View "Remember Mulugeta: Confronting Hate in Portland," at opb.org.
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Michael Dunne: I’m Michael Dunne. The hairstyles are better, cars are better, TV is better, and clothes are better. Comparing today with the 1980s shows a lot of things have improved, but a new documentary by producers at OPB showcases how racial animosity and racial violence may not have improved as much as we hope. Today on the show, you’ll hear from producers Dan Evans and Nora Colie about their new film, “Remember Mulugeta: Confronting Hate in Portland.” It’s a gripping documentary about the brutal murder of an Ethiopian immigrant on the streets of Portland in 1988, but it’s also a harrowing echo of the difficult times we find ourselves in today. Much progress has been made, but as the film points out, we have a long, long way to go. Dan Evans and Nora Colie are producers at OPB who put together this new documentary. I really appreciate both of you coming on. Welcome.
Both: Thank you.
Dunne: Nora, what was the impetus for making this documentary? Why did you want to make this particular film?
Nora Colie: One day I was working with Dan, and we were editing something else, and I was asking him about other projects he might want to make at OPB. He said, “I really want to make a film about the murder of Mulugeta Seraw.” And I was like, how do you know about that? I grew up in Portland; Dan didn’t. I was surprised, and I also knew that so many people these days have never heard his name. Dan can tell you the part of the story about how he learned about it where he grew up. But for me, I was 17 and attending St. Mary’s Academy in downtown Portland. I spent a lot of my youth downtown. I would probably have called myself a new waver at the time, maybe back when I was 12. There was a counterculture of all these different groups downtown, hanging out at the Galleria and shopping at all the record stores. And then you would see skinheads down there quite a bit. I knew there were the anti-racist ones and the racist ones. Sometimes they’d be walking toward you and you’d be stunned — a younger kid thinking, which ones are these? Should I start running? Should I be afraid? So when the murder happened, it was very shocking. Portland was a city, and there was violence now and then, but this murder, as a teenager, captured my attention because it was a group attacking a Black man, in this case, an Ethiopian immigrant.
Dunne: Dan, how did you hear about Mulugeta and the story? Pick it up from where Nora just left off.
Dan Evans: I grew up in eastern Washington, and I was a kid when the news broke that a skinhead had murdered a Black man in Portland. The injustice of it really struck me. I couldn’t quite square what had happened. It almost seemed like a dark fantasy — that there were skinheads, which I didn’t really understand, and they had murdered a Black man. The story really stuck with me. When I later moved to Portland as an adult, I was surprised that most people didn’t seem to know about it. I wanted to be involved in getting the story out and making sure people knew what had happened. And for me, it was also about unpacking something that had seemed almost mythological from my childhood. I wanted to get more at the actual story and what had really occurred.
Dunne: Watching the film, I keep thinking that hairstyles and clothes look so different from the ‘80s, but this racial tension is very much alive today. Nora, talk about the timing of releasing this documentary in 2026, even though the events happened decades ago, and where we are right now in our community, our state and our nation with regard to racial violence.
Colie: We started this project two years ago, and we weren’t working on it full time — we kept stopping to do other projects. There was a moment where we asked ourselves, are people going to pay attention to this? And then 2026 happened. Suddenly our topics of immigration, attacks and racial violence were all front and center. Groups of people seem emboldened to express feelings that, over time and through learning, they may have understood they needed to let go of. They’ve now been empowered to say it out loud and even act on it. It feels like right now there are no repercussions. We ended up releasing this film at just the right time, but that was never the intention. We were just telling a story. It really brings what’s happening right now into sharp focus.
Dunne: Dan, from the creator’s point of view, give our audience a preview of what they’ll see in this documentary, and as you do that, explain the narrative you wanted to convey.
Evans: We really wanted to center the story on Mulugeta. I think a common pitfall in documentaries like this is that they end up focusing more on the killers who survived rather than the victim. That was our guiding star when we started: we wanted to re-center the story on Mulugeta. We were fortunate to connect with his uncle, Engedaw Berhanu, who was really the driving force in seeking justice for Mulugeta. The narrative is centered around Berhanu and his firsthand perspective of what happened. The other main strands of the story are relatively new territory. The ground has been covered in other places, but putting it all together this way was new. One strand follows the anti-racist activists who fought back at the grassroots level against Neo-Nazis who had infiltrated the music scene in Portland. Those stories are also told through a great podcast called “It Did Happen Here.” The creators of that podcast, including Mike Crenshaw, were very helpful in connecting us with people to interview. The third strand is the civil trial against Tom Metzger and White Aryan Resistance, which was based out of California but had been spreading hate throughout the country, including appearances on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and on “Geraldo.” Metzger had been in contact with East Side White Pride, the racist skinhead group that murdered Mulugeta. So those three strands — Berhanu’s story as Mulugeta’s uncle, the grassroots activism and the civil trial — come together in the film.
Dunne: Nora, you touched on this at the beginning, but one thing I loved about the way you put this together is how you described this interesting place that Portland was in the 1980s — this stew of counterculture, music and the punk scene. And you described something a lot of people might not have known: that skinheads were not one monolithic group. Many had anti-racist roots, and the movement took a very different turn with certain factions. Talk about that whole environment in Portland in 1988.
Colie: Skinhead culture as a subculture emerged in the United Kingdom around the 1960s. It was a blend of working-class style, the mod fashion scene and Rude Boy culture — the immigrants from Jamaica coming to the U.K. and the music and style they brought with them. Those groups formed a style of music that punk also grew out of. And then there was the clothing: Doc Martens, straight-leg jeans, closely cropped hair, suspenders. But there was a moment when a break occurred within that scene. Some working-class white kids started to form this back-to-England, white supremacist ideal. The neo-Nazi skinheads began starting fights not just with other skinheads, but with people on the street. There’s a well-known story, even before Mulugeta Seraw, of an Asian family coming out of a restaurant and the father being attacked and beaten in front of his family. That kind of violence started to rise and become more frequent.
Dunne: Dan, one of the things I found fascinating was the irony surrounding Mulugeta’s story. He fled Ethiopia at a time of great violence, and his uncle was instrumental in bringing him to what was supposed to be a safer place. Talk about the irony of being murdered in Portland, in a country he had come to in order to escape civil war and violence.
Evans: There was a long-standing civil conflict in Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991, and Ethiopians had been coming to America and to Europe to study in small numbers for some time. Berhanu came here to study while the civil war was really raging in the ‘70s, when it hit peak violence. When Berhanu finished his studies, he intended to return home, but his family told him it was too dangerous. It was a Marxist military regime targeting civilians, especially those who had been educated in the West. Rather than return to Ethiopia, Berhanu decided to try to bring his nephew, Mulugeta, here instead. The irony is that in escaping the violence in Ethiopia, Mulugeta met his end here in Portland — something nobody could have anticipated.
Dunne: Nora, we don’t get to meet Mulugeta directly in this documentary — we learn about him. But someone we do meet, perhaps for the first time for many viewers, is Tom Metzger. Talk about him and his movement, especially the fact that this was a charismatic, media-savvy individual who knew how to build a following.
Colie: I remember always hearing about him when I was a teenager. I never had a face to put to the name, but people would mention Tom Metzger. I believe that started happening after the murder. He was considered a kind of folksy, everyday guy. He had been a leader in the Ku Klux Klan and then started his own organization, White Aryan Resistance. He was a TV repairman — a working-class guy with his own business. But he created this magazine called WAR that was almost like a zine, but large-format and filled with illustrations that you could see would pull a younger person in. It was full of racist stories and ideology. He also operated a telephone hotline where you could call in and hear a racial message — praising violence against people of color or Jews, or commenting on events happening around the country. And then in the trial, he defended both himself and his son, serving as his own counsel. He did a pretty decent job. He really knew how to present himself and shape a narrative.
Dunne: Dan, at least to my reading of the film, you’re asking the audience to consider a central question: Was the racism in Portland at the time homegrown, or was it imported?
Evans: That is one of the main questions we ask in the film, and I think the honest answer is both. What happened during the trial is that, in one sense, you could view the prosecution of Tom Metzger and WAR as an attempt to deflect guilt away from Portland and Oregon onto an outsider. So we looked at what really drew a fringe of the city’s youth to Neo-Nazism and tried to illustrate that it found genuine appeal and a foothold in the local music scene. In earlier, longer cuts of the film we went into much more depth on Oregon’s long history of racism — from its founding as a state with exclusion laws that prevented Black people from settling here, to the large Ku Klux Klan presence in the 1920s. We ultimately trimmed much of that, because the kids who were drawn to this movement at the time probably didn’t know that history. They were drawn to the imagery and ideology of Neo-Nazism more directly. For listeners who do want to learn more about the history of racism in Oregon, OPB has produced documentaries on that subject — one is “Black Pioneers,” and another is “The Rise of Hate,” about the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon.
Dunne: Nora, did Mulugeta’s murder in 1988 change things? Was it a catalyst? Do you see positive steps that came from it? And reflecting on 2026, do you think things have gotten worse?
Colie: It definitely feels worse. There isn’t a gang of thugs walking the streets of Portland the way there was then, but there’s a different kind of threat walking all around America now, and in the White House. That said, I do think the response — the youth who fought back — has had a direct effect on the activism happening today. There are both young and old people really putting themselves on the line and showing up consistently. Even now, outside of ICE facilities, there’s a group of elders I know who show up at least once a week, standing in front of the ICE office and the Tesla facility, marching and organizing and meeting in groups. It may not look exactly like the youth activism in our film, but I do think it’s connected. Portland continues to be an activist city in ways that stand out nationally. So I think that history has had a direct effect. And yet, at the same time, nothing has changed.
Dunne: Dan Evans and Nora Colie are OPB producers who made this new documentary. I really appreciate both of you coming on. It’s a great film and great work. Thank you for talking with us.
Both: Thank you so much. That was great.
Dunne: That’s the show for today. All episodes of Oregon On The Record are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. Tomorrow on the show, you’ll hear from a group that wants to ban almost all killing of animals for consumption in Oregon. I’m Michael Dunne, host of Oregon On The Record. Thanks for listening.
