Experience Oregon permanent exhibit
Oregon Historical Society
Portland, Oregon
June 13, 2026 | 10:25am
The Oregon Historical Society had just opened for the day.
I was alone in the Experience Oregon permanent exhibit, moving through displays on women’s history, wartime service, and Oregon’s long struggle toward greater equality. Nearby were uniforms worn by women during the First and Second World Wars. Across the gallery were stories of civic participation, progress, and inclusion.
Then I turned a corner and stopped.
Inside a glass case sat a white hood from Oregon’s Ku Klux Klan era.
My first reaction was immediate.
Disgust.
A few steps later, I stopped.
The conversation that followed wasn’t with anyone else. There was no audience. No one in the gallery telling me what to think. It was entirely internal.
Part of me wanted to move on. The other part argued that doing so would be too easy.
It is easy to condemn hatred in the moment. It is easy to say the right things. It is easy to support equality when the evidence of the opposite sits safely in history books and documentaries.
Standing in front of an artifact is different. Very different.
I turned around and walked back. For several minutes, I stood there looking at it, staring it down.
The pointed top.
The eye holes.
The unsettling realization that this was not a reproduction or a photograph, but an object worn by a real person in the 1920s.
For the people who encountered it in its intended context, it was not a museum artifact.
It was a warning.
What surprised me most was where my mind went.
Although the artifact belonged to an Oregon exhibit, I found myself thinking far beyond Oregon.
I thought about the Civil Rights Movement and the courage it took for people to challenge systems built on intimidation and exclusion.
I thought about Mamie Till-Mobley, whose words after her son Emmett Till’s murder in 1955 still resonate today:
“Let the world see what I’ve seen.”
I thought about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 and the four innocent young African-American girls who were killed there.
I thought about the countless people from many marginalized communities who encountered symbols like this not behind museum glass, but in their daily lives.
The hood itself is nothing more than fabric.
What gave it weight was what it represented: hate, violence, dehumanization, and one of the ugliest, most shameful chapters of American history.
Standing there, I felt anger.
Not at the museum for displaying it.
Anger for the innocent lives affected by the hatred it symbolized.
Anger for the fear and terror it once inspired. Anger for the fact that such an object needed to exist at all.
The experience reminded me that museums preserve more than achievements and accomplishments.
They also preserve evidence.
Some artifacts inspire. Others teach.
A few confront.
This was one of them.
I left the gallery unsettled, but also convinced that difficult history deserves the same attention we give to the stories that make us proud.
Not because confronting it changes the past.
But because understanding history requires us to face all of it—and looking away never has.
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