Railroad Park memorial was vandalized piece-by-piece over several days earlier in the week

By Morgan Rothborne, Rogue Valley Times

With weak sunshine amidst intermittent showers Sunday, the streets of Ashland were nearly empty. But inside Studio Z on Hersey Street, a small group of people worked to recreate the T-shirts that form the Say Their Names memorial following a third vandalism attack.

A pile of blank T-shirts hung over a small retaining wall dividing the entryway of the studio from the dance floor, where tables were set up with markers and paints. The room was as quiet as a library. There was no laughter, but there were some smiles. Voices were low, and concentration was high.

At a table in one corner, Micah BlackLight stood over a white T-shirt carefully drawing out the name “Matthew Ajibade” across it. Beside him were papers with names, dates and short paragraphs describing the deceased.

“Matthew Ajibade, 21, was taken into police custody, strapped to a chair, tased and died in Savannah, Georgia, on Jan. 1, 2015. The officer was convicted of cruelty to an inmate, which was one month in jail that he could serve on weekends; others involved received lesser punishments,” the sheet said.

“It’s something I’m continually surprised by even though I shouldn’t be given the history of this country and even this town. I’m still taken aback by what people are willing to spend their time defacing. I understand that for some people, this is their way of communicating their displeasure, and I can imagine that they feel like they’re not being heard,” BlackLight said.

He said he can try to empathize with these people as attempting a legitimate objection to a broader conversation. He also believed some may vandalize the memorial simply to enjoy impulsive, petty destruction. But the most recent attempt felt different.

“It’s fascinating, because this time they were like ‘maybe they won’t notice, I’m just going to disappear it a little at a time,’ This to me feels like they have legitimate beef,” he said.

The Say Their Names memorial was created in response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020 when local filmmaker Joanne Feinburg and others created T-shirts listing the names of Black lives lost to racial — and especially police — violence. The shirts were hung across a fence behind Railroad Park in Ashland.

The memorial had been vandalized twice before. First, months after it was created in 2020, and on Jan. 25, 2023, the shirts were all torn down overnight. But they were left on the ground where they could be replaced with relative ease. In the latest attack last week, shirts disappeared slowly over the course of several days.

“I don’t feel any pain, this doesn’t hurt me. For some people it legitimately disturbs them, it makes them sad. That pain, to me, it speaks to, ‘We shouldn’t have this in our town,’ But we do, so let’s deal,” BlackLight said.

“It’s an opportunity for us to come together again, to talk about having a permanent installation that you can’t quite so easily just take down. When that thing is stainless steel and bronze, good luck,” he said, referencing his planned sculpture.

In 2022, BlackLight’s sculpture concept was chosen for a piece of public art intended to create a memorial more permanent than shirts. “Ancestor’s Future: Crystalizing Our Call” will include all names included in the Say Their Names memorial.

BlackLight proposed to fund his sculpture through a fundraising effort rather than with city funds. Say Their Names Collective and local group Black Alliance and Social Empowerment are now working to raise the money.

“These are lives, these are people, every single one of these names was a person walking, living, breathing, with dreams and families and hopes. And they’re not here and we are, so we can do things like this to try to make sure it doesn’t ever happen again,” he said.

Working to recreate the list of names Sunday afternoon was a mix of 25 to 35 people from the Ashland Together group and the Say Their Names collective. Ashland Together is a new group working to help existing Ashland groups better communicate and work together, especially on anti-racist projects, said member Elizabeth Fairchild.

The collective has long been involved with the shirts and is emphatic they are the work of no one person, but the group as a whole. Members of the collective take the shirts down to wash and replace them periodically, making the latest act of vandalism easier to hide, said Cassie Preskenis, owner of Studio Z and a member of both the collective and the Ashland Public Arts Commission. Working along the fenceline hanging newly decorated shirts, she stressed she was not acting as a member of the commission.

“I feel guilty that I didn’t notice it sooner. I came down here a week ago and I saw some on the ground and some in the trash can, but there has been a lot of weather and I thought, ‘Someone’s probably just cleaning things up, they’re probably just trying to help. I was naive,” she said.

When asked how she felt, she hesitated to answer.

“I feel like this is not the answer I was supposed to say, but it feels invigorating to see the community come together again. Last time it was taken down, it needed more, we just put it back up again. This time we took a week, and we set out a date, and we planned more than we’ve done before,” she said.

“I still feel every time it comes down like it’s an opportunity for us to look at Ashland as a specific location where racism happens. The first time it came down in 2020, as I was standing here putting things back up, people kept coming by and saying, ‘Isn’t it terrible that someone came in from another town and took the shirts down?’”

Some involved with the collective believe they saw and can identify Ashland residents involved in the latest act of vandalism. But the identity of the perpetrators has not been openly discussed yet, Preskenis said.

“We don’t want to see the shirts taken down until we take them down. Until there’s a permanent installation,” she said, referring to BlackLight’s sculpture.

“Even then, I don’t know. I don’t know what that looks like, what the future is for them,” she said of the shirts.

A conversation to use the shirts to help fundraise for BlackLight’s sculpture is ongoing between members of Ashland Together and the Say Their Names Collective, she said. Fairchild suggested creating a way for people to sponsor each shirt and use the money for the sculpture.

Ilene Gregorian said it was her first time helping with the memorial, as she moved to hang a shirt.

She pointed to one hanging on the fence with “Aidan Ellison” written across it and winced to remember, “That happened here.”

“I moved to Ashland during the pandemic, so I haven’t been here that long. It’s funny, you would think Ashland is a liberal town. It looks that way on the surface,” she said.

To learn what could happen in the future for the shirts and the sculpture, or how to participate, visit the BASE website, baseoregon.org/say-their-names.

Reach reporter Morgan Rothborne at [email protected]. This story first appeared in the Rogue Valley Times.