(music) - We believe that the light pole where the mob hung Alonzo Tucker was at this intersection of Seventh and Golden.

And today there's a baseball field.

There's the junior high school, there's a what was once a soccer field that's now sort of fenced off.

And to think that there were 300 people gathered in this spot over 120 years ago.

There's pain in this space, knowing that at some place in that stretch is where Alonzo Tucker took his last breath.

But I think that we've taken some of the steps to heal the wounds that exist in our physical communities.

(music) You have to believe in the dream, even when you've never seen it before.

(music) And you have to see the dream even when others don't believe in it.

Six years ago, when I told people that I was gonna put a historical marker about lynching in Coos Bay, Oregon, the general consensus was, "Good fucking luck, kid."

(music) - Bye, baby.

- Bye.

- I love you.

- Love you.

I grew up in a conservative white evangelical environment where race was minimized and the dominant perspective was to be colorblind.

I'm mixed race, and so I have a Black father and a white mother.

(music) I had spent my whole life wanting to be a lawyer.

(music) This issue of race that I had been avoiding most of my life, I realized was centrally important to the fabric of the United States.

And so I switched to wanting to do civil rights law.

(music) I just so happen to see a flyer advertising this thing called the Civil Rights Immersion.

Because of that flyer, I went on a trip that changed my life.

We traveled to Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas.

I had always known about lynching in the abstract, but to actually read the names of people who are lynched in this country made this history personal.

(mellow music) I lived in Oregon my entire life, and I couldn't believe that I had to go all the way to Montgomery, Alabama just to learn that there had been at least one widely documented lynching here in Oregon.

I wanted to share this experience and this history with others.

With the Oregon Remembrance Project, I want to rewrite the ending to the story of the state founded with racially exclusionary laws.

And I've learned that following your dream will actually be the hardest thing you ever do.

That question, "How do you reconcile a lynching?"

The search for an answer to that question has changed my life.

(music) Alonzo Tucker was 28, married and a boxer from California, and he was operating a small gym in the Coos Bay area at that time called Marshfield.

On September 17th, 1902, he was accused of sexually assaulting a white woman.

While he was in jail, a mob in town formed with the intention of lynching him at the spot of the alleged assault.

Law enforcement attempted to divert him away from the mob, and in the midst of that transportation, they encountered the mob.

Alonzo Tucker escaped and then wound up hiding in the mudflats underneath the local docks overnight.

(music) Alonzo Tucker would wind up running down Front Street where he was shot.

The mob decided to string up Alonzo Tucker's dead body from a light pole on the old Marshfield Bridge in front of a crowd of 300.

No one would ever be held accountable for the killing of Alonzo Tucker.

Following the lynching of Alonzo Tucker, there were talks of running the other African Americans out of town.

Today, Coos Bay is less than 1% African American, like most communities across the state.

- Hey, there.

- Hey, Steve.

- Good to see you again.

- Good to see you.

- Welcome back to the Museum.

- [Taylor] The first project that we did was a soil collection ceremony, collected soil from the mudflats where Alonzo Tucker spent the night hiding, from Front Street where he was shot, and then from where the old Marshfield Bridge used to be.

- There were some heels that were dug in a little bit, like this is not a good story.

Why would anybody tell a sad story?

Well, it's a true story.

And like you said, you can't move to reconciliation until you do the remembrance.

- Yeah.

- Until you understand the truth.

- [Taylor] When it came to the work about Alonzo Tucker, it was, "Let's do something permanent.

Let's put a historical marker."

(music) - Every time I have someone come to visit this community, I bring them here.

- Aw.

- I have them read the words to remember that this is the same air that Mr. Alonzo Tucker breathed into his lungs.

And the trauma of his death is not gonna be the story of his life.

It's overwhelming.

It can, it has so much depth.

And we don't talk about the burnout.

- Trying to figure out how to pace myself better.

- Because I think a lot of times when we're doing and engaging in anti-racism work, we forget that joy is the main pillar.

(music) - [Taylor] One thing that I had learned doing this work is that we can't change the past, but we can always change our relationship to it.

It wouldn't be Coos Bay, the community where a lynching occurred.

It could become Coos Bay, the community where this lynching reconciliation work happened.

This obscure personal side project became how I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

I was put in contact with Grants Pass community members who wanted to do the same thing regarding their community's history of being a sundown town.

(music) Oregon's Black exclusionary laws didn't end in 1926.

They evolved into sundown towns.

Sundown towns were communities that purposely excluded African Americans and other racial minorities from living in or simply passing through the community through a culture of fear, violence and intimidation.

(birds chirping) Sometimes African Americans were allowed to travel through town and they'd better be out by night.

Or more often the case, they were entirely prevented from existing in those spaces.

We know that there were one of these signs in Grants Pass that said, "Nigger don't let the sun come down on you here."

We are gearing up for our participation in a community parade that occurs in May that the Ku Klux Klan had marched in.

We're trying to develop this new identity in Grants Pass is that of a sunrise community.

- Hey.

- Hey, Sylvia.

- Good to see you.

- Good to see you.

- [Sylvia] Oh, how was your drive?

- [Taylor] It was good.

How are the preparations going?

- We are still in process, but going really well.

- Hello, hello.

- You're here.

- Oh.

- Oh, yay.

- Woo, excited for tomorrow.

- [Sylvia] We're getting there.

- [Taylor] We are giving out seed packages for a flower called the Oregon Sunshine.

- Part of why we walk in the Boatnik Parade is because the KKK walked in the parade that became the Boatnik Parade, and we didn't want the story to end there.

And there are people in our community that are like, "Why would you bring up that ugly history?"

Like, "Why would you do that?"

People don't all understand that we're not just talking about the ugliness, there's so much beauty and that we can be moving forward with that.

We can talk about that hurt and that harm, and we can listen in on how it's still happening, and we can still move forward.

And this is an opportunity where we get to share that as well, so.

- Oh my gosh, is that it?

- That is it.

- [Sylvia] You just ate one.

- [Gabi] That's okay.

- I have an idea that rather than tell a community who they're not, tell 'em who they can be.

- Yes.

- And then show 'em the steps to becoming that community, allowing them to play an active role in their own journey.

- I love that.

- And so I think that, that requires folks like yourself who have lived here their whole life, to be like, "Okay, how can I think about Grants Pass as the community I want it to become?"

- You know, it's so weird to love it and see how beautiful it is, and at the same time have this like, "Why are we like this?

Why can't we change and accept people and just be decent?"

As many people of color as we have here, we need to make it safe for them.

Grants Pass Remembrance is doing that in our town, and how can we build from there?

How can we change our reputation?

(music) - [Taylor] I have three ideas about change.

The first is that I'm not in the business of changing everyone.

Success is a function of realistic expectations.

But also we lose hope when we stop believing individuals and communities can change, so I choose to remain hopeful.

And third, that just because you can't change the whole of something doesn't mean you can't change a part.

(crowd chattering) - Say "sunshine."

- Sunshine.

(crowd chattering) (drums beating) - I believe that there are three R's within this idea of reconciliation.

Remembrance, repair and redemption.

Remembrance, understanding the harm.

Repair, putting an end to the harm as it continues.

And redemption, creating good from a story of harm.

(music) They're seeds, you can plant them with your parents.

- Hi, Jesse.

- Jesse, you're one in a million.

You're one in a million.

(music) - And I think that at the end of it, it really does come back to this sense of unrelenting hope that we can be the change that we're waiting for.

(music) I thought that my biggest sacrifice would just be uncertainty.

Lately, it kind of feels like it's slowly killing me.

Through my trip to the South, saw the sacrifices that people had to make during the civil rights era.

Often the things that it takes to do the meaningful things takes a lot out of you.

This question between a meaningful life and a happy life will stay with me for a long time.

So I don't normally watch the sun go down, but it's a little bit eerie.

I don't really know how we make that feeling go away.

(music) (music)