‘Turning pain into power’: Ashland vigil Saturday, May 23, to honor victims of racial violence

First in a series of vigils will address racial violence and the city’s sundown town past as part of lead-up to a 2027 sculpture unveiling

By Sydney Seymour, Ashland.news

The Ashland Sunrise Project will host a Say Their Names candlelight vigil at 7 p.m. Saturday, May 23, at Wesley Hall behind the Methodist Church. It is the first in a series of vigils leading up to the March 2027 unveiling of Ashland artist Micah Blacklight’s sculpture called “Ancestor’s Future: Crystallizing Our Call.”

The deets
Say Their Names candlelight vigil, 7 p.m. Saturday, May 23, Wesley Hall (behind the United Methodist Church at 175 N. Main St.) RSVP at [email protected]

Each 60- to 75-minute vigil will honor about 20 of 117 names and recount the stories of victims of racial violence, many of whom were victims of police brutality. A candle will be lit for each person with an image of them behind it, and a moment of silence will follow. Poems will also be read aloud. All are welcome but the event features stories of harm that may trigger or not be suitable for all ages.

Tamsin Taylor, a volunteer with the Ashland Sunrise Project, aims to create a space for people to understand and remember what happened to victims of racial violence and police brutality. “It’s particularly important for a community like Ashland, which is very white, to understand this history,” she said in a phone call to Ashland.news, “because understanding why there’s so few people of color here makes it possible to move forward.”

Taylor Stewart founded the Oregon Remembrance Project (ORP) in 2018 to memorialize Alonzo Tucker, one of Oregon’s most widely documented African American victims of lynching. Stewart, who is based in Portland, has helped communities across Oregon recognize past racist injustices, including former sundown towns, such as Oregon City and Grants Pass, via ORP’s Sunrise Project, as earlier reported by Ashland.news. Sundown towns were communities that deliberately kept African Americans and other racial minorities from living in or passing through by using fear, threats and violence.

In May 2024, Ashland artist and activist Micah Blacklight (second from left) talked about the art piece he designed for Ashland Creek Park, a permanent, public art installation inspired by the “Say Their Names” memorial. Ashland.news photo by Bob Palermini

ORP’s Sunrise Project aims to help former sundown towns develop new identities as “sunrise communities,” the opposite of a sundown town. Ashlanders are “working to try and help Ashland develop this new identity as a sunrise community, a place where everyone can feel safe, respected, like they can call that space their home,” Stewart said to Ashland.news in a phone call.

With help from Stewart, a small group of community members, including those of Ashland Together — an organization with a vision of an Ashland community that welcomes all — launched the Ashland Sunrise Project in February 2024 as a local volunteer subsidiary of the ORP to address Ashland’s history as a “sundown town.”

The theme of the upcoming vigil is “turning pain into power,” Stewart said. “We are focusing on the names of individuals whose lives were cut short, but whose stories we are committing ourselves to continue. We hope that through our memory and our actions we can give these individuals a legacy that will live on much greater than their lives themselves. We hope that through these vigils and the eventual unveiling of the sculpture, that that is not the end of the story, but simply the beginning of a new chapter.”

The artist creating the sculpture, Blacklight and Stewart will attend the vigil as speakers. Stewart said he hopes the event and future vigils will be “a real cataclysmic moment for folks in Ashland to get more involved in the racial justice movement more broadly.”

The vigil will also be a stop for ORP’s newest program: Sunshine Trips, in which the group will offer Black Portlanders a free trip to Ashland to see a sunrise town in action, Stewart said. “As the years go on,” he said, “we hope to continue to be able to offer these new opportunities for new visitors to experience the sunrise side of Ashland.”

Artist Micah Blacklight sketched his sculpture, “Ancestor’s Future: Crystallizing Our Call,” to submit a project proposal five years ago. Now, he is constructing the sculpture which is set to be unveiled March 2027 at Ashland Creek Park. A ring of stepping stones, decorated by members of the community, will also be placed in a circle around the winged figure to invite viewers to take a closer look and share the space. Photo courtesy Ashland Sunrise Project

Unveiling a new sculpture after years of vandalism

“Ancestor’s Future: Crystallizing Our Call,” an Afrofuturist sculpture of a winged figure holding an open book, will be located at Ashland Creek Park next March. The figure could represent an ancestor, a collective of ancestors or even the spirit of George Floyd, Blacklight, the creator, told Ashland.news.

The permanent, public art installation is a community-driven effort inspired by the Say Their Names Memorial at Railroad Park, he explained. In June 2020, in the aftermath of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, local artists put up hundreds of T-shirts that spanned over 100 yards worth of fence to commemorate Black Americans whose lives were taken due to racial violence. Less than two months after its installation, vandalists destroyed the memorial, removing and taking down shirts. The community came together to rebuild the memorial at least five times, as previously reported by Ashland.news.

On Nov. 23, 2020 a white man killed 19-year-old Aidan Ellison at Ashland’s Stratford Inn where they both were staying. Robert Keegan, who thought Ellison was playing his music too loud, was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 12 years in prison, according to previous Rogue Valley Times and Ashland.news coverage.

A grassroots coalition of Ashland and Rogue Valley residents soon formed the Say Their Names Collective to bring the memorial into permanence. A plaque was installed, as Ashland.new reported earlier, and the collective put out a call to artists to propose a public, permanent and community-oriented art installation that would be much harder to vandalize or make disappear.

With guidance from the city’s Public Arts and Parks commissions, as well as City Council, the community voted, and a selection panel composed of Black community members ultimately chose Blacklight’s sculpture. Dozens of Ashland community members, including those a part of Black-led organizations like BASE Southern Oregon, advocated and raised $100,000 for the metal sculpture — without aid from city funding, Blacklight said.

The top half of the sculpture, “Ancestor’s Future: Crystallizing Our Call,” semi-carved. Photo courtesy Micah Blacklight

Every name on the Say Their Names T-shirts previously adorning Railroad Park will be etched into the open book. “You can’t just wipe them away,” Blacklight said in a phone call to Ashland.news. “We want this statue to exist until such time as statues like him are no longer needed.”

Through a collective statement of intent on the book’s front page, titled, “Crystallizing Our Call,” the winged figure offers a declaration of commitment for Ashland residents and visitors to create a collective culture of inclusion, understanding, progress and change, Blacklight said.

“When we have an administration that is actively going after any Black institution or organization under the guise of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), it’s small acts of defiance, protest and legitimate community in the face of what looks like a whole lot of hatred that can make a lot of difference for people,” he continued. “Projects like this force the conversation, and they force us to pay attention to what has been here and the changes that we would like to see.”

The sculpture is an embodiment of Ashland’s will to call attention to history and enact change, Blacklight said. He quoted Stewart: “We are carving the names into the geographic memory of this city.”

Stewart continued to Ashland.news: “Crystallizing Our Call,” not only means ensuring the names etched in the book are a permanent part of the community’s collective memory but “making sure that when we think about 250 years of the United States, we think about the names that will be in that sculpture, because those names are just as important, if not more important, because they hold up a mirror to America and force us to grapple with what we see in the reflection.”

The vigil, Blacklight said, humanizes the victims of racial violence. “It’s about peopleizing,” he said. “It can be really easy to read a name or a list of names and not connect fully to the fact that every single name was a life — a human being, and they had dreams, and they had hopes, and they had families, and they are not here.”