PORTLAND, Ore. — A few years ago, Gwen Gage moved from a homeless encampment at Portland’s Laurelhurst Park into transitional housing in the city’s downtown.

But on Saturday morning, Gage, 51, returned to see friends — and seek some shade.

Her unit in the 120-year-old building has no air conditioning. So, despite freezing water bottles in advance and installing the box fans she and her neighbors received from the nonprofit that runs the housing program, she said she just couldn’t be there Saturday.

“When I looked at the weather and saw 113 degrees, I just thought, ‘This can’t be Portland,’” she said.

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SALEM, ORE. — Jonathan Jones named his restaurant Epilogue because it was supposed to be the end of a beginning.

Jones, 32, and his wife, Maura Ryan, 31, moved here from Wilmington, N.C., in 2014, to delve into Oregon's wine industry and to try to open their own restaurant. They started with a food truck called Prologue Pastry and in 2019 finally turned it into a brick-and-mortar establishment serving dinner and cocktails. Epilogue Kitchen & Cocktails was the fulfillment of a dream and made Jones one of few Black business owners in Oregon's capital city.

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Lauren Brown says college was "culture shock." Most of the students at her high school were Black, but most of the students at the University of Missouri were white. And she got to the university in the fall of 2015, when Black students led protests in response to a string of racist incidents. The protests put Mizzou in the national news.

But the news stories didn't match what Lauren saw. They made it seem like racism on campus was an aberration. And they made it seem like Black student organizing was new at Mizzou. What Lauren saw was "Black Mizzou," a thriving campus-within-a-campus that Black students have built over decades to make the university a more welcoming place.

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Paul Dorr is a master of tactics to defeat referendums intended to finance public schools. He believes schools run by government steer kids away from Christianity. His campaigns — most of them in the Midwest — have also created lingering bitterness within communities.

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