When Norman Sylvester was a boy of twelve, long before he earned the moniker "The Boogie Cat" or shared a stage with legendary musicians like B.B. King, he boarded a train in Louisiana bound for the distant city of Portland, Oregon. His life up to that point had been steeped in the rural South: the sweet taste of wild muscadine grapes from his family’s farm, the quiet thrill of fishing in the bayou, and the comforting rhythm of his grandmother’s gospel singing as she churned butter in the kitchen. When his father, who had relocated to Portland in pursuit of better employment, sent for him, Sylvester felt a profound sense of leaving paradise.

It was the autumn of 1957, and Oregon carried a reputation for being an unwelcoming place for Black families. From 1844 to 1926, the state enacted a series of exclusionary laws designed to prevent Black individuals from settling within its borders. The Oregon Donation Land Act of 1850, which offered up to 640 free acres to white settlers, explicitly prohibited Black people from claiming any land. Oregon notably declined to ratify the 15th Amendment, and in 1917, the state’s Supreme Court upheld racial discrimination in public accommodations. By the 1920s, Oregon was home to the largest Ku Klux Klan chapter west of the Mississippi River.

Despite this hostile history, Black pioneers were among the earliest settlers in Oregon, establishing lives and striving for equality amidst these challenges. The Portland chapter of the NAACP, founded in 1914, stands as the oldest continuously operating chapter west of the Mississippi. However, the state’s deeply entrenched anti-Black policies served as a significant deterrent; by the time Sylvester arrived, fewer than 1% of Oregon residents were African American, and Portland’s Black population was the smallest among major West Coast cities. This stark contrast to his Southern upbringing contributed to a significant culture shock when Sylvester stepped out of Portland’s Union Station.

Sylvester was about to enter seventh grade at his first integrated school, and his immediate need was a haircut. His first destination in his new city was a barbershop near the intersection of Williams Avenue and Russell Street in North Portland. Arriving at the intersection, he was met with a vibrant scene. A handsome brick building, topped 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 from his Louisiana home: "African American people – in charge of businesses, driving nice cars up and down the street, strutting their stuff." He would later compare this scene to Harlem, but on that day, it simply reminded him of the place he had left behind. Despite the thousands of miles separating him from the muscadine vines that clung to his grandmother’s fence, standing on that corner, he felt a profound sense of belonging. Even the air seemed familiar, carrying the aromas of Southern cooking and the melodies 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 bustling intersection was, in fact, the heart of a neighborhood known as Albina. In the early 1900s, Black Portlanders, many of whom worked as railcar attendants, began to settle in this area due to its proximity to Union Station. Over the subsequent decades, landlord discrimination and institutionalized policies, including a 1919 Portland Realty Board ruling that deemed it unethical to sell property in white neighborhoods to non-white buyers, effectively excluded Black residents from other parts of the city, further concentrating the community in Albina. By 1940, more than half of Portland’s Black population, then just under 2,000 people, resided in Albina.

The outbreak of World War II brought a significant influx of over a hundred thousand newcomers to the city, with approximately 20,000 of them being African American, drawn by employment opportunities in the booming shipyards. Among these wartime migrants were Sylvester’s parents, aunt, and uncle, who initially lived in a defense housing development called Vanport. Constructed behind a railroad embankment in the floodplain of the Columbia River, Vanport was the largest wartime housing project in the nation. About a quarter of its over 40,000 residents were African American, making it by far the largest Black community in Oregon.

After the war concluded, 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. Denied housing in most neighborhoods due to their race, they continued to reside in Vanport. It was there, on Memorial Day in 1948, that the Columbia River, swollen by spring rains and snowmelt, breached its embankment and surged toward the city. Within 40 minutes, Vanport was submerged. At least 15 people lost their lives, and more than 18,000 others, a third of whom were Black, were left homeless.

Sylvester’s family, like most African Americans displaced by the flood, found refuge in Albina, the only Portland neighborhood where they were welcomed. By the time Sylvester settled in the city, four out of every five Black Portlanders lived in this district. While redlining, a lack of public investment, and neglectful landlords sometimes resulted in overcrowded and dilapidated housing, the neighborhood itself was close-knit and vibrant, fostering the flourishing of Black-owned businesses, churches, and gathering places. "Everything you needed in a community was right there," Sylvester told me.

One of those essential elements, he emphasized, was music, and Albina offered an abundance of it in the decades following Sylvester’s arrival. Gospel choirs filled churches with song, while soul bands packed the Cotton Club, which became the Pacific Northwest’s premier destination for soul music. Nearly every night, jazz, blues, and funk ensembles could be heard in the neighborhood’s numerous venues, including teen clubs and all-ages spaces. Bands were formed in basements, backyards, schoolrooms, and churches, a testament to the pervasive musical spirit.

When Sylvester was thirteen, his father, working two jobs – at the hospital by day and the foundry by night – saved enough to buy him a guitar. It wasn’t the gleaming red electric model he yearned for, but an $11.95 pawnshop acoustic. His father promised that if Sylvester learned three songs, he would buy him the electric guitar. Finding music instruction in Albina was not difficult; Sylvester learned his first guitar licks from an elderly Creole man who owned the house his family inhabited. Later, a fellow high school student mentored him in the blues. Sylvester proved to be a rapid learner, and the guitar soon became a powerful tool for 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 shared.

Now eighty years old, Sylvester has continued to express himself through music. His first band, Rated "X," was among Portland’s pioneering soul groups. They recorded a single in 1972, and were gaining local momentum when Sylvester’s employer, a trucking company, placed him on the graveyard shift, forcing him to leave the band. Undeterred, he continued to play, and before long, established himself as a prominent blues musician. The Norman Sylvester Blues Band has been performing for four decades, and he has shared stages with icons like B.B. King, Buddy Guy, and Mavis Staples, earning induction into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame in 2011.

Sylvester’s accomplishments are significant, but he is far from the only remarkable musician to emerge from Albina. He is part of a broad and deeply connected community of Black musicians, educators, and arts advocates who converged in this neighborhood during the latter half of the 20th century, transforming the region into a vibrant hub for music in the West and creating a legacy that endures today. Until recently, however, the narrative of Albina’s musical history largely resided within the memories and personal collections of those who lived it, a generation of artists now nearing 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 occasionally freelanced as a music journalist, was aware of a vibrant jazz scene that had existed in Albina during the 1940s and ’50s, an era documented in Robert Dietsche’s 2005 book Jumptown. However, he wondered what happened to Portland’s Black music scene after 1957. As an avid record collector, Smith began searching for commercial recordings that could answer this question. For years, he scoured used record stores and consignment shops, but found very few commercial releases by Portland’s Black musicians from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. He eventually stumbled upon the 45 rpm single Sylvester had recorded with Rated "X" in the early 1970s, one of the few records from those decades he managed to find. Concurrently, he engaged with his neighbors, lingered at local parks whenever he heard music, and frequented 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 newly established community radio station broadcasting from Albina. By then, he had amassed a small collection of recordings from the region’s past and started inviting local musicians to the station to discuss them on air. One of his first guests was Calvin Walker, a drummer, bandleader, and self-described "child of Albina." Walker initially came for a 30-minute interview, but the conversation extended for three hours as he shared his life story and, in doing so, mapped out an entire ecosystem of musicians and educators who had 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," Walker told Smith. "And I’ll help you."

Soon, Smith’s weekly radio show transformed into a hub where elder Black musicians came to share their experiences. Despite the systemic barriers that had limited their access to the recording industry, Albina’s musicians had diligently documented their own 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 an ambitious mission: to preserve thousands of obsolete and decaying media items and make them accessible to everyone. Elder engineers donated their time and equipment, teaching volunteers how to operate the archaic machinery. Each item was meticulously digitized and uploaded into a 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 contains over 13,000 items sourced from 180 different contributors. It features not only music – including live recordings, out-of-circulation albums, and unreleased demos – but also film, newsprint, posters, handbills, and oral histories. This extensive collection forms the backbone of the archive, functioning less like a museum and more like a seedbank, safeguarding historical artifacts that are then brought to life through various projects extending far beyond the website. An art installation titled Wall to Wall Soul combines restored and recolored posters and photography into striking images that have been exhibited throughout the city and now hang permanently in the dining room of Clyde’s Prime Rib. Under a record label of the same name, AMT releases vinyl albums featuring never-before-heard music from Albina’s past, as well as new works from contemporary artists within the community. 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 a chorus of musicians and club owners recount the neighborhood’s history. Listening to the tour provides an immersive experience, as if donning 3D glasses, bringing an unseen dimension into sharp focus. Even after removing the earbuds and being enveloped by the present-day sounds of the city – the rustling of maple leaves, the whirring of cyclists’ tires – 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 office in Northeast Portland. The space, just a few hundred square feet, felt like a cozy, walk-in closet. Shelves filled with neatly labeled boxes lined one wall, and 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 room was filled with the warm sounds of jazz. Settling into one of the four mismatched chairs arranged in the compact space felt more like joining a family around a snug kitchen table than meeting with a board of directors. That day, I experienced something akin to Smith’s first meeting with Walker: what was expected to be an hour-long conversation evolved into a journey through shared stories, stretching well past lunchtime and leading us to a nearby taqueria where we finally sat around a table to share 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 Berry’s 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 School, and after graduating, began playing a Hammond B3 organ at what was then Albina’s most prominent jazz club, The Upstairs Lounge. It was there he met the late Thara Memory, a trumpeter from Florida who had played with artists like James Brown. Memory was traveling with his band en route to Seattle when they stopped in Portland to perform at The Upstairs Lounge. However, Albina—with its majestic trees and lively community—captivated him, and when his band continued north, Memory remained. He and Berry later formed a group called Shades of Brown, one of several collaborations that would profoundly shape Albina’s music culture for decades to come.

Around the same time, and not far from The Upstairs Lounge, Walker encountered Memory at another of Albina’s vital community hubs, 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 captivated. "I never played trumpet again!" he exclaimed. Instead, Walker continued with drums, and Memory joined on trumpet.

In the summer of 1970, the American Legion held its annual convention in Portland. In an effort to divert potential war protesters from disrupting the event, the city organized the only state-sponsored rock concert in U.S. history: Vortex 1. Although The Gangsters were not officially invited to perform, they loaded their gear into the Albina Arts Center truck and drove to the festival, arriving right at the stage. When the manager informed them that all the bands had already been booked, 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 said, grinning.

Despite its significance, most retrospective coverage of Vortex 1, including a book and a television documentary, omitted this pivotal story. When AMT inquired about the omission, the answer was straightforward: the researchers were unaware of it. Like much of Albina’s history, this story was preserved within the community, not within institutional archives. "The public library and the Oregon Historical Society have existed for over a hundred years," Smith told me. "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 documenting a unique facet of American life, from LGBTQ individuals in the Deep South to radical Indigenous women activists and communities impacted by the death penalty. As control over historical narratives increasingly becomes a tool of political manipulation—as evidenced by the Trump administration’s critiques of the National Museum of African American History and Culture—community-based archives like AMT broaden the spectrum of voices authoring history, fostering a more inclusive and multifaceted understanding of America’s story.

In AMT’s compact office, Walker, Smith, and Berry recounted the Trust’s story with the kind of intimate rapport forged through years of shared dreams and problem-solving. Despite their differences in age and race, the profound respect they held for one another was palpable, evident in the seamless flow of their conversation: one man would recount an anecdote, another would clarify the timeline, and the third would provide essential context. It was only later that I realized the experience mirrored that of a great band jamming together, each player contributing a distinct element without overshadowing the others, creating a cohesive whole far greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Before I departed, Berry handed me a copy of YouthSound, then asked me to text him upon my safe arrival home. That evening, I placed the album on my turntable and leafed through the liner notes as a cascade of voices—dozens of children and adults singing together in a high school auditorium four decades prior—filled my living room. "It was all about listening," one student recalled in an oral history. "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."

Though their work often involves the literal preservation of the past, AMT’s ultimate focus is 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 partnering with Portland schools and nonprofits to expand access to arts education while connecting students with Albina’s rich Black music legacy.

Last June, I attended "Rhythms of Tomorrow," one of 38 public events AMT hosted in 2025 alone. This event, a collaboration between AMT and Portland Public Schools, marked the district’s first-ever celebration of Black Music Month. On my way, I stopped for lunch on Mississippi Avenue, in the historic Albina neighborhood. There, I stood in line for tacos amidst a throng of lunch-goers, predominantly white individuals in their thirties and forties, many sporting Blundstone boots and fine-line tattoos. Nearby, a cafe advertised boba tea and handcrafted donuts, and a boutique nursery offered mounted ferns for $150 each. Yoga studios and brewpubs abounded.

Decades after city bulldozers tore through Albina, another wave of displacement impacted what remained of the neighborhood. In the 1990s, the area’s affordable housing began to attract white individuals priced out of other districts. The city commenced investing previously withheld resources into Albina, cracking down on predatory lending and housing abandonment. These changes primarily benefited middle-class white newcomers, and soon, gentrification drove housing prices beyond the reach of many long-term 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 told me, referring to the far eastern reaches of 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 headquarters stands on a sprawling 10.5-acre campus. This site, a product of the "urban renewal" projects that displaced residents in the 1960s, is a drab industrial building, brick-pink and resembling a parking garage. However, on the day of my visit, its banal exterior stood in stark contrast to the vibrant scene unfolding inside. Children darted around, enjoying watermelon slices and salami from a long table laden with snacks. Adults exchanged hugs and handshakes. A DJ, positioned behind a spread of turntables and mixers, caught the attention of many eleven-year-olds, filling the room with buoyant tracks.

Norman Sylvester opened 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 onstage carrying his guitar less like an object and more like an extension of his body. Though Sylvester has explored various genres throughout his career, he remains deeply rooted in the blues. When asked what drew him 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 answered, "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 equal parts aching and sweet, I reflected on his words and their profound implication: a song is not merely an artifact to be archived, but a repository of history in itself. Here, preserved in melody and lyric, rhythm and pitch, a record of life is stored for future access.

Before the end of summer, 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 now sits 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, bisected by the shade of street trees. Cars passed by. A woman carried a toddler down the sidewalk. I imagined Sylvester standing there all those years ago. If that twelve-year-old boy returned today, I wondered, would he recognize anything? Apartments 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 has remained vacant since it was demolished in the 1970s. Now, half a century later, that 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 paying $8.5 million to 26 descendants of displaced Black families—is among the project’s partners. Funding for the project comes in part from the 1803 Fund, an organization dedicated to investing in Black Portland and supporting several restorative development efforts underway in Albina. The 1803 Fund also supports AMT’s work, because, 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 soon after he returned to Portland in 2024. He had grown up in the area, but his parents immigrated from Sierra Leone, leaving him without 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, Washington D.C., and Detroit, all cities celebrated for their Black culture. "Portland isn’t on that list," he stated. "But here was this living, breathing thing – the largest archive of its kind in the U.S. – right here in Portland. To me, it was a treasure trove."

Demographically, Sei acknowledged, Albina is no longer the center of Black life in Portland. Most Black Portlanders now reside farther east or outside the city. At the library celebration events held thus far – featuring puppet theatre and 3D printing demonstrations – Sei couldn’t help but notice the limited presence of Black attendees. However, at the TimeSound concert, the scene was entirely different.

In a spacious meeting room, a dreamy mural backlit a stage, and glass doors opened onto a courtyard where people stood in the sun, enjoying complimentary horchata oat-milk popsicles. The space was flooded with light and filled to near capacity with predominantly Black families, though many others were also present, creating a crowd that spanned generations: seniors, individuals in their forties, and babies in arms.

Calvin Walker was the first to approach the microphone. "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 Arietta Ward, who, in the TimeSound tradition, led an intergenerational ensemble performing works by Albina’s Black composers. When Ken Berry asked her to direct, Ward admitted to feeling some trepidation. "It’s hard not to get imposter syndrome. These musicians are my heroes, my teachers. They’ll always be legendary to me." But on stage that afternoon, no trace of her worries was visible; only her profound admiration for Albina’s musicians – past and present – resonated. To showcase the community’s female artists, she had selected a set composed primarily by women and began with a song by her mother. The crowd fell silent. Some, like myself, had never heard this particular composition before. Others had listened to it many times, perhaps even played it themselves. For them, the song likely unlocked a chest of memories, evoking cherished people and places from years gone by. The courtyard doors were left open, and I couldn’t help but wonder: if a young boy were standing on the corner of Williams and Russell right now, might he catch a riff drifting on the wind?

Near the end of the show, Ward invited Berry onstage to sing. He approached the microphone, shaking his head with a mixture of mystified delight and emotion. "I was just having a flashback," he said, describing an evening approximately 35 years prior. He was on stage at another Portland library, performing another community concert. Ward and her sister Nafisaria were present, mere children at the time. "Arietta was right here," he said, placing a hand on his ribs to indicate her height. When he looked up, his eyes were glistening with tears, yet he was smiling. "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 allowed the music to speak for itself.