REBROADCAST: Alonzo Tucker

The only documented lynching in Oregon’s history was committed in 1902 in Coos Bay. Today we listen back to a conversation from 2020 with a group of Oregonians working to create a memorial to Alonzo Tucker, the man who was killed. They say it’s a way to educate Oregonians about the state’s racist history and bring restorative justice to the community. Jay Brown is a co-founder of the Alonzo Tucker Project, and Taylor Stewart is the founder of the Oregon Remembrance Project, which educates Oregonians about the history of lynchings.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud, I’m Dave Miller. There were more than 4,400 lynchings of Black people by white people in the 75 years following Reconstruction. One of them happened in Oregon. It took place in 1902 in what’s now called Coos Bay when a Black man was brutally killed by a white mob. His name was Alonzo Tucker.

In 2020, there was an effort to put up a memorial for Tucker. It got more attention as a result of the Black Lives Matter uprising. We talked about that effort in July of 2020 with Jay Brown, the cofounder of the Alonzo Tucker project, and Taylor Stewart, the founder of the Oregon Remembrance Project, which educates Oregonians about the history of lynchings. We’re going to revisit that conversation right now, following our recent week in Coos Bay, because the plaque is now up. It’s outside the Coos History Museum. Most of the articles we’ve seen about Alonzo Tucker focused on his death, but I started by asking Jay Brown what she’s been able to uncover about his life.

Jay Brown: As a team, we have come together with our community, and we have discovered so much about Alonzo Tucker, the man. Because it is more than just his death. We have discovered he was married. He was a professional boxer. We are following a lead right now about possibly two children that he has had, we’re still waiting on the names for that. He was raised by a single mother after his father was killed. He was an outstanding man in his community. So many people loved and adored him in Monterey Bay. They have articles and articles. Just this morning, I got a message about him doing a 25 round fight against a man named Ed Johnson, which we’re trying to track down.

Alonzo Tucker himself is an incredible man. And that’s exactly what Alonzo Tucker Project does. We go and try to find out who Alonzo Tucker the man is.

Miller: Before we go further, I just want to warn listeners that we are now going to touch briefly on the lynching itself because it’s too important to gloss over. But if you don’t want to hear about this violence, you should turn your radio off for just a few minutes.

Jay Brown, can you tell us what we know about what happened to Alonzo Tucker in September of 1902?

Brown: In September 1902, he was traveling through Coos Bay, from what we have been able to verify, to go see his wife in Washington. Back then, it wasn’t uncommon for the wife to stay home with their family as a professional boxer travels. He was on his way to Washington to go see her when he happened to be passing through Coos Bay. A white woman, we’ve gotten four different names for this woman, accused him of rape, and then accused him of assault. And another article said that he had jumped out of a bush and beat her. So we’re not really sure what the exact crime he was accused of doing, but some crime he was accused of, and there was a mob of 200 that chased him down under a bridge. He hid out there for a little bit. They found him, chased him into a store. He held up in the store. And here’s what’s really interesting that’s not in a lot of information, is they attempted to hang him at that point. And instead of hanging him at that point, they said no, let’s go take him to jail.

So they took him to jail. We can’t verify this information, we’re still working on it, but from our understanding, two white women did help him escape from jail. They took him in a boat. He jumped off the boat to get to safety because he didn’t trust those two people. Another mob comes around, finds him. They shoot him. He gets up. They shoot him again. He gets up. They shoot him one more time. And he’s staying down at this point. And instead of just leaving him and letting him be there, they still took his lifeless body and hung him on the 4th Street Bridge And he sat there for four days.

Miller: Taylor Stewart, how was this lynching covered at the time in local papers?

Taylor Stewart: It was some early 20th century racism. He was a Negro brute, Negro fiend. Some newspapers played up the story of him begging for his life. And while this lynching occurred in Coos Bay, you can see through the newspaper coverage across the state that the rest of the state was complicit, both in their silence about justice, and their endorsement of the act. This lynching made newspapers across Oregon, Washington, California. Made newspapers in Ohio and New York. So just like the lynchings that occurred in the South, the same anti-Black racism that fueld that existed in Oregon.

Miller: When did you, Taylor Stewart, first hear the name Alonzo Tucker?

Stewart: It’s kind of a story. I graduated from the University of Portland in 2018, and that summer I went with UP on a civil rights immersion to the states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. And when we were in Alabama, we went to Montgomery and saw Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, or Lynching Memorial. And I was, for the first time, really confronted with this legacy of lynching. And I was struck by the reality of how had I not heard this before? How did I go 22 years in this country and no one told me about the depths of this atrocity? I was confronted with the legacy that was racial terrorism.

When you enter the museum, you’re met with these six foot high pillars that have the name of the state, the name of the county, and the names of everyone who was lynched in the county. And what really stood out to me was names I recognized. I remember there was a George Washington. There was a Joe Johnson, he’s a basketball player. And I was just struck by how different the lives of the men who I knew compared to these names that I was reading, knowing that the color of their skin and the time they were alive determined their fate. But I think what touched me the most was seeing names with the last name Stewart, knowing that I very easily could have been on that pillar.

And as I made my way through the museum, I could just feel the weight on my shoulders. And the pillars began to come off the ground. And when you make your way to the end of the museum, the pillars are hanging over you much like many of the victims of lynching. And it was an extremely powerful moment. That weight that I was carrying, I couldn’t carry it anymore. And the moment took over me. I couldn’t help but cry for the names that I read, and all the more that weren’t there. And I had the chance to see the Oregon pillar, which had the name Coos County, and Alonzo Tucker. That was the first time that I saw Alonzo Tucker’s name. And I knew, after some time, that I wanted to help bring that same encounter with history that I had back to Oregon. And that’s how I got involved in this project.

Miller: Jay Brown, what about you? When did you first learn about Alonzo Tucker and what happened to him?

Brown: In the Black community, I was born and raised in San Bernardino, California, and my uncles, my brothers, a lot of us were very big into Black history. Black education in our family is very important. So I was actually told about Alonzo Tucker when I was maybe 10 or 11.

But it didn’t connect to me until I was older and ended up moving to Oregon. And then when I moved to Oregon, everybody’s like “you know about Alonzo Tucker?”, and I was like “oh my goodness, that happened here, here?” So I heard it when I was 10, but I didn’t really understand it and research it and look into it until I physically moved to Oregon. And there was just so much little information. So I never really knew everything, only based off of what my family taught me about Alonzo, which wasn’t much.

Miller: Taylor Stewart, you’re one of the people, and Jay Brown I think you as well, who helped organize an event in February where dirt from the place where Alonzo Tucker was lynched was scooped into two jars. One for the Coos History Museum, and one for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama that you, Taylor Stewart, just mentioned. Did you scoop any of the dirt yourself?

Stewart: Yes. It was a special moment. I had been working on that soil collection for about a year and a half. I was really nervous the whole day. I was nervous when I gave my speech. I was nervous after it. But when it came time to put the soil in the jar, I could finally relax. And I put the soil in the jar. And I was struck by the powerful moment, in that when Alonso was killed, a crowd of over 300 witnessed his killing, and the newspapers reported that the sympathies of the community were with the lynchers. And it was a special thing that day in February where the sympathies of the community with the lynching. I found that to be moving, and I was so glad to be a part of it.

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