Portland State University will celebrate Juneteenth as an official university holiday for the first time this year, encouraging students and employees to use the time as an educational opportunity to learn more about the history of the day and of the Black experience in Oregon.
Taylor Stewart, who graduated Sunday with his master’s from the School of Social Work, has a recommendation.
Stewart, founder of the Oregon Remembrance Project, is inviting Oregonians across the state to join in a Coos Bay ceremony at 10 a.m. on June 19 to place a historical marker to commemorate the life of Alonzo Tucker, a Black man who was lynched in that town in 1902.
Taylor Stewart“What I hope Juneteenth could be as a holiday is a day of learning and reflection,” said Stewart who has worked for three years to make the Alonzo Tucker memorial happen. “While slavery ended, its legacy lives on. One of the taglines of Juneteenth is celebrating freedom. We need to celebrate the pursuit of freedom because we’re still trying to get there.”
Stewart selected Juneteenth for the dedication of the monument to Tucker, a 28-year-old boxer from California who was hunted and killed by a mob for the alleged sexual assault of a white woman. He says 300 people witnessed Tucker’s killing, he wants at least that many on hand to witness the installation of the historical marker commemorating his life and the history of lynching in America.
The event is part of a national reckoning led by the Equal Justice Initiative, which has documented close to 6,500 victims of lynching across the country. Tucker’s story is the only documented lynching in Oregon.
Three years ago, Stewart visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, an Equal Justice Initiative museum in Montgomery, Alabama and was moved to get involved.
In the first phase of memorializing the Coos Bay lynching, Stewart worked with community members to collect two jars of soil at the site where Tucker was killed. One jar was sent back to Montgomery and the second will be displayed at the Coos History Museum.
Stewart has a vision that one day he will bring his children to Coos Bay to see the historical marker and they’ll read it and say, “Oh, Alonzo Tucker. We learned about him in school.”
“We can’t change the past,” Stewart said, “but we can always change our relationship to the past.”
What’s next for Stewart? After completing his Master’s in Social Work, the 25-year-old is turning his full-time attention to the Oregon Remembrance Project, which aims to help communities in the state confront and repair instances of racial injustice. His next focus will be Grants Pass, Oregon and an educational campaign about the history of so-called sundown towns where Black people were prohibited from living and the legacy of racism that endures even after explicit laws are off the books.
“I want to work with formerly exclusionary communities on their commitment to being inclusive,” he said.
Read:
Stewart wrote about his project in an editorial published in The Oregonian.
“Our collective memory and our collective consciousness hold power,” Stewart wrote. “When we forget Alonzo Tucker, we forget how far Oregon has to come to heal its relationship with African Americans.”
Watch:
How to Reconcile a Lynching: A June 3 virtual presentation by Stewart moderated by Walida Imarisha, assistant professor and director of the Center for Black Studies at Portland State.
Attend:
The Oregon Remembrance Project will livestream the dedication of the Alonzo Tucker memorial this Saturday, June 19 at 10 a.m.