![]() ![]() It was the company’s first “community store,” where 80 percent of the workers lived within five miles and a portion of the profits was dedicated to local organizations. Herndon approached Nike, for example, about opening a store in northeast Portland, arguing in a Willamette Week interview that “pimping the styles popularized by black kids and black athletes was too much of a one-way deal.” Nike opened a store on Northeast Martin Luther King Boulevard in 1984. The BUF also advocated for economic opportunity for Black Portlanders. Prophet, the city’s first Black school superintendent (1982). Over four years, the October 9, 1984, Oregonian reported, Herndon and the BUF “amassed a formidable array of accomplishments." They advocated for improved minority hiring, a Black consultant to revise curriculum (1981), the relocation of Harriet Tubman Middle School to Eliot School, near Memorial Coliseum (1982), and the hiring of Matthew W. In 1980, the BUF and other concerned community members negotiated a seven-point plan for desegregation, which included an end to busing to achieve desegregation. The BUF called for a boycott of schools and the dismissal of the district superintendent. ![]() The next year, an administrative ruling by the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare concluded that Portland’s busing program did not constitute illegal discrimination. Olivet Baptist Church, organized the Portland chapter of the Black United Front to force the school board to change its racist busing policies. Black students from the King School area, for example, were bused to forty-two different schools, “effectively desegregated, perhaps,” the July 3, 1979, Oregonian reported, “but unfairly isolated.” The unfortunate result was that about two-thirds of the students bused were Black. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Portland school district established busing policies to achieve desegregation in the schools. Herndon built on his local success by serving as president and board chair of the National Head Start Association from 1991 to 2013. Herndon also created a program that trains substitute teachers, many of them parents of Head Start children and employees of the program. The program became a “single-purpose Head Start grantee with a community-based board of directors” in 1993 it began serving families with infants and toddlers in 2000. Under his leadership, Albina Head Start expanded from serving 126 children and families in 1975 to over 1,000 at twenty-five sites in 2020. In 1975, Herndon was named director of the Albina Ministerial Alliance Head Start Program. BEC grew from a summer program to a full-time school, offering kindergarten through fifth-grade instruction. By the following spring, Reed administrators and faculty had agreed to establish a Black Studies Center.Īfter Herndon graduated from Reed with a degree in history in 1970, he and fellow Reedies Joyce Harris and Frank Wilson co-founded the Black Educational Center, a private school on Northeast Morris Street designed to serve the academic and cultural needs of Black children. Reed was “just as racist as any institution I had encountered in my previous twenty-three years,” he said, and he spent his two years there “in protest, constant protest.” He and other members of the Black Student Union, for example, demanded that Reed establish a Black studies program, and students occupied a floor of the administration building in December 1968. “All the adults pushed you to do well in school, despite obstacles.” A basketball scholarship helped Herndon through junior college, and in 1965 he entered Volunteers in Service to America, working as a community organizer in Michigan, New Jersey, and New York.Ī Rockefeller scholarship to Reed College took Herndon to Portland in 1968. “I saw this effort to bring about change,” he recalled. In the small, segregated community of his home town, Blacks helped one another. Herndon was reared by his grandparents, who emphasized the importance of education. īorn on December 18, 1945, in Coffeyville, Kansas, Ronald D. A long-time activist for minority rights and educational opportunities, especially in Portland, he was a founder of the Portland chapter of the Black United Front, the director of Albina Head Start, and the president of the National Head Start Association. Ron Herndon has been described as all three. ![]()
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