This is how communities are reconciling with Oregon’s racist past

Note: This story discusses the history of racism in Oregon and contains racist slurs.

Taylor Stewart’s voice is perpetually brimming with enthusiasm and he moves with ease between topics of interest, but racial reconciliation is where his deepest passion lies.

When OPB last featured him in 2020, Stewart had successfully organized a memorial event for Alonzo Tucker, Oregon’s most widely documented victim of a public lynching. The effort culminated in the public unveiling of a historical marker and exhibit at the Coos History Museum in Coos Bay, the coastal town where the killing took place.

Stewart said residents of Coos Bay initially showed some confusion and resistance to the project, but eventually began to understand its significance.

“There were conservative city officials standing alongside young, progressive Black Lives Matter activists,” he said. “It was really eye-opening to me, the possibilities of what community change across the state of Oregon can look like.”

He has since formalized this work as the Oregon Remembrance Project, a nonprofit he founded with the mission of helping communities reconcile their historical injustices and harm.

Filmmaker and “Oregon Experience” producer Nora Colie caught up with Stewart, who was buzzing with new initiatives, including one effort to surface Grants Pass’ history as a former “sundown town” — places where people of color were once unsafe after nightfall.

Through their conversation, Stewart was able to reflect on the nuts and bolts of his social craft, but also the heavy burden he carries performing this line of work.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Nora Colie: You’ve said the idea of crafting a new narrative, rather than being defined by past tragedies, was ​​key in your process of helping Coos Bay acknowledge the lynching of Alonzo Tucker with a historical marker.

Taylor Stewart: Yeah, I once interned at an organization called Lines for Life, which is a suicide and substance abuse prevention organization. One thing I learned in training was when you’re on the phone with someone, you’re helping them unpack their luggage. So you have to help them repackage their emotions before you can end the call.

And so I take that same approach to community organizing, where if we’re going to unpack a community’s history, you can’t leave it all scattered about. You’ve got to repackage that history into something new. There needed to be a new story created from Alonzo Tucker’s tragic death. And people really did gravitate to the idea that we have the power to write new endings.

I believe that there are three R’s within this idea of reconciliation: remembrance, repair and redemption. Remembrance is understanding the harm. Repair is putting an end to the harm as it continues. And redemption is creating good from a story of harm. There’s a transformation that happens along the process, and reconciliation is less of an endpoint and more of an ongoing commitment.

NC: Is that a strategy you’ve used moving forward in other communities?

TS: Yes. I was put in contact with someone from Grants Pass who wanted to acknowledge their community’s history of being a sundown town. Sundown towns were communities that purposely excluded African Americans and other racial minorities from living in or simply passing through, with a culture of fear, of violence and intimidation.

The folks in Coos Bay were like, “Good luck in Grants Pass.” There has been a reputation. For instance, we know that there was a sign in Grants Pass that said, “Nigger, don’t let the sun come down on you here.” Yet, we actually don’t have a photo of one of those signs in circulation and most of our understanding about sundown towns comes directly from oral history.

So, for the last three years, I’ve been working with Grants Pass community members to develop a new identity for Grants Pass as a ”sunrise community,” essentially the opposite to a sundown town — a place in which everyone can feel safe, respected, and that they can call home.

I wish it was my idea to use the word sunrise, but that came from a 69-year-old white male truck driver from Grants Pass named Randolph, and I think that really illustrates the beauty of this work, that it really is just ordinary people coming together to try to do something extraordinary.

NC: Another way you’re spreading positivity is through the annual Boatnik Parade held in Grants Pass every Memorial Day weekend.

TS: We have a picture of the [Ku Klux] Klan marching in a Grants Pass parade, and we are replacing the shadow of those white hoods with our bright yellow Sunrise Project T-shirts while passing out seed packets for sunflowers. We like to say that we’re trying to create pockets of sunshine and so this parade is one of our largest encounters with the community. I wear my yellow Grants Pass T-shirt, and people ask me, “What’s your shirt about?”

NC: So the Oregon Remembrance Project has launched Sunrise Projects in Ashland, Medford and is continuing to expand in Sandy and parts of Eastern Oregon. What are other recent achievements?

TS: In June of this year, the project was also a part of Coos Bay honoring another Black man who was murdered in 1924. Timothy Pettis is now remembered with a memorial and gravestone at Sunset Memorial Park. He was a local janitor who was killed by a group of sailors, mutilated and tossed into the bay. All of us just wanted there to be recognition for that.

NC: You’re speaking with passion and enthusiasm — I definitely know this work can’t be easy. Though many in Coos Bay are happy and even inspired that they put up the historical marker to remember and repair, the initial pushback must have made it hard to keep working towards your goal.

TS: I find meaning in the work I’ve done, but it is taxing to a level that I’m not happy with most of the time. Figuring out how to balance all of that so that I can continue to do these things and have 20- and 30-year plans is something that I’m trying to reshuffle.

How do I take better care of myself while doing this? What happens when you’re so burnt out you just evaporate? It’s obviously not to the same degree, but I sometimes think about Martin Luther King’s last speech where he says, “I hope I live a long life, but I’m not so sure. I’ve been to the mountaintop, and I know you’ll get there but maybe not with me.”

“

Reconciliation is less of an endpoint and more of an ongoing commitment.”

— Taylor Stewart, founder of the Oregon Remembrance Project

NC: Moving forward, what are your biggest goals?

TS: My plan is to end the death penalty in Oregon by 2028. I learned that lynching and the death penalty are intertwined historically; at the same time lynchings in the United States started [to] decrease, state-sanctioned executions increased. Between 1910 to 1950, despite making up only 22% of the South’s population, African Americans account for 75% of all of those who were executed in that region.

And so while we did the remembrance work for Alonzo Tucker, I believe that we have to repair this fundamental question of who our society believes deserves death for a wrong committed, which continues to be disproportionately African Americans.

Illustration by Jenny Davanh / image source: Brooke Herbert

Learn more about the Black experience in Oregon:

• Oregon’s Black Pioneers