CLAIRE WITHYCOMBE/EO MEDIA GROUP - Protesters attend the women's march in Salem Saturday.

SALEM — Hundreds of demonstrators gathered on Oregon’s Capitol mall Saturday in a show of feminist solidarity one day after the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump.

In brief remarks to the crowd, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said the state she leads stands for equality and diversity.

While Oregon has a reputation for progressive policies and boasts one of the country’s highest rates of female participation in state government, it also has a reputation for homogeneity and a well-documented history of institutional discrimination against people of color.

Keynote speaker Shelaswau Bushnell Crier, a former Willamette University law professor and former vice president of the Salem-Keizer NAACP, pointed to these divisions — historic and current — within Oregon and called for unity.

Crier said that, at first, she wasn’t sure, as a black woman, whether she would be welcomed to join the ranks of post-inaugural women’s marches in Oregon, or whether she was merely an “afterthough.”

For many years, Crier said, “women” did not always mean all women. For example, women’s restrooms in the Jim Crow era distinguished between “Ladies” and “Colored Ladies.”

“Division has been a tool to keep all of us subjugated,” Crier said.

And divisions are not just a thing of the past: The mother of a son who attends the University of Oregon, Crier said she wondered whether she should withdraw him from the school after the news emerged this autumn of a white law professor there hosting a Halloween party in blackface.

On second thought, she said, “hell no” to that, and demanded “to be seen” — as a woman, as a person of color and as an American.

Crier implored demonstrators to attend local public meetings, defend civil rights, and demand “answers” and a “seat at the table.”

The event coincided with similar demonstrations in cities across the country and a march in Washington D.C. that organizers say was attended by 500,000 people.

Undeterred by the morning’s persistent rain, protesters of all ages held signs aloft bearing messages rebuking the nation’s new commander in chief and stressed inclusivity of a kind the new president — and many of his supporters — has shunned as “political correctness.”

In the shadow of the marble “empire builders” carved into the Capitol, Gov. Brown repurposed the state song’s refrain of “My Oregon” as anaphora in a call to action:

“In my Oregon, all people are equal, and in my Oregon, love wins,” Brown said, clad in the signature pink cat-eared hat of the day’s march. “And in my Oregon, black lives matter, and in my Oregon, immigrants and refugees are welcomed with open arms. And in my Oregon, people with disabilities are respected. And in my Oregon, under my leadership, women are in charge of their own bodies. And in my Oregon, people and planet are valued over profit. And in my Oregon, my Oregon, diversity is celebrated. Are you with me?”

Brown is the state’s second female governor. The first was Barbara Roberts, a Democrat elected in 1990 to one term. Brown has one other female counterpart in the executive branch of state government — Ellen Rosenblum, the state’s attorney general.

Oregon has one of the highest rates of female membership among state legislatures. It ranks eighth among the 50 states, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. The Speaker of the Oregon House is female, as are the majority leaders in the House and Senate.

Mariana Lindsay, interim executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Women’s Leadership at Portland State University, says that Oregon’s level of participation by women — about 30 percent of all legislators — may in part be explained by longstanding training programs for women interested in state and local politics. As early as 1973, female legislators banded together to pass a set of feminist reforms.

But, Lindsay said, that comparatively high rate neither demonstrates total parity nor represents the racial and ethnic diversity of Oregon.

While the new class of legislators is the most diverse yet, it wasn’t until 2012 that a Latina, Jessica Vega Pederson, was elected — not appointed — to the Oregon House.

In the private sector, just one of the state’s 39 publicly traded companies as of late 2016 had a female CEO, according to a report published by the Women’s Foundation of Oregon in September.

“That is a sharp example of the leadership gap across public and private sectors, not just in our state, but nationwide,” Lindsay said.

The Women’s Foundation of Oregon report, titled “Count Her In,” pointed to significant disparities in earnings, health care and other quality of life factors for the state’s women.