Lectures

Join us for a presentation with Dr. Kenneth Hawkins on the life and achievements of Black abolitionist and merchant Abner Hunt Francis, with remarks from Kimberly Stowers Moreland on the significance of Francis's accomplishments today. Francis operated a prosperous mercantile store on Front Street in Portland until 1861. Throughout the mid-1800s, Francis used his position to fight for Black people on the frontiers from western New York to the Pacific Coast. He wrote letters to his friend Frederick Douglass about the conditions for Black people in Oregon and his successful resistance to the state’s Black exclusion laws, which Douglass published in his abolitionist newspaper. Even with these written accounts, histories of the Oregon Territory and its commercial port often ignored, ridiculed, or misrepresented Francis and…