Sundown to Sunrise

THIS FALL University of Portland hosted a screening and discussion of an OPB documentary featuring the work of alum Taylor Stewart ’18. “Road to Sunrise: A Journey to Reconcile Oregon’s Racist History” follows the development of Taylor’s young career in racial justice work. Inspired by a University of Portland Moreau Center civil rights trip, he established a nonprofit called The Oregon Remembrance Project and went on to pursue a memorial project for a man named Alonzo Tucker in Coos Bay (featured in Portland magazine’s Fall 2020 issue). Taylor believes that a better future begins by telling the truth about the past.

“One thing I’ve learned doing this work,” he said, “is that we can’t change the past, but we can always change our relationship to it.”

More recently he has been working in Grants Pass, OR, on what he’s calling a “Sunrise Project.” With it, he aims to flip the script in communities that had been known in the past as “sundown towns.” Taylor defines a sundown town as a community that “purposefully excluded African Americans and other ethnic minorities from living or simply passing through the community.” This exclusion may have been enacted through a culture of intimidation or violence, and sometimes there was an actual sign stating that these minority groups should not “let the sun come down” on them. Members of the Sunrise Project marched in a parade and handed out seeds of Oregon Sunshine flowers. The group chose to march in the parade specifically because the KKK had marched in it in the past. They want to communicate that the story of their community has a more hopeful and inclusive culture today. “I didn’t want the story to end there,” one Sunrise Project participant said.

The film screening was co-sponsored by Portland magazine, Diversity and Inclusion Programs, and the Moreau Center for Service and Justice. Thank you, Taylor, for your partnership and your important work in our community.