Hello.

I'm Mariah Rocker, the public programs and exhibits manager for Oregon Black Pioneers, Oregon's only historical society dedicated to preserving and presenting the experiences of people of African descent statewide.

Unfortunately, America's relationship with race can often be fueled by distrust and ignorance.

As a consequence, many communities throughout the country had implemented a form of racial segregation by excluding via some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, and violence.

Because of signs posted in these communities that directed people of color to leave town by sundown, the term sundown town is used to describe such places that practice this particular form of segregation.

Now I would like to present two films about how two small cities separated by over two thousand miles found, with the help of dedicated community members, a path to redemption and reconciliation.

This first film centers on the city of Goshen, Indiana's past as a sundown town and presents how its community acknowledged its exclusionary past and how the people of Goshen declared it has, quote, a past to stand against for the benefit of future generations.

The second film is a profile of one person's mission to shine a light on some of Oregon's darkest truths and the efforts of two Oregon communities to enlighten and inform fellow citizens about the past and how we can all move forward together.

Six votes, three Republican and three Democrat, redefined a town's past and brought to light injustices within the stories of those who had suffered and endured in the shadows of the past.

This is the story of Goshen, Indiana's legacy of being a sundown town and its efforts to recognize and reconcile this history.

Over the last century, Goshen, Indiana, like many small American towns, has faced racial and social challenges that have created a complicated past.

Goshen, like several other small settlements across the United States, was a sundown town that used racially exclusionary tactics to keep minorities out of the community.

Like other communities, substantial evidence shows Goshen's covered, forgotten, and suppressed pass that was unknown to many until famous author James Lowen included the Maple City in his book about sundown towns in America.

A sundown town is any jurisdiction, a town, a city, even a county in the United States that systematically excluded people of color, especially African Americans.

Dr. James Lowen wrote a book called A Hidden Dimension of American Racism.

As Dr. Lowen defines it, a sundown town is any jurisdiction that systematically excluded people of color, first and foremost, from living in that jurisdiction.

But what Doctor.

Lowen discovered was even being in a town or community overnight, that's the whole idea.

You need to, if you're person of color, you need to be out of town by dark and don't come back until dawn, if you come back or if you even pass through this town.

A sundown town is an area in, I think the term is unique to the United States, that has historically either by custom or tradition or by oppressive tactics have kept certain groups of people from living in that area.

I think it's mostly been associated with African Americans and in many places in the country also Jewish people, but variations of sundown towns, that idea can occur with people groups across the country.

After the Civil War, many freed slaves from the South moved towards the North, seeking a better life and more opportunity.

In many cases, they would find the North as unwelcoming as the South and sundown towns.

Places along their route, like Dawson County, North Chattanooga, Newburgh, would create exclusions for people of color.

Unfortunately, the Goshen community was overall unwelcoming and discriminatory towards minorities, especially African Americans.

In addition to the unspoken sundown town rules, some official city offices put into writing these exclusionary means from the 1930s to the late 1970s, including statements about Goshen's safety and its homage to a more white population.

I experienced quite a few things.

Personally, I had a friend worked here in Elkhart and those were my drinking days.

We'd go there and have a drink after work on Fridays and I got a chance to experience not being welcome, being in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

So I got a chance to experience that personally.

Well, you can tell they didn't want you there, you know, from just the way they were acting and talking and name calling.

They were called the N word and things like that.

That was when you're going right in off of thirty three, it used to be a tavern there years ago.

And I was at that tavern with a friend of mine and didn't feel welcome at all.

Goshen created an unwelcoming environment and included some housing deeds that prevented people of color from living within the city limits.

This ensured that people of color would have no desire to settle within Goshen, most of whom then chose to live on the outskirts, even if they worked within the city limits.

And in the early days, the demographics page was written by mayors in the community.

And then later on, it was taken over by chambers of commerce.

But in the mid 1950s, fifties, if you go to the public library, there's a sentence in there that says, Goshen is low crime because of the nature of its population, which is ninety seven point five percent native born white, two point five percent foreign born white, and there are no Negroes.

Now, I stop and think, that's a pretty racist statement.

You know, we're low crime because we're all white.

This is what they were promoting about Goshen to attract white families to move here, and white businesses, white owned businesses to move here.

Well, I never looked in Goshen for an apartment, even when I was looking for this house here, because of the atmosphere that Goshen had up until recently that, know, blacks just didn't go over there and try to get apartments.

The answer that, well, people just like to live around people who are like them, sometimes becomes an argument that is hard to defy because there is a truth to that, but segregation just perpetuates itself.

We worked in Goshen, we always did, but we just never chose to move and live there and make Goshen a residence for us.

It just wasn't, you know, it wasn't something that we desired to do.

I got several phone calls, but the one I remember the most clearly is from the son of Rollin Roth, who said that his father was mayor, Republican mayor in the early 50s in Goshen, and at the time that his father was mayor, a black family moved into Goshen, which was a big deal.

It was almost unheard of, even in the early 50s.

He said, My father got a lot of pushback.

He got a lot of protests from especially the neighbors of this new family.

He said, my dad said to these people who are complaining, it's a free country.

You know, you can live wherever you want in the United States.

I said, so so what happened to this family?

The neighbors thought of that.

They harassed them so unmercifully that within a few weeks or months, they moved out on their own.

I think my real contact with the with Goshen began when I moved here to live.

A black guy had robbed somebody and headed up toward Michigan.

And I was told that he looked exactly like me.

Of course, blacks always look like one another like that, you know.

One of the police officers, I lived next to them, his parents on on College Avenue, at once upon a time, and he was at the this roadblock, and I thought he had weighed me on.

He wanted to to to and so I stopped, and I thought he recognized who I was.

It was at night, and I began to drive off.

And there's a a a person in back of me who who knew who I was, who recognized my car at least.

And I didn't know what happened there, but she told that police officer that who I was, and so he didn't shoot me.

I was told that by someone later on.

Yeah.

He could've gotten me.

And that's always the case.

The climax of racial discrimination in Goshen arrived with a Ku Klux Klan rally in the nineteen seventies that received support from the local youth.

The Ku Klux Klan, people that wore the white robes and the white hoods and hung people and you know, hated African Americans.

A couple of times I went to Goshen in 'seventy four, nineteen seventy four, I went over there and out in front of the courthouse, you had people with hoods on it, you know, KKK walking around with signs and the signs were very offensive.

They had signs of, well, a little baby, half half black, half white, and they were saying all the appropriate words to go with that sign that you didn't want your children to look like that.

Well, actually, I took my son downtown to one of the Cannon rallies across the street because I wanted them to witness this, to know as a black individual in America, this is what you're up against.

That this ugliness is beneath the surface, and at times, it will rear its ugly head, and we need to be prepared for that.

And we need to be willing to stand up like our forefathers.

And like I said, my father did not march in vain.

Civil rights happened, and we're not going back.

The KKK was met with a shocking surprise.

Many in town organized a counter protest outnumbering the KKK's contingent.

This is considered a turning point for Goshen, with many wanting to move forward to establish a more welcoming community that celebrated diversity.

You know, the Ku Klux Klan came into town just soon before Mayor Puro left office.

And it was out of that, I mean, he created this diversity day, an alternative event for people to go to instead of going down and gawk at the Ku Klux Klan downtown, which is what they want.

So, it was out of that diversity day was born, and then the Human Relations Commission.

And it's not the last time the Ku Klux Klan came back, they came back a couple times.

When I was mayor, and so one time, we decided, the city council decided to pass an anti mask ordinance that says, yeah, first amendment protects your right to speak, but it doesn't protect anonymous speech.

And I contacted Southern Property Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, communicating with them about what was happening in my community and asking for advice.

What do I do?

So it was then that I found out about the anti mask ordinance.

They sent me a sample anti mask ordinance and suggested that as a way to move forward to sort of unmask the Klan.

They gave us some advice on how to write an ordinance that would pass constitutional muster.

So we passed it, and the night we passed it, the Ku Klux Klan sat in the back of the room in their robes and hoods and tried to intimidate people.

And the leader of the clan asked if he could speak at the microphone, and I said, well, yeah, but the rules of the council are you have to identify yourself, so you'll have to take your hood off and give us your name.

And he agreed to do that if the cameras didn't train on him, and he came up and he took his hood off and gave a name, and our police chief was sitting in the back of the room going like this.

I said, evidently that's not your real name, what is it?

So he gave a different name and so we passed that ordinance and we got sued by the ACLU in Indiana and we lost that lawsuit.

We spent fifty thousand dollars.

Back then, fifty thousand was real money.

But nobody really complained about us wasting money because the community had made a statement that, you know, we don't want this in our community.

Change came about slowly for the community of Goshen, and it would take time before its past was formally acknowledged.

And while the community started to become more welcoming towards minorities, it would take decades before people of color would feel comfortable living in Goshen.

The post office brought the postmaster in.

He was African American from South Bend.

And he's a real gregarious guy.

He couldn't buy a house in the city limits.

Between the banks and the realtors, he ended up having to buy a house right outside the city limits.

But he took it upon himself to integrate everything he could, okay?

So he joined our Kiwanis Club, and he joined the Exchange Club.

And those two clubs are supposed to be mutually exclusive, so you don't belong to two.

But which clubs are gonna tell the first African American they can't belong to your club?

Nobody did.

Okay?

He joined the country club and the Presbyterian church, and everybody was talking about, hey, we've got an African American.

Well, it's the same guy.

In twenty fourteen, Goshen started the process to formally recognize its racially exclusionary past.

Dan Shank and Leroy Berry brought the idea to me that would the city pass a resolution like this.

And and I said right away, yeah, we'll take a look at this.

And I said, but we need to build support from the ground up.

We can't just take this to the city council without a groundswell of support.

And so we had a a an initial meeting there with the CRC in mid November.

Goshen News then gave it, like, front page coverage the following weekend.

The whole community became aware of this resolution that was being proposed, and and it was still being formulated.

This process wasn't easy and was met with some backlash and resistance regarding wording and its overall purpose.

So it was kind of a quiet process at the beginning to build up this support so that the people on the city council that were not so open to it wouldn't have as much support to be against it, I guess.

You know, there was definitely conflict when this first came to the council.

Even within the council itself, there was a group, and I was on this side, saw the resolution that was presented, and I was absolutely one hundred percent behind passing it.

Others weren't necessarily against the passage, but they wanted to change some of the language.

And there were people that didn't want to apologize because it wasn't us that did it, it was somebody else that did it.

They went through some pretty heavy community and committee discussions, ended up bringing that resolution back.

It had changed that wording, so it no longer said I'm sorry, but it did mention that it was something that we never want to see happen, negotiated again.

I have never been in a community meeting where I felt so uncomfortable.

It was clear it was not a safe space, and one of the first things I did was look for where the exits were because the tension was palpable.

Truth telling precedes reconciliation.

We need to tell the truth about the past before we can have genuine reconciliation.

A resolution is a statement of opinion of the city council.

Here is how we feel.

And that's what this resolution was.

We want to acknowledge that we were this, and it should never happen again.

It's a statement of opinion.

I remember Leroy said that night.

He said, Goshen could be exemplary in adopting this kind of resolution that acknowledges what happened for most of the twentieth century in this community.

Yeah, I think overall it was a good process, but I do feel that that piece of removing the I'm sorry, I felt that weakened it a little bit, but I still think we were able to make a strong statement for the community about who we want to be.

On March seventeenth twenty fifteen, the Goshen City Council finally passed the sundown town resolution with unanimous votes, becoming one of the first former sundown communities to pass a resolution of this kind.

Johnson?

Yes.

Councilman Stitzman?

Yes.

Councilman Thomas?

Yes.

Councilman Weddle?

Yes.

Where you have people coming from different experiences and different backgrounds, they have been culturated in different ways.

You see things differently.

But I prefer to just think of it straightforwardly, as here is a a community that thinks enough of itself to come to terms with an indecent part of its past and is ready to acknowledge it because that's what human beings do.

There's always going to be the politicking of who's favored, who gets favored, who gets blamed and so on.

It's not a blame game.

Well, think maybe as important as not repeating it is just that these next generations don't grow up ignorant like we were ignorant.

It happened, it was wrong, it's a new day.

And so, that's as close to an apology as you can get to say it was wrong, you know, without using the word apology.

And so, it's a resolution.

So, resolutions can get buried on a shelf, you know, and lost, and ten years from now, nobody remembers it or whatever, and we don't want that to happen at this point.

We want to remind future generations of our past so that our kids and their kids don't grow up as ignorant as we grew up.

Keeping the conversation going, that's what It's a New Day means to me.

We're gonna keep this going.

We're always gonna do better.

And if we're making mistakes, we're gonna acknowledge it, and we're gonna fix it, and we're gonna make it better again.

Well, I think it was probably twenty eleven I was coming through Goshen, and I was speeding.

Like I said, I'm retired, but I was a truck driver, and I was speeding a little bit.

I was over the speed limit, the police car pulled in, put his lights on me, and I pulled over, and actually it was a pleasant stop.

You know, I was geared up, I don't know what's gonna happen now, this is going through my mind.

But actually the officer was, talked to me real decent, asked me why I was in such a big hurry, and he just told me to slow down and have a nice morning.

It was in the morning, And so I've seen that shift then, but it probably started happening before then.

Well, think it's important for everyone to feel that they're a part of the community and to be welcomed at the table and not just on the sidewalk.

So once again, representation matters.

I was the first African American or BIPOC individual elected to any office in Goshen.

You know, since then we've had, an Hispanic member to the council.

Hopefully we'll have more.

And I think it's important for individuals to feel that they do have a seat at the table, that even though white people have historically been in charge of a lot of positions, that that doesn't mean that the door is slammed shut anymore.

It's not open wide, and you gotta push your way through, but hopefully there's enough individuals who feel that this is my community as well.

I think one of the most beautiful things that happened in the city of Goshen was that the those who were in charge of public policy making for the city had the insight and the ability and the commitment, the integrity, if you will, to do what was right and good, and could emancipate themselves from the impediments that prevent that kind of thing from occurring and do what they thought was the right thing to do.

If Goshenites link ourselves with that kind of commitment and force, shouldn't we have a good experience?

Shouldn't we be able to prevail over our lesser selves?

I think so.

And so the hope for Goshen is like the hope for any other place in these United States.

To remember not who we are, but who we're supposed to be.

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 three hundred people gathered in this spot over one hundred and twenty 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.

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

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 luck, kid.

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 color blind.

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

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

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.

I just so happened 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 were lynched in this country made this history personal.

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.

Alonzo Tucker was twenty eight, married, and a boxer from California.

He was operating a small gym in the Coos Bay area at that time called Marshfield.

On September seventeenth, nineteen o two, he was accused of sexually assaulting a white woman.

While he was in jail, a mob in town formed at 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.

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 three hundred.

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 one percent African American like most communities across the state.

Hey, Steve.

Good to see you again.

Good to see you.

Welcome back to the museum.

The first project that we did was a soil collection ceremony.

Collected soil from the mud flats 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 hills that were dug in a little bit like, this is not a good story.

Why why would anybody tell a sad story?

Mhmm.

Well, it's a true story.

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

When it came to the work about Alonzo Tucker, it was let's do something permanent.

Let's put a historical marker.

Every time I have someone come to visit this community, I bring them here.

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 death.

And we don't talk about the burnout.

Trying to figure out how to pace myself better.

Mhmm.

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

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 Grant's pass community members who wanted to do the same thing regarding their community's history of being a sundown town.

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.

Sometimes African Americans were allowed to travel through town and they had better be out by night or more often the case, they were entirely prevented from existing in those spaces.

We know that they were one of these signs in Grant's Pass that said, don't let the sun come down on you here.

We're 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 Grant's past is that of a sunrise community.

Hey, Sylvia.

Nice to see you.

Good to see you.

Oh, how was your drive?

It was good.

How are the preparations going?

We are still in process, but going really well.

Oh, yeah.

Excited for tomorrow.

We're getting there.

We're 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, that there's so much beauty, and that we can be moving forward with that.

We can talk about that hurt and that harm, and 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.

Oh my gosh.

Is that it?

That is it.

She just finished it.

That's okay.

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

Yes.

And show them these 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?

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.

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.

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.

I thought that my biggest sacrifice would just be uncertainty.

Lately, it kinda 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 it's a little bit eerie.

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

Thank you for watching and supporting Southern Oregon PBS.

If you'd like to know more about Oregon Black Pioneers, please visit OregonBlackPioneers dot org.

And for more information about the Oregon Remembrance Project, please visit OregonRembrance dot org.

Thank you.