A plaque outside the Coos Bay History Museum memorializes the lynching of Alonzo Tucker.
Sage Van Wing / OPB
Last year, Coos Bay erected a marker commemorating Oregon’s only known lynching. It came to be after years of work by many members of the community, but the marker itself was just the start of a process of restorative justice, says Taylor Stewart. He is the founder of the Oregon Remembrance Project and is currently working on more initiatives to remember Oregon’s racist history and ways to move forward. Stewart tells us about efforts in Grants Pass and Oregon City.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: Last year, residents in Coos Bay put up a marker commemorating Oregon’s only known victim of a lynching. It was the culmination of years of work by many members of the community, but according to Taylor Stewart, the marker itself is just the start of a process of restorative justice. Stewart is the founder of the Oregon Remembrance Project. He joins us once again to talk about his broader efforts throughout Oregon. Welcome back to the show.
Taylor Stewart: Hi. It’s a pleasure to be here this afternoon. Thank you for having me on.
Miller: Thanks for joining us once again. In the last few years, you’ve been expanding your work and doing it in other Oregon cities, not just in Coos Bay. What’s the idea behind the Sunrise Project?
Stewart: The Sunrise Project is located in Grants Pass, Oregon, looking to reconcile Grants Pass’ history as a sundown town. Sundown towns were communities that purposefully excluded African Americans and other racial minorities from living in or simply passing through the community through a culture of fear, violence and intimidation. With the Sunrise Project – we have that title because we hope that sunrise can be the opposite to sundown and signal the start of a new day – we’re looking to rewrite the ending to the story of a sundown town by creating the ending in which a formerly-exclusionary community can become one of the communities most intentionally committed to inclusivity because of its history.
Within this idea of reconciliation or three are words: remembrance, repair and redemption. And then in order for us to get to that last r word of redemption, we need to have the courage it takes to undertake the first two. So we’re starting this remembrance work in the community of Grants Pass about what sound downtowns looked like, both nationally and locally, how that exclusion evolved into the present and then the next steps a community can take to create a more inclusive environment. What’s exciting is that we’re hoping to culminate much of this work with the installation of a historical marker, one side talking about racial exclusion and Oregon and Grant Pass on and the other side function is the community’s stated commitment to inclusivity or their sunrise commitment. What is exciting is that this will be the first-ever historical marker about sundown towns in the United States; and, the goal is to expand the Sunrise Project to other communities in Oregon and create a blueprint for communities across the country.
Miller: How are you doing that first part? What are you actively doing for the remembrance?
Stewart: Right now, we are collecting a lot of history on sundown towns, both nationally and locally. Sundown towns were such a phenomenon that existed widely across the United States. Sundown towns didn’t actually exist in the traditional South. They were more of a North and West phenomenon. It’s likely that most places in Oregon, outside the urban centers, were once sundown towns. We have been digging into some of the national research to paint this wider picture of how Oregon’s story fits into this larger narrative. But then we’re starting to collect some history through newspapers, interviews about what sundown towns look like specifically in Oregon. One aspect of this remembrance work is the oral history collection that we’re doing to collect the first hand memory of those who remember their communities as a sundown town by collecting history from white individuals who remember their community with racially exclusive policies, as well as stories from older African Americans from the Portland area who remember navigating sundown towns in Oregon. We’re looking to collect the history regarding the injustice, the effect, but also the resiliency associated with the sundown town history in Oregon.
Miller: How are you going to capture and promote the opposite of that, not just injustice, but bigotry, but also inclusion and unity? How do you go about that?
Stewart: We try to do it where the individual can model for the communal and the communal can model for the individual. We’re hoping to install these sort of three r words of harm rectification into a variety of community settings. For instance, last time I was down in Grants Pass, someone had talked to me about, oh, how can this work fit into education? They gave the example of their biracial granddaughter being called the N-word at school and how could these three r’s be applied to that situation? My response was that, we start with that first our word of remembrance. We have the perpetrator of the injustice to understand and to come to a clear understanding of the harm that was caused, the power of those kinds of words. But then we hope to set them up to engage in an element of repair, interjecting when their peers use that same type of language so that we can hopefully and actually create a good in the world because of that harm that was originally cause. And that the perpetrator of that original injustice can then sort of be an intervener for futures to come. And that is how we find that idea of redemptive justice for that situation, not that the perpetrator and the affected become friends at the end of this, but that we’re able to sort of rewrite the ending to the story of the harm. We’re trying to apply these r words into community settings, in education, business, into face circles. All about how we can build more just relationships with one another. Not that we will prevent harm from ever arising, but how can we be more intentional about rectifying harm when it does come up?
Miller: Taylor Stewart, thanks very much for joining us today.
Steward: Yes, my pleasure.
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