1926: Oregonians voted to repeal the “exclusion laws” from the state constitution. The laws, first enacted in 1844 and written into the original 1857 state constitution, were aimed at preventing African Americans from settling in Oregon. Though not rigorously enforced, the laws deterred African Americans from entering the state in the latter half of the nineteenth century and kept the state predominantly white.
1927: Oregonians removed a clause in the state constitution that denied African Americans the right to vote. They also removed restrictions that discriminated against African American and Chinese American voters.
1951: The federal government repealed all legislation banning interracial marriages in Oregon. In 1967, the United States government lifted the nationwide ban on interracial marriages, after the landmark case of Loving v. Virginia.
1953: Governor Paul L. Patterson signed Oregon’s Civil Rights Bill, outlawing “any distinction, discrimination, or restriction on account of race, religion, color, or national origin” in public places.
1972: Oregon repealed laws that criminalized same-sex sexual activity.
1983: Legislation abolished the Oregon State Board of Eugenics, called at that time the Oregon State Board of Social Protection, responsible for 2,648 forced sterilizations on children, teens, and adults from 1923 to 1981. Nineteen years later, in 2002, Governor John Kitzhaber issued a formal apology for Oregon’s use of eugenics. Between 1900 and 1925, thirty-two other states enacted eugenics laws in an effort to prevent the birth of “unfit” Americans.
2002: Oregon removed racist language from the state constitution.
2014: A U.S. federal district court legalized same-sex marriages in Oregon. In 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States lifted a nationwide ban on same-sex marriages.
2015: Oregon became the third state to ban “conversion therapy” on minors. The practice was used in an attempt to change sexual orientation or gender identity.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
LIKE MOST OF MY NOVELS, THE STEEP AND THORNY Way grew out of a series of different story ideas that one day, without warning, exploded into a full-fledged book plot that gripped me by the shoulders and refused to let me go. In fact, I had to put this particular novel aside to write another contracted book, but the story called out to me the entire time and begged for me not to forget it.
Inspired by the HBO TV series Boardwalk Empire and my interest in World War I history, I at first thought about writing a novel focused on female bootleggers trying to survive with their war-widowed mothers in the 1920s. I also envisioned a completely separate novel involving a teen boy who’s hiding the fact that he’s gay in early-twentieth-century America. Those two threads eventually worked their way into the fabric of The Steep and Thorny Way in the forms of the Paulissens, the Markses, and Joe Adder.
The central plot of the book—Hanalee’s story—emerged after I researched Oregon’s nineteenth-and twentieth-century interracial marriage laws for one of my other novels. When I dug deeper into the history of the state’s prejudices and restrictions, I unearthed the troubling exclusion laws and unofficial “sundown laws,” the latter of which kept African Americans from passing through certain towns after dark. I also discovered the widespread use of eugenics in Oregon and the Ku Klux Klan’s takeover of the state in the early 1920s—including the KKK’s control over the 1922 gubernatorial election. As a lifelong resident of the typically open-minded West Coast, and a resident of Oregon itself since 2006, the lesser-known histories of the area shocked and saddened me. Whenever I experience a passionate reaction to a controversial piece of history, I find myself compelled to write a book about it—not to dig up old wounds and tarnish a region’s reputation, but to pay tribute to those who endured and overcame the forgotten injustices of the past. I’ve always been in awe of fighters and survivors.