Great exhibit, check it out, the LCHM, OBP,  and the Rutherfords should be proud of this material too often missing from our history.  Oregon's African-American pioneers faced a tough life just to survive. 
 And the Oregon Electric was a great line that shouldn't have been lost.

Here in Lane County, black railroad  workers were pioneers--Leo and Pearlie Mae Washington were the first permanent African-American    family to live here, arriving  in 1937.  He worked for the  Southern Pacific railroad  as a baggage handler and crew hauler.  They later took in black  boarders,  often railroad workers who couldn't stay in  local hotels. 

And of course our most famous early black resident was Wiley Griffon, who arrived about 1889 to operate the mule-powered "Eugene Street Railway Co." and later worked as a waiter on the railroad, allowing him to buy his home on the millrace at 4th and Mill in 1908, becoming Eugene's first African-American home owner.