OREGON CITY, Ore. (KOIN) — Jacob Vanderpool once had a business in Oregon City. But he is the only known person expelled from Oregon under the state’s Black exclusionary laws.
Now, Taylor Stewart, who founded the Oregon Remembrance Project in 2018, is working to memorialize the spot where Vanderpool’s business was. He wants to show others how healing can come out of understanding rather than ignoring difficult moments.
He started the Oregon Remembrance Project “to memorialize a man named Alonzo Tucker, Oregon’s most widely documented African-American victim of lynching.”
Tucker was 28 when he was lynched in Coos Bay in 1902. Stewart spent 3 years working closely with the community because “it was important to show up and to show my commitment, and be there physically in the community.”
In February 2020 Stewart coordinated a soil collection ceremony near the area where Tucker was lynched.