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.

“It made me want to do something about the story that, while his life may have ended in injustice, we could hopefully end his story in a place of justice,” he said.

He’s proud of what he did in Coos Bay.

“I hope that what we did in Coos Bay can be sort of the Birmingham, the Montgomery of Oregon, that this movement for historical reconciliation, this belief that we can do things with our histories of injustice can be remembered,” he said, “and that Alonzo Tucker’s story can influence Oregonians and hopefully people across the country that we can bring some semblance of justice to those who have been historically harmed.”

The Oregon Remembrance Project is now working with the Grand Ronde tribe in Oregon City “for how we can not just reimagine or renovate physical space but the stories held within them,” he said.

He’s also working to get a historical marker placed where Jacob Vanderpool once had a business.

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