By Sabrina Halstead | PacificSource Wellness Coordinator

My husband and I arrived at Alton Baker Park in Eugene early on a Sunday morning. The parking lot was nearly empty, and the Frisbee golf site not yet buzzing with activity. With my phone in-hand, we locked up the rest of our belongings and set off toward the pond and footbridge. Realistically, we probably looked more like we were playing Pokémon Go rather than setting off on a tour to learn more about local Black history.

This was our first outing using the Strides for Social Justice app, a mobile app created in partnership with the local chapter of the NAACP, Eugene Marathon, and PeaceHealth. The only thing I really knew about the app was that it would take me on a walking tour to local sites or checkpoints that represented the community’s Black history. I had tinkered with the app a little to understand its functionality and to get to the first starting point, and let the app and the journey guide me from there.

For more context, the Strides for Social Justice mission is “to engage and educate participants on the landmarks demonstrating the history, contributions, achievements and milestones of Black residents while also promoting health and wellness.”

Strides for Social Justice offers four different tours—downtown, West Eugene, Westmoreland Park, and South Eugene. Given how rarely we make it to the downtown area anymore, my husband and I decided that would be a good place to start.

I’ll be honest—when we set out on our tour, we were on a mission: Get to the first site. Having selected the downtown tour, I went almost directly to the button that says “View Map with Walking/Running Directions.” This opened up our tour on Google Maps, which was fabulous for my terrible sense of direction. The downside? I completely overlooked that Alton Baker Park (Ferry Street Community) was our first site. We didn’t realize it until we were walking back from Eugene Depot, the last stop.

As we made our way back, we got into the Strides for Social Justice app and pulled up the information for the first stop. Here’s what we almost missed:

During the Great Migration in the mid-1940s, Oregon’s timber and shipyard industries attracted many African Americans leaving the South. The problem was that, at the time, Eugene had widespread deed restrictions against selling or renting homes to Black people. As a result, Black families and individuals set up makeshift homes—tents and shacks—to live in. The community, once known by names such as “Across the River,” “Across the Bridge,” or “Tent City,” is now known to us as Alton Baker Park.

The destruction of this community in 1949, and the displacement of the families and individuals who lived there, is heartbreaking. I didn’t know about any of this before engaging with this tour and the app, which goes into greater detail about this and the other sites. What I also found fascinating, according to Strides for Social Justice:

“Efforts are underway to honor and remember the Ferry Street Community. In February of 2021, Lane County’s Board of County Commissioners voted in favor of publicly acknowledging its role in the destruction of the county’s first Black community and agreed to contribute funds for a memorial.”

While these efforts can’t go back in time and undo the injustices that the Black community experienced and still experience, it’s at least one way that our present and future community is acknowledging this injustice. And, ultimately, this is one of the beauties of Strides for Social Justice—it’s not only raising awareness about the injustices, achievements, and contributions of the Black community, it’s taking us there and encouraging us to engage with that history.

The tour in full—with a few detours—took somewhere from an hour to hour and a half. It was a truly enjoyable way to be active, spend some time in (brisk) sunshine, and learn more about the community in which we’ve lived for many years. I won’t say much about the other site stops along the tour. Instead, I encourage you to tap into your curiosity, and explore for yourself. And if you don’t happen to live in the Eugene area, but still want to explore what Strides for Social Justice has put together, the app also offer a virtual tour. (This will require the Google Earth app.)

Like so many communities across the nation, Eugene has a lot of healing to do. It is my hope that both local residents and tourists take the opportunity to engage with Strides for Social Justice. It creates an opportunity to practice empathy and compassion while increasing your awareness. Even just engaging with the content and being informed and aware is a step toward healing and progress.


My Recommendations When Using this App

  • Read ahead, and explore the app before your tour. For each site, the app provides historical information about what the landmark is and its historical significance. It can be a little lengthy if you’re on the move, but the information is fascinating and eye-opening, especially if you’ve never dived into much of any of Eugene’s local history.
  • Give yourself plenty of time. The app doesn’t give you an approximation of how long a total tour will take, at least, not that was obvious to me. The map associated with the tours (using the Google Maps app) does give you approximate walking time between sites, but not the full tour.
  • Close other apps. I made the mistake of having multiple other apps open on my phone while using Google Maps to guide me. This made it a little cumbersome to go back and forth between the Strides for Social Justice app, Google Maps, and my camera. (And I’ll be honest, pictures may not have been necessary, but it’s fun to be a tourist in your own city when you’re exploring it from a completely different perspective!)
  • Don’t be afraid to “go squirrel.” Walking between sites, my husband and I veered off the tour path a few times to check out different things that caught our eye that we’d never stopped to really look at before. It made for a really enjoyable, unintentional practice in mindfulness and being present.