Barging into the city jail, the Oregon coal miners declared they were going to administer “Southern justice” to the alleged rapist.

The following day, Sept. 18, 1902, they did. They hung Alonzo Tucker, already dead from multiple gunshot wounds, from a bridge in Marshfield, now Coos Bay.

It is the only documented racial lynching in Oregon history.

More than a century later, the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) wants to highlight the murder as part of its Community Remembrance Project, an effort to call attention to the thousands of “racial terror lynchings” that took place in the U.S. from the end of the Civil War through the 1940s. Most of these killings, undertaken as much to cow black communities as to punish specific individuals for possible crimes, happened in the South.

The project’s objective, EJI states, is for people across the country to confront these terrible aspects of their history so they can “begin a necessary conversation that advances truth and reconciliation.”

Taylor Stewart, a Portland State graduate student and an EJI volunteer, will lead a group to Coos Bay next week to collect soil at the sites of both Tucker’s shooting and his lynching. (A jar of the soil will be sent to EJI’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, and another jar is expected to be displayed at a forthcoming civil-rights exhibit at Coos History Museum.)

After that, local historians and social-justice activists are hoping to put up a historical sign that explains the lynching.

“We don’t have places in Oregon that remember black suffering,” Stewart says. “We’re a state that had black-exclusion laws, but we don’t do a good job remembering that.”

The violence that’s now being memorialized erupted 118 years ago after a miner’s wife, a white woman, accused a black man of raping her near South Marshfield’s Seventh Street Bridge. The accusation alone was powerful evidence: “She is highly esteemed for her pure womanhood,” one newspaper at the time wrote.

Lawmen soon arrested Tucker, a California boxer, who protested his innocence.

That evening, after the news had spread, more than a hundred gun-wielding white miners marched into downtown Marshfield, headed for the city jail. The marshal tried to spirit Tucker out of the jail, but the terrified suspect broke away and disappeared.

The Oregon Journal's report about the lynching of Alonzo Tucker was almost celebratory. (The Oregonian archive)

The next morning, the miners and others in the growing mob found their quarry and shot him. “Oh, oh, Lord, have mercy!” Tucker reportedly called out.

There would be no mercy. Someone put a rope around Tucker’s neck. The 200 or so people in the mob were determined to string him up at the site of the alleged crime, but he died en route. They hung him from the bridge anyway -- as a “public spectacle.”

“There was not a masked man in the crowd, and everything was done in broad daylight,” wrote a reporter at the scene.

The subsequent inquest determined that Alonzo Tucker came to his death “at the hands of parties unknown” -- even though it was actually well-known around town who participated in the mob action. No one was ever arrested or charged.

The Community Remembrance Project’s soil-collection ceremony, scheduled for Feb. 29 at 10 a.m., will not be at the lynching site, which is now a soccer field for Marshfield High School. (The bridge is long gone.) Instead, the event will take place where Tucker was shot, on the south end of North Front Street, across from the Sause Bros. building.

City officials and local high-school students plan to participate in the ceremony, but Stewart recognizes that some people in the community might not be open to the somber commemoration.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a controversial topic in Coos Bay but it’s a loaded topic,” Stewart says of Tucker’s long-ago lynching. “People who grow up in Coos Bay tend to stay in Coos Bay. So when we talk about the lynch mob, we’re talking about the [ancestors] of people there.”

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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