "Everything you needed in a community was right there," Sylvester shared.

Central to this community was its rich musical life. In the decades following Sylvester’s arrival, Albina pulsed with sound. Gospel choirs filled churches with powerful harmonies, while soul bands packed the Cotton Club, then the premier soul music destination in the Pacific Northwest. Nearly every night, jazz, blues, and funk bands could be heard in the neighborhood’s numerous venues, including teen clubs and all-ages spaces. Bands formed organically in basements, backyards, schoolrooms, and churches, creating a dynamic and ever-evolving musical landscape.

At the age of 13, Sylvester’s father, working two jobs – at the hospital by day and the foundry at night – saved enough to buy him a guitar. It wasn’t the gleaming red electric he desired, but an $11.95 pawnshop acoustic. His father promised that if he learned three songs, he would purchase the electric guitar. Finding music instruction in Albina was not difficult; Sylvester learned his initial chords from an elderly Creole man who owned the house his family rented. Later, a fellow high school student mentored him in the blues. Sylvester proved to be a quick study, and the guitar soon became his most potent form of self-expression. As a shy country boy from the South, he often felt overwhelmed by Portland’s urban youth and struggled with a stutter. "But with my guitar in front of me, I could express myself," he explained.

Now 80 years old, Sylvester has been channeling his emotions through music ever since. His first band, Rated "X," was among Portland’s pioneering soul groups. They recorded a 45 single in 1972 and were gaining local momentum when Sylvester’s employer, a trucking company, placed him on a graveyard shift, forcing him to leave the band. He continued to play, however, and soon established himself as a distinguished blues musician. The Norman Sylvester Blues Band has now been performing for four decades. He has shared the stage with music titans such as B.B. King, Buddy Guy, and Mavis Staples, and in 2011, he was inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame.

Sylvester’s musical accomplishments are significant, but he is far from the only remarkable artist to emerge from Albina. He is part of a broad and deeply interconnected community of Black musicians, educators, and arts advocates who converged in the neighborhood during the latter half of the 20th century, transforming the region into a West Coast hub for music and forging a legacy that continues to resonate today. Until recently, however, the rich tapestry of Albina’s musical history existed primarily within the memories and personal archives of those who lived it, a generation of musicians now approaching the twilight of their lives.

By the time Bobby Smith moved to Albina in the early 2000s, the neighborhood bore little resemblance to the predominantly Black community of Sylvester’s youth. Smith, a young white schoolteacher who also freelanced as a music journalist, was aware of Albina’s vibrant jazz scene in the 1940s and 50s, an era chronicled in Robert Dietsche’s 2005 book, Jumptown. Yet, he wondered about the subsequent decades: What happened to the narrative of Black music in Portland after 1957? As an avid record collector, Smith diligently sought out recordings that could illuminate this period. For years, he scoured used record stores and consignment shops, but commercial recordings of Portland’s Black musicians from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s were scarce. He eventually discovered the 45 single Sylvester recorded with Rated "X" in the early 70s, one of the few records from those decades he could find. Concurrently, he engaged with neighbors, frequented local parks hoping to hear music, and spent time at Clyde’s Prime Rib, one of the city’s few venues consistently featuring elder Black performers.

In 2014, Smith began DJing for XRAY-FM, a nascent community radio station broadcasting from Albina. By then, he had amassed a modest collection of recordings from the region’s musical past and began inviting local musicians to the station to discuss them on air. One of his first guests was Calvin Walker, a drummer, bandleader, and self-proclaimed "child of Albina." Walker’s initial 30-minute interview extended into three hours as he shared his life story, inadvertently mapping out an entire ecosystem of musicians and educators who had profoundly shaped—and been shaped by—Albina. "If you’re really curious about this, here’s a list of people you need to start talking to," he told Smith, offering his assistance.

Soon, Smith’s weekly radio show transformed into a vital platform where elder Black musicians came to share their stories and their music. Despite the systemic barriers that had limited their access to the recording industry, Albina’s musicians had diligently documented their work, leaving behind a wealth of unreleased recordings: demos, reel-to-reels, cassettes, and VCR tapes. This ever-growing cache of music and memorabilia pouring into the station began to reveal an extraordinary legacy of Black arts and culture in Portland, an untold chapter of Oregon’s history.

In 2015, Walker, Smith, and Ken Berry, another local musician and community leader, founded the Albina Music Trust (AMT) with the ambitious goal of preserving thousands of obsolete and decaying media items and making them accessible to all. Elder engineers donated equipment and trained volunteers in the operation of archaic machines. Each item was digitized and uploaded into a meticulously categorized database. After a decade of dedicated effort, in 2024, AMT publicly launched the Albina Community Archive, believed to be the only community archive in the United States dedicated to the restoration of a Black community’s musical heritage.

The online repository now houses over 13,000 items from 180 distinct sources, encompassing not only music – including live recordings, out-of-circulation albums, and unreleased demos – but also film, newsprint, posters, handbills, and oral histories. This vast collection serves as the foundation of the archive, functioning more like a seedbank for historical artifacts, which are then brought to life through projects that extend far beyond the website. An art installation titled Wall to Wall Soul combines restored and recolored posters and photography, creating striking images exhibited around the city and now permanently displayed in the dining room of Clyde’s Prime Rib. Under a record label of the same name, AMT releases vinyl albums featuring previously unreleased music from Albina’s past, as well as new work from contemporary local artists. An audio tour, The Albina Soul Walk, guides listeners on a mile-long, music-infused journey through Albina, visiting the sites of former venues and gathering places while musicians and club owners share personal accounts of the neighborhood’s history. Listening to the tour feels akin to donning 3D glasses, suddenly bringing an unseen dimension into sharp focus. Even after removing the earbuds and being re-immersed in the present-day sounds of the city – the rustling of maple leaves, the whir of passing cyclists – the voices from the tour lingered, transforming the perception of the neighborhood.

One morning last summer, I met Smith, Walker, and Berry at AMT’s modest office in northeast Portland. The space, scarcely a few hundred square feet, evoked the feeling of a walk-in closet. Shelves laden with neatly labeled boxes lined one wall, while audio equipment spanning different eras – turntables, reel-to-reel machines, cassette players, CD drives – were crammed under and atop desks. A grid of framed record sleeves adorned a lime-green wall, and the air was filled with the smooth sounds of jazz.

Settling into one of the four mismatched chairs arranged in the confined space felt less like a formal meeting and more like joining a family gathered around a cozy kitchen table. That day, I experienced something akin to Smith’s initial encounter with Walker: expecting an hour-long conversation, I found myself drawn into a cascade of stories that extended well past lunchtime, eventually leading us to a taqueria across the street where we shared a meal together.

Ken Berry arrived in Oregon from Kansas in 1953 at the age of four. His family settled in a house in southeast Portland near Laurelhurst Elementary, where he became the school’s first Black student. However, two years later, following complaints from anti-integration neighbors, their landlord demolished the house, and the Berry family relocated to Albina.

There, he began playing piano during Sunday school at the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, earning 75 cents a day. He joined the choir at Jefferson High and, after graduation, started playing a Hammond B3 organ at The Upstairs Lounge, then Albina’s most prominent jazz club. It was there he met the late Thara Memory. Memory, a trumpeter from Florida who had performed with artists like James Brown, was en route to Seattle with his band when they stopped in Portland to play at The Upstairs Lounge. However, Albina – with its majestic trees and lively community – captivated him, and he remained in Portland after his band continued north. He and Berry later formed a group called Shades of Brown, one of several collaborations that would significantly shape Albina’s music culture for decades.

Around the same time, not far from The Upstairs Lounge, Walker encountered Memory at another vital community hub in Albina, the Albina Arts Center. As a teenager, Walker frequently performed there with his jazz-infused funk band, The Gangsters. "Thara comes in one night and says, ‘Can I play your trumpet?’" Walker recalled. He handed over the instrument and listened, utterly astounded. "I never played trumpet again!" Instead, Walker continued on drums, and Memory joined him on trumpet.

In the summer of 1970, the American Legion held its annual convention in Portland. Seeking to preemptively distract potential war protesters from disrupting the event, the city organized the Vortex 1 festival, the only state-sponsored rock concert in U.S. history. While The Gangsters were not officially invited to perform, they loaded their gear into an Albina Arts Center truck and drove to the festival, arriving directly at the stage. When the manager informed them that all performance slots were already filled, Memory retorted, "But you don’t have any all-Black bands." Thirty minutes later, they were on stage. "We played for an hour and a half, and I think they even paid us!" Walker recounted with a grin.

Despite its historical significance, most retrospective coverage of Vortex 1, including books and television documentaries, omitted this particular story. When AMT inquired about this omission, the answer was straightforward: the researchers were unaware of it. Like much of Albina’s history, the story resided within the community, not within institutional archives. "The public library and the Oregon Historical Society have existed for over a hundred years," Smith observed. "But in the 10 years we’ve been around, we’ve become the largest digital repository of Black arts and culture in the entire state of Oregon." Walker nodded in agreement. "People are putting their lives in our hands because they trust that their story will be told accurately," he stated.

AMT is part of a burgeoning nationwide network of community archives dedicated to preserving collective histories that have been overlooked by mainstream repositories. More than 300 such archives have been mapped across the country, each meticulously documenting a unique facet of American life, from LGBTQ experiences in the Deep South to the activism of radical Indigenous women and the struggles of communities impacted by the death penalty. As control over historical narratives becomes an increasingly exploited political tool – evidenced by the Trump administration’s attacks on the National Museum of African American History and Culture – community-based archives like AMT broaden the spectrum of voices authoring history, contributing to a richer, more multifaceted American narrative, transforming it from a monologue into a vibrant chorus.

In the Trust’s compact office, Walker, Smith, and Berry wove together the story of their organization with an intimate rapport, forged through years of shared dreams and collaborative problem-solving. Despite their differences in age and race, the palpable respect they held for one another was evident in the seamless flow of their conversation. One man would recount an anecdote, another would clarify the timeline, and the third would offer essential context. It was only later that I recognized the experience for what it truly was – akin to listening to a masterful musical jam session, where each player contributed a distinct element without overshadowing the others, collectively creating a sound far greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Before I departed, Berry handed me a copy of the YouthSound album and requested that I text him upon arriving home to ensure my safe journey. That evening, I placed the album on my turntable and, while leafing through the liner notes, a cascade of voices – dozens of children and adults singing in unison in a high school auditorium four decades prior – filled my living room. "It was all about listening," one student recalled in the notes. "Anybody could put out a tune. But your tune gotta match the person standing next to you. This was about teamwork. We needed to sound as one."

Although their work often involves the literal preservation of the past, AMT’s ultimate focus lies firmly on the future. "In another 50 years, we don’t want a couple of guys like me and Ken sitting around talking about the good old days," Walker remarked. To this end, the Trust is actively collaborating with Portland schools and nonprofits to expand access to arts education, thereby connecting students with Albina’s rich Black music legacy.

Last June, I drove to the school district headquarters for "Rhythms of Tomorrow," one of 38 public events AMT hosted in 2025 alone. This initiative, a collaboration between AMT and Portland Public Schools, marked the first district-wide celebration of Black Music Month. On my way, I stopped for lunch on Mississippi Avenue, in the heart of historic Albina. There, I joined a throng of lunchtime patrons wearing Blundstone boots and sporting fine-line tattoos, predominantly in their 30s and 40s, and largely white. Nearby, a cafe advertised boba tea and handcrafted donuts, while a boutique nursery offered mounted ferns for $150 each. Yoga studios and brewpubs abounded, painting a picture of the neighborhood’s transformation.

Decades after city bulldozers tore through Albina, another wave of displacement affected what remained of the neighborhood. In the 1990s, the area’s affordable housing began attracting white individuals priced out of other districts. The city initiated investments, previously withheld, into Albina, cracking down on predatory lending and housing abandonment. These changes primarily benefited middle-class white newcomers, and gentrification soon pushed housing prices beyond the reach of many longtime residents. By 2000, less than a third of Black Portlanders lived in Albina, and for the first time since the 1960s, the area no longer had a Black majority. "A lot of folks are out in The Numbers now," Sylvester shared, referring to the far reaches of East Portland. "I used to cruise around in my 1974 Dodge Charger – it had a sunroof and an 8-track," he reminisced. "I could wave at 50 people, stop and talk to 30. Now, I can drive from my house in Kenton, all through Albina, and never wave once."

A mile south of Mississippi Avenue, the school district’s headquarters occupies a sprawling 10.5-acre campus. Constructed as part of the "urban renewal" projects that displaced residents in the 1960s, it’s a drab industrial building, brick-pink and resembling a parking garage. However, the day I visited, its mundane exterior starkly contrasted with the vibrant scene unfolding inside: Children darted around, enjoying watermelon slices and salami from a long table piled high with snacks. Adults exchanged warm hugs and handshakes. A DJ, positioned behind a setup of turntables and mixers, captured the attention of numerous 11-year-olds, filling the room with buoyant music.

Norman Sylvester kicked off the event, the first in a lineup of musicians and speakers spanning genres and generations, from blues to hip-hop, high-schoolers to elders. He stepped onto the stage, his guitar held more like an extension of his body than a mere object. Though Sylvester has explored various genres throughout his career, his roots remain firmly planted in the blues. When asked about his attraction to this music, he explained, "I can only imagine a man like Muddy Waters or Son House, plowing a field, driving a tractor all day, and still being able to play a guitar and sing at that quality. Where did that come from?" Before I could offer a guess, he provided the answer: "From the dedication they had to doing something better. Those journeys just mean something to me, so I want to keep that going." Listening to him play that afternoon, bending notes into riffs that were both achingly sweet and profoundly resonant, I reflected on his words and their powerful implication: a song is not merely an artifact to be archived, but a form of archive itself, a repository of life preserved in melody, lyric, rhythm, and pitch, accessible for future generations.

After Sylvester’s performance, four women – MaryEtta Callier, Arietta Ward, Nafisaria Mathews, and LaRhonda Steele – took the stage to present a set of gospel songs. Ward and Mathews, sisters, are the daughters of the late Janice Scroggins, an Albina music legend who passed away in 2014. Best known as a virtuoso pianist, Scroggins was also a revered educator and composer. "My mother started playing when she was 2 or 3," Ward recounted. According to family lore, Scroggins, initially perceived as a sickly, perpetually crying child, fell silent one day while gazing at a piano. Upon being placed at the instrument, her ceaseless crying ceased. A few years later, while playing at a church in Idabel, Oklahoma, a wealthy parishioner recognized her extraordinary talent and offered to sponsor formal lessons. Her teacher not only imparted fundamental musical knowledge – scales and notation – but, more importantly, Ward emphasized, "she showed my mother that music was something a woman could do."

When Scroggins arrived in Albina in the 1970s, she joined a community rich with exceptional female musicians. Some, like the acclaimed singer Linda Hornbuckle and bassist Marianne Mayfield, are no longer with us, while many others, including Steele, Callier, and Shirley Nanette, continue to perform today. However, the male-dominated nature of the music industry is undeniable when browsing the archive, where male figures far outnumber female ones. This underrepresentation of women in the music industry is not unique to Albina and persists today; a 2024 USC Annenberg study revealed that 62.3% of recording artists and over 94% of producers on chart-topping songs were male. "Making it as a musician has always been more difficult for women," Ward confided, sharing her experience of often being offered less compensation than male performers for identical shows, a sentiment echoed by Tahirah Memory. "It takes tenacity," Ward added, "but it makes you stronger."

Performing as Mz. Etta, Ward has cultivated a dynamic career in Portland as a genre-fluid singer and bandleader. Her powerful vocals, imbued with joy and an effortless strength, draw enthusiastic crowds across the city. Ward attributes her perseverance to the supportive Albina community. "People talk about the Great American Songbook," she remarked. "Well, my great American songbook looks a lot different, because growing up I was exposed to all these Black composers. I was shown that we can do anything in a time when other people said we couldn’t." Her mentors – Ken Berry, Linda Hornbuckle, Norman Sylvester, LaRhonda Steele, and her mother – imparted more than just the technical skills required to master complex compositions. "We were taught to honor the music, but also to honor ourselves," she stated. "It’s freedom that was instilled." Ward continues this tradition of mentorship today, collaborating with AMT on programs like the public school event, as well as jam sessions and community concerts that amplify the legacy of Albina’s female musicians. "They may not have been at the forefront, but their imprint was very poignant."

In the school auditorium, Ward and the gospel quartet opened with Walter Hawkins’ song "Be Grateful." Their voices intertwined, building a sound so rich and layered it felt palpable. A young girl nearby, mid-bite into a cookie, paused, her mouth agape, captivated by the singers. The song enveloped the room like water filling a vessel, immersing everyone present.

The event concluded with Portland-based producers Tony Ozier and Jumbo, two of the five artists who remixed archival recordings to create contemporary, beat-based tracks for AMT’s 2025 album, Soul Assembly. "We figured we could be the bridge, not just to take the old to the now, but to pass the torch so the youngsters can take it from us and walk forward," Jumbo told the assembled crowd.

Soul Assembly derives its name from a 1968 musical theatre production conceived by the Black Student Union at Jefferson High in response to the escalating racial tensions following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Performed throughout the city, the show illuminated African American history while celebrating the vibrant culture and creativity of Portland’s Black community.

When Ozier encountered this story within the archive, he was struck. Portland, he admitted, does not typically boast a reputation for Black culture. He moved to the city 19 years ago as a young funk musician, not expecting to discover such a deeply rooted Black music scene. However, he soon met Janice Scroggins, who introduced him to a wealth of local funk musicians. "I thought I was funkin’," Ozier said with a laugh. "She said, ‘You are funkin’ – but Portland ain’t new to funk.’" Ozier now teaches youth music classes for the Bodecker Foundation and hopes that AMT projects like the Soul Assembly album will help connect young people to the music and stories of Albina’s past. "This is Black history in Portland – where else do you hear that?" he asked. Culture, Ozier explained, is profoundly shaped by the music youth engage with. "Listening to ‘Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,’ when you’re 15 is different than listening to ‘You Used to Call Me on Your Cellphone.’ Those words, they get stuck in your head whether you want them to or not."

That afternoon, Ozier and Jumbo performed two tracks. The first, "Searchin’ for Love," recorded in the 1970s by Shades Of Brown, was released in 2024 on AMT’s label. With its laid-back groove and piercing vocals, the song is irresistibly catchy yet imbued with a profound sense of anguish. Described in the liner notes as a "cry for decency," the track reflects the Albina community’s deep disappointment with the city’s disregard for their neighborhoods. Next, Jumbo played a remixed version, layering samples from his own coming-of-age years over the original track. A thumping beat and electronic distortion lend fresh potency to the original vocals, which reverberate relentlessly throughout.

The song seemed to collapse time, captivating the audience as they listened, heads nodding in mesmerized appreciation. Its effect was perhaps particularly powerful in this setting – within a building constructed on the site of razed homes from a once-thriving neighborhood, now filled with members of that displaced community gathered to celebrate the enduring fruits of their flourishing culture. The space mirrored the sonic landscape Jumbo had crafted, where histories layered upon one another, and spectral echoes mingled with present dreams. Like the song, the event served as both a tribute to the enduring impact of history and a testament to the human capacity to create something new from all that has been received.

Before the summer’s end, I attended one more AMT event: the latest performance of TimeSound, Albina’s historic concert series, recently revived by AMT after a three-decade hiatus. It was part of the grand reopening celebration for the expanded Albina Library. Located on Russell Street, the library stands just a block east of the intersection where Norman Sylvester found himself on that autumn day in 1957, a young boy in search of a haircut. Before the show, I walked over to the crossing.

There, the afternoon sun pooled on the asphalt, broken by the shade of street trees. Cars passed by. A woman carried a toddler down the sidewalk. I pictured Sylvester standing there all those years ago. If that 12-year-old boy returned today, I wondered, would he recognize anything? Apartments now occupied two corners, and a commercial complex on the third housed the Urban League of Portland, a civil rights nonprofit. On the fourth corner, where the brick building with the onion-shaped cupola once stood, a chain-link fence enclosed a rectangle of bare land.

This space had remained vacant since its demolition in the 1970s. Now, half a century later, that situation is finally changing. Last February, a collaboration guided by a Black-led nonprofit, the Williams and Russell CDC, broke ground on a residential and commercial development that will prioritize access for individuals with generational ties to the neighborhood. The city of Portland – which, last June, agreed to a settlement awarding $8.5 million to 26 descendants of displaced Black families – is among the project’s partners. The development is partly funded by the 1803 Fund, an organization dedicated to investing in Black Portland and supporting several restorative development initiatives underway in Albina. The 1803 Fund also supports AMT’s work, as Juma Sei, the organization’s community partnership manager, explained, "You can have a bunch of buildings, but it doesn’t matter if there isn’t a culture to put people into those buildings."

Sei first encountered AMT shortly after returning to Portland in 2024. Though he grew up in the area, his parents immigrated from Sierra Leone, leaving him without direct generational connections to Portland’s Black community. Seeking to deepen his understanding of local Black history, he began researching archives and discovered AMT. He was astonished. Sei had lived in Atlanta, D.C., and Detroit, cities renowned for their Black culture. "Portland isn’t on that list," he stated. "But here was this living, breathing entity – the largest archive of its kind in the U.S. – right here in Portland. To me, it was a treasure trove."

Demographically, Sei observed, Albina is no longer the epicenter of Black life in Portland; most Black Portlanders now reside farther east or outside the city. While previous library celebration events – featuring puppet theater and 3D printing demonstrations – had a notably sparse Black attendance, the TimeSound concert offered a stark contrast.

In a spacious meeting room, a dreamy mural backlit a stage, and glass doors opened to a courtyard where attendees enjoyed complimentary horchata oat-milk popsicles in the sun. The space was bathed in light and nearly filled to capacity with a predominantly Black audience, though people of all backgrounds were present, creating a vibrant intergenerational crowd spanning seniors, those in their 40s, and infants in arms.

Calvin Walker took the microphone first. "Is this not a miracle?" he asked. "To have this beautiful facility, the second-largest library in Portland, right here?" The room erupted in applause. "There was a time when nobody wanted to live in Albina," he continued. "After Vanport, this is where we landed, and we made it vibrant. Now, it’s going to come back, and it’s going to come back with all of us."

The concert was directed by Ward, who, in the TimeSound tradition, led an intergenerational ensemble performing works by Albina’s Black composers. When Berry asked her to direct, Ward felt a touch of apprehension. "It’s hard not to get imposter syndrome. These musicians are my heroes, my teachers. They’ll always be legendary to me." Yet, on stage that afternoon, any trace of her worries was absent, replaced by a palpable admiration for Albina’s musicians – past and present. To highlight the community’s female artists, she had curated a set primarily composed by women, opening with a song by her mother. The audience fell silent. For some, like myself, this particular composition was entirely new; for others, it may have evoked a flood of memories, conjuring images of people and places from years gone by. The courtyard doors stood open, and I wondered: If a young boy were standing on the corner of Williams and Russell at that very moment, might he catch a riff drifting on the wind?

Near the concert’s conclusion, Ward invited Berry onstage to sing. He approached the microphone, shaking his head with a mixture of disbelief and delight. "I was just having a flashback," he said, describing an evening approximately 35 years prior. He had been performing at another Portland library, participating in a community concert. Ward and her sister Nafisaria were present, then just children. "Arietta was right here," he stated, placing a hand to his ribs to indicate her height. Looking up, his eyes welled with tears, yet a smile graced his face. "It’s just so good to see that we are still whole when there’s been so much to break us apart." He paused, then turned to the band, signaled them to begin, and let the music speak for itself.