Nearly 800 community members gathered at Churchill High School on Thursday night to find out if Eugene is really as liberal as its reputation.
Although the audience was well-behaved and attentive at the University law school’s roundtable discussion of race issues in Lane County, some felt Eugene is not living up to its reputation or the challenge of dealing with the inequities of the criminal justice system.
“I’m here because I want info,” said Jorge Navarro of Eugene. “I’m here to see what so-called ‘diversity’ really is in our town.”
The “Community Roundtable on Race and Criminal Justice in Lane County: Where Do We Go From Here?” drew a diverse group of people concerned about race issues. Vicki Morgan said Eugene has strong liberal and conservative elements, and “we’re trying to make people welcome, but we don’t always do it right.”
To start the roundtable discussion, Charles J. Ogletree Jr., the University’s 2001-02 Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics, described a series of correspondences he said “exemplify issues of race in the United States that have never been properly discussed or resolved.”
The letters were between Oregon resident Lou Hansen and Wayne Morse himself, during Morse’s time as a senator in 1963 and 1964.
Hansen’s letter asked how Morse could support legislation that would guarantee the rights of blacks if statistics showed blacks committing a substantially higher rate of crime than whites.
Morse responded with a letter saying that blacks had waited more than 100 years to be treated as equal citizens, and that although he appreciated Hansen’s comments, he could not support them.
Some time later, Morse received a letter with a flier in the mail that was popular at the time in Oregon. The flier was an advertisement endorsing a plan to relocate blacks in Mississippi to Oregon, sent by a man in Mississippi.
“These are hard-working negroes,” the man said in the letter, “and we would be glad to have them sent to your great state of Oregon.”
After his speech, Ogletree, a Harvard Law professor, posed questions to a panel of Eugene legal and community experts, using one person’s answer to formulate a question for another. The panel, according to Ogletree, “(will) make comments without fear you will disagree.”
Ogletree asked many panel members if, when they went to work, their co-workers said or overtly acted racist. Most said their co-workers did not exhibit overtly racist behaviors, but they all discussed ways in which racism did, in fact, enter their workplaces. Soon it became apparent Ogletree was illustrating how subtle racism can be.
Ron Chase of Sponsors, Inc., a group helping outgoing prisoners integrate back into their communities, said that most minorities he deals with feel their race makes integration much more difficult, and that even something as simple as getting a driver’s license is sometimes more difficult for minorities.
Charles Dalton, former head of Eugene’s NAACP, said that there is “an assumption that (African Americans) are all guilty of something.”
Marty Toohey is a freelance reporter for the Oregon Daily Emerald.