Make a statement in this soft cotton sweatshirt custom made by us. The Never Forget Collection pays homage to destroyed Black communities like Vanport. Vanport was constructed in the pro-segregation, white supremacist state of Oregon as a temporary housing solution for the thousands of Black people who came to the state to fill the employment gap left when WWII drafts led to a shortage in working class white men. What was known as 'The Great Migration' came right after the appeal of the long standing ban on Blacks in the state which was intended to keep the area as white as possible. Henry Kaiser constructed the cheaply made housing projects of Vanport to quickly fill his own need for employees and the city became the second largest in the state with over 6,000 Black residents. The city had been built on marshland with nothing but a dike system to protect them from the Columbia River, which reached heights more than 8 feet over flood level in 1948. Officials did not evacuate or issue a warning, choosing instead to lie to residents while discreetly moving valued property and horses from the area. Just five days after their reassurance of the residents' safety, the dikes gave way and the city was decimated within 10 minutes. With hundreds of lives lost and thousands displaced, the once densely populated city became nothing more than a faded memory and now in its place sits Delta Park. May we never forget the drowned town sunken by greed and bigotry.