Black stories from the big blue

Most accounts of the United States’ maritime enterprises are disproportionately populated by white seafarers. A new exhibit at Newport’s Pacific Maritime Heritage Center, “Take Me to the Water: Histories of the Black Pacific” expands that narrative to include the many Black whalers, commercial mariners, fishers, explorers, soldiers and sailors who traveled along the Pacific Coast and traversed the high seas from the 16th Century to the present day.

The exhibit opens this Saturday, Nov. 23, and will be on view through Jan. 12.

An opening reception will take place on Saturday, from 1 pm to 4 pm. At 2 pm, Zachary Stocks, executive director of Oregon Black Pioneers, will give a talk about “The Shoreys in Hammond.”

In the 1910s, Capt. William Shorey and his family were prominent members of Oakland, California’s Black upper class. But in the 1920 census, his wife, now a widow, and their children were living in the tiny town of Hammond, near Warrenton on the Oregon Coast. Stocks will describe how this wealthy Black family ended up there, and how he uncovered the story.

This important exhibition recenters the relationship between Black folks, water and ships, moving beyond the entrenched narrative of the Transatlantic slave trade and towards the understanding that Black people have not only existed in the Pacific region for centuries, but played an integral role in the development of Pacific economy and society.

The exhibition is curated by Dr. Caroline Collins, who charts her interest in Black people’s relationships with water and watercraft to a childhood that included regular visits to Southern California beaches. Collins is an incoming assistant professor at UC San Diego; UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at UC Irvine, an affiliated researcher with the Democracy Lab and the Indigenous Futures Institute at UC San Diego and is a co-founder of “Black Like Water,” an interdisciplinary research collective at UCSD that highlights Black relationships to the natural world.

The Pacific Maritime Heritage Center is located at 333 SE Bay Blvd. in Newport. For more information, go to oregoncoasthistory.org or call 541-265-7509.