Portland’s Summer of 2020
Ninety Days that Shook the World
The following paper was presented at an International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy conference in Bologna, Italy, in 2022, two years after the events it describes. Ted Wheeler did not seek re-election, and Keith Wilson took office as Portland’s 54th mayor in January 2025, under a new Council-Mayor form of government. The original analysis appears here as written, with light factual updates and a brief 2026 postscript.
Thanks to its history of changemakers, Portland, Oregon has long been a hotbed of progressive political activism. As one of Portland’s most controversial native sons, John Reed, would agree, however, this is a city with a split personality – supporting justice movements on one hand and struggling with entrenched racism, economic conservatism, and right-wing encroachment on the other. With apologies to Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World, this essay offers an analysis of Portland’s Summer of 2020: Ninety Days that Shook the World.
The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police ignited the latest chapter in Oregon’s social justice story. Outraged citizens of all ages and races gathered in the city’s center, across from the federal justice building, to protest this latest in a string of murders by police officers of unarmed people of color. For many, his pleas for help and the haunting last words “I can’t breathe!” became a passion-inducing call for this mostly white community to demand an end to racial injustice. A broad range of self-organized groups, including a mostly white “Wall of Moms”, dads armed with leaf blowers to fend off tear gas, Black Lives Matter activists, “Don’t Shoot Portland” organizers, and the well-publicized “Antifa” youth, coalesced to demand police reform and accountability, and to call for racial justice more broadly.
Daily protests evolved into a semi-permanent encampment in front of the Justice Center, where peaceful protesters encountered daily interactions with federal officers who tear-gassed them, fired rubber bullets, and beat individuals. Additionally, they experienced violent confrontations launched by right-wing groups. Then-President Donald Trump politicized the daily uprisings and sent in Homeland Security, the FBI, and private contractors to aggressively respond. Media headlines catapulted Portland into the national and international spotlight. Escalation of violence by such right-wing groups as Patriot Prayer, Oath Keepers, and Proud Boys ultimately resulted in the deaths of two people, Aaron Danielson and Michael Reinoehl.
These Ninety Days, though contentious and politicized, brought needed change to Portland’s policing practices, including a $15 million Police Bureau budget cut that was spent instead on intervention services; the creation of an independent police oversight committee charged with investigating misconduct; and a suite of state laws designed to rein in certain policing practices (Ellis, 2020). It also stimulated, however, an exodus of officers from Portland, less responsiveness to the upsurge in criminal acts, and the proliferation of private security guards hired by Portland businesses that hadn’t moved out. In the two years after protests, more than 12,000 Portlanders had left the city altogether (Mesh, 2022).
This essay explores the social, historical, and political roots of Portland’s social justice history from which this latest movement arose. It also examines the ongoing layers of struggle Portland has faced in this period, including worsening income inequality. It will show how neoliberalism, and each side’s conscious or unconscious reaction to its excesses, undergirds ongoing strife across Oregon.
Post-Neoliberalism, Portland Style
The clashes between the antifascists and Patriot Prayer, the most violent feature of the Ninety Days, have their roots in – and are a microcosm of – a broader anti-neoliberal backlash seen across the country. Neoliberalism’s excesses, such as the free movement of unregulated capital, growing income inequality, and the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs, have ignited this movement. Portland’s strife, underlying the 2020 uprising, can be traced to what Paolo Gerbaudo (2021) describes as the limits of neoliberalism, evidenced by political polarization and manifested in culture wars prosecuted by the Right and Left. On one hand, the populist Right targets “cultural neoliberalism” (immigration policies, LGBTQA+ rights, and the supposed teaching of critical race theory in public schools). Their antipathy is laced with conspiracy theories spread through disinformation campaigns. On the other hand, the populist Left’s objections are to economic neoliberalism (focusing on housing, health care access, and fair wages).
The real upsurge in this latest chapter of struggle came after Trump was sworn in as President in 2017. Portland experienced a corresponding rise in violent and deadly clashes between anti-racist activists and Trump supporters, including Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys, two groups intimately involved in the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The pattern was already visible by May of that first Trump year, when Jeremy Christian, a self-proclaimed white nationalist, stabbed two men to death on the Portland light rail train after they intervened on behalf of two women of color, the targets of his racist rage. Two years later, in October 2019, 23-year-old anti-fascist activist Sean Kealiher was killed when a right-wing group ran him over after a dispute at a local brewery. The violence carried into the new decade: in February 2022, Benjamin Smith confronted and shot at a group of racial justice advocates walking past his house, killing one and wounding four others.
The rise of Portland’s Far Right became most acute on August 30, 2020, in reaction to the nightly racial justice protests downtown. A caravan of 600 Trump supporters from the Portland suburbs swarmed the city center, hoping to ignite a civil war. Armed with paintball guns, bats, clubs, and bear spray, they confronted the peaceful protesters and ignited skirmishes. One of their own, Aaron Danielson, was shot and killed in the resulting melee. President Trump exploited the incident by calling for the activation of the Insurrection Act of 1807 – a call for posse comitatus action that would allow him to step over state and local authorities and deploy military units to suppress the nightly protests. Ultimately, the shooter, a self-proclaimed “Antifa” activist by the name of Michael Reinoehl, was gunned down by law enforcement officers.
Meanwhile, the echoes of so-called “non-lethal ammunition” (which caused permanent brain damage in one protester) and of tear gas canisters fired into the peaceful crowds by police reverberated throughout the city and could even be heard in the northwest Portland hills three miles away. The authors were among the many Portlanders who had purchased a bike helmet, gas mask, and goggles, hoping to join the protests in solidarity. Instead, we donated the gear to a friend who had no such protection. We drove to the encampment a few times, overwhelmed by the strong, bitter smell of tear gas residue hanging in the air. We provided food and cash to the Riot Ribs outdoor kitchen concession that emerged to provide free food and bottled water to protesters, journalists, and medics. We observed a sea of tents, graffiti such as “ACAB” (which stood for “All Cops Are Bastards”) and “Fuck the Police”, and anarchist and antifa symbols scribbled on sidewalks. Doors and windows of such businesses as Starbucks – seen as symbols of corporate capitalism – were smashed and boarded up. Fliers for free self-defense training were stapled to telephone poles. A huge and colorful mural depicting George Floyd, with the phrase ‘I can’t breathe’, was painted on the gigantic boarded-up wall of the downtown Apple Store.
All of this was happening in the midst of a still-raging pandemic, epic wildfires that clogged Oregon air, and a growing homelessness crisis borne of neighborhood gentrification and a gaping income/wealth gap between rich and poor Oregonians (Bates, 2013).
When the total 200 days of action were over, police had arrested more than 1,000 protesters – 200 of whom were charged with crimes. The New York Times reported that undercover FBI surveillance teams infiltrated the demonstrations and recorded protesters, who were later identified and arrested (Baker, M., Olmos, S., Goldman, A., 2021). Critics say that these tactics amounted to domestic spying and possible First Amendment infringements. According to a 2022 Portland city auditor’s report, police officers collected information about protesters with documentation of criminal activity. This included photos and videos of protest activity, as well as recorded vehicle license plates. The auditor recommended that police intelligence cease its evident infringement on protesters’ First Amendment rights when no criminal activity was at issue.
Other disturbing activity, conducted by a Trump-deployed militarized unit, also made headlines during this time. BORTAC, the Border Patrol Tactical Unit of the federal government, created in 1984 to respond to rioting at immigrant detention facilities, showed up in military-style camouflage, driving unmarked minivans, and abducted peaceful protesters right off the streets of downtown Portland. Terrified victims were blindfolded and taken to secret locations for interrogation and imprisonment. As Harvard law professor Andrew Crespo documented, at least one high-profile example from Portland of an arrest (captured on video) clearly violated the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids law enforcement officers from arresting individuals without probable cause (Vladeck, 2020).
In addition to the federal government's provocative engagement, the racial justice movement’s steam was finally diminished when political and corporate entities co-opted it to express their solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, contributing more than $10 billion to its causes (Robinson, 2022). Those effects were to reduce it to symbolic achievements, such as the removal of monuments honoring past (racist) leaders and renaming schools and military bases. Antonio Gramsci describes this tactic as “passive revolution”, involving the dominant class’s overtaking of the intellectual, political, and cultural leadership of anti-capitalist and anticolonial struggles.
The Long Local History
Portland’s Ninety Days was not an anomaly for this urban western burg. Like Minneapolis, whose police violence inspired the Summer of 2020, Portland’s history of anti-racist activism goes back decades. When, in the 1980s, a group of Minneapolis youth formed “The Baldies”, a self-proclaimed anti-racist skinhead group who clashed with a gang of neo-Nazis called the White Knights, they subsequently evolved into the Anti-Racist Action Organization, which established chapters in several cities, including Portland. Also emerging in this period were anti-racist youth groups in Portland, such as the East Side Skinheads (Flores C., Yanke, E., Crenshaw, M., 2019)
Racism remained problematic throughout this time. Portland was home to various neo-Nazi groups in the 1980s and 1990s. White supremacists and neo-Nazis saw the Northwest as the last frontier for establishing a white utopia.
On April 20, 1985, 31-year-old Lloyd “Tony” Stevenson – an African American and former Marine – was killed by Portland police who applied a choke hold, mistaking him for a suspect in a convenience store robbery (Buggy, 2016). This security guard and father of five had gone to the store to buy ice cream for his kids when he intervened in a scuffle between two store clerks and a black man accused of stealing. When the police arrived, they attempted to arrest Stevenson, who made a futile effort to explain that they had the wrong guy. In subduing him, they pressed on his carotid artery in the neck to diminish blood flow to the brain. It killed him. On the day of his funeral, Portland police officers began selling t-shirts with the message: ‘Don’t Choke ‘em; Smoke ‘em.” Co-chair of the Black United Front Ron Herndon said at the time, “This is what you would expect from police hit squads in El Salvador” (Turner, 1985). It was just one of countless documented cases of police violence against Portland’s Black community.
Among the most notorious of the activist groups was the White Aryan Resistance, whose members in 1988 murdered Ethiopian immigrant and Portland State University student Mulugeta Seraw – a crime that was provoked by WAR leader and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Tom Metzger. The Southern Poverty Law Center used an innovative legal strategy to hold Metzger and WAR liable for the wrongful death of Seraw, winning a $12.5 million verdict that effectively put the racist hate group out of business (Bennett, 2020). Out of the same period of resistance, Rose City Antifa formed in 2007, becoming the first official antifascist organization in the country. This movement joined a long and rich Portland protest culture that included anti-war protests and advocacy for a broad range of progressive social policies. When President George Bush visited Portland in 1991, for instance, he was confronted by such protesters, prompting him to dub the city “Little Beirut” (McCall, 2003).
Intimately tied to the racial justice movements of the past four decades is the concurrent and intersectional fight for income equality and economic justice. Especially in the post-protest climate, with some 5,000 homeless people sleeping on Portland’s sidewalks while rich developers erect multimillion-dollar hotels and penthouse condominiums on the same streets, the case for economic justice had never been more stark (Hasenstab, 2022). Portland’s wealth gap tracks the nation’s, with the top 1 percent owning one-third of the country’s wealth by the end of 2021. And like the rest of the U.S., Portlanders were active in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, begun in 2011 on the heels of the financial crisis, to advance social and economic justice. Then, as in the Summer of 2020, protesters set up an encampment near City Hall that lasted only a little more than a month before the city shut it down. Over time, the group expanded to plan acts of civil disobedience and led a picket that successfully shut down the busy Port of Portland for a day. Its activists later turned attention to protesting war, supporting student debt relief, and calling out the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
This is the movement that most concerned the corporate titans, and it is in part to divert attention from questions of economic inequality that elites have long embraced a non-economic racial justice message in Portland and across the country. When necessary, partisans have no problem with more heavy-handed tactics, of course – such as the use of the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service (FPS), which has contracts with more than 50 private security firms, including “Blackwater” (Conroy, 2020). FPS, with its $1 billion budget, hires 13,000 security guards to support federal law enforcement with crowd control. In “protecting” federal buildings, armed FPS-hired security guards confronted protesters in Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, in June 2020, lobbing flashbang grenades and tear gas to disperse them. These units were deployed despite a 2019 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office that called out the guards’ insufficient training and noted that several guards were felons. Today’s army of ICE officers is similarly unqualified.
Moreover, through the state apparatus, the ruling classes began deploying new surveillance technologies, arming local police with advanced military-grade weapons, and pouring millions of dollars into private security to institute social control and sustain capital accumulation amid the enduring financial crisis facing capitalism. William Robinson (2022) calls this the “accumulation by repression,” and it is an instructive lens through which to view the widespread protests of 2020 and the disproportionate federal law enforcement and government response. In dealing with the visible face of economic inequality, the government’s response, even in liberal Portland, has at times veered toward control rather than problem-solving. Portland’s mayor at the time, Ted Wheeler, leaned on his advisor and former mayor Sam Adams, who proposed warehousing thousands of homeless tent dwellers in temporary shelters supervised by unarmed Oregon National Guardsmen (Kavanaugh, 2022). A business-funded group, People for Portland, attempted a parallel ballot measure in November 2022. Critics of both plans identified criminalizing homelessness and disregard for people’s unmet needs as reasons to block the proposals, which they did, successfully.
Portland in 2022
Though the nightly protests waned to nearly nothing in the year-plus since they were officially ended, young “Black Bloc” anarchists roamed Portland’s streets for a time, sometimes vandalizing businesses and vehicles and generally stirring up trouble. They seemed to have no political agenda, having sprung from a white youth brigade that essentially hijacked Portland’s black-led racial justice cause. Though most of the plywood had come off by 2022, and businesses were returning to profitability, evidence of the Ninety Days remained. For months, a huge, imposing fence wrapped around the front of the federal building, the county courthouse across the street has subsequently moved, and the nearby police headquarters remained boarded up. Graffiti marred many buildings. Pandemic-related protocols lifted, tourism began to revive, and nightlife returned. Mayor Wheeler fought off a small Leftist recall effort, a few officers were held accountable for assaulting protesters, and, as noted before, both the city council and the state legislature enacted police oversight and legal restraints (Zielinski, 2021).
According to the “Oregon Values and Beliefs” survey, a majority of Oregonians polled supported the Black Lives Matter movement at the time, but they were split on whether society had improved because of it (OVBC, 2022). Surveyors noted a lingering political divide among Oregonians regarding perceptions of the social justice movement, with 87 percent of Democrats in support and 69 percent of Republicans opposed. Antifascist protesters drew “strong criticism for demonstrations that ended in repeated damage to downtown businesses.” Some noted that this vandalism “drowned out the overall message and overshadowed the need for police reform” (Vaughn, 2022). In short, we remained a divided state and city whose government, nonprofit, and academic institutions adopted full-throated equity and diversity language and plans, but few solutions to enduring economic and political chasms. But as the City Most Known for Its Protests, Portland will surely rise up again.
Postscript: 2026
Three and a half years on, the original paper’s hint that Portland would rise up again has been borne out, though not in the form anyone would have wanted. In the spring of 2025, Donald Trump’s second administration deployed federal forces to the South Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, where months of nightly protests drew a federal response familiar from the Summer of 2020. Portland police officers eventually testified in federal court against the actions of federal officers at the site, in what Mayor Keith Wilson described as a principled stand against federal overreach. The “No Kings” rallies of 2025 and 2026 have once more put thousands of Portlanders into the streets.
The political map shifted as well. Ted Wheeler did not seek re-election. In November 2024, Portland voters used a new ranked-choice system to elect Keith Wilson, a freight company executive and political outsider, as the 54th mayor under a restructured Council-Mayor form of government. The change abolished the commission system that had governed the city for more than a century, expanding the council to twelve members elected from four geographic districts.
Other elements of the 2022 portrait have shifted. The fence around the Hatfield Courthouse came down. Some of the criminal cases against protesters resulted in convictions, others in acquittals. The independent police oversight committee remains tangled in disputes over implementation. Portland’s homeless population has more than tripled in four years: Multnomah County now estimates nearly 18,000 people are experiencing homelessness in the region, with roughly 9,000 unsheltered, up from about 6,000 unsheltered when Wilson took office in January 2025. Mayor Wilson, who campaigned on ending unsheltered homelessness within a year, has publicly disputed the county’s methodology while reassuring Portlanders that the city is in a “resurgence.” In late 2025, his administration resumed enforcement of the public camping ban, a criminalization-of-homelessness measure that the 2022 critics had successfully blocked in earlier forms.
The city now faces a budget deficit of more than $160 million in the 2026-27 fiscal year. The named forces of cooptation, surveillance, and accumulation by repression have not weakened; if anything, they have grown more entrenched. Division among Portland’s city councilors threatens to reduce the body’s productivity and has already engendered internecine policy struggles. Whether the political shift to a new mayor-and-council form of government will produce solutions to the underlying economic and political chasms, or only manage them more efficiently, remains an open question.
References
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Bates, L. K. (2013). Gentrification and displacement study: implementing an equitable inclusive development strategy in the context of gentrification. City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. https://www.portland.gov/sites/default/files/2020-01/2-gentrification-and-displacement-study-05.18.13.pdf
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Conroy, B. (2020, July 22). The lead federal agency responding to protesters in Portland employs thousands of private contractors. Medium. https://wkc6428.medium.com/the-lead-federal-agency-responding-to-protesters-in-portland-employs-thousands-of-private-db137349f8b0
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Flores, C., Yanke, E., Crenshaw, M. (2019). It did happen here. https://itdidhappenherepodcast.com/transcripts/episode1_transcript.html
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Kavanaugh, S. D. (2022, February 11). Portland mayor’s top advisor proposed massive, militarized group shelters as step in ending homeless camping, records show. The Oregonian. https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2022/02/portland-mayor-wants-to-create-1000-person-group-shelters-then-outlaw-camping-by-homeless-people-records-show.html
Mesh, A. (2022, March 24). Portland metro population declines amid American flight from major cities. The Willamette Week. https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2022/03/24/portland-metro-population-declines-amid-american-flight-from-major-cities/
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Robinson, W. I. (2022). Global civil war: Capitalism post-pandemic. Kairos.
Turner, W. (1985, May 5). Blacks protest choke-hold death in Oregon. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/05/us/blacks-protest-choke-hold-death-in-oregon.html
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Vladeck, S. (2020, July 25). Are the Trump Administration’s actions in Portland legal? Are they constitutional? The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/25/are-trump-administrations-actions-portland-legal-are-they-constitutional/
Zielinski, A. (2021, November 8). The campaign to recall Mayor Ted Wheeler is officially over. The Portland Mercury. https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/2021/11/08/36852057/the-campaign-to-recall-mayor-ted-wheeler-is-officially-over
Note: Illustration by Ramin Farahmandpur, after Reuters coverage of federal officers in Portland, summer 2020.