Bend group plans march up Pilot Butte to mark Juneteenth
(Update: Adding video, comments from COBLA leader and historian)
BEND, Ore. (KTVZ) -- On Friday evening, the Central Oregon Black Leaders Assembly, also known as COBLA, will host a march up Pilot Butte and a ceremony at the summit to celebrate Juneteenth.
Juneteenth recognizes the freedom of slaves following Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
On Tuesday, NewsChannel 21 spoke with Riccardo Waites, the founder of COBLA. He said the Bend 4 Black Lives Matter group will host a Juneteenth celebration at Drake Park from noon to 5 p.m. Friday before inviting the community to hike up Pilot Butte for COBLA's event.
“I’ve lived here for 20 years, and I’ve always done Juneteenth with my friends at home," Waites said. "It’s nice to get a little bit of community sense, that there are two groups having Juneteenth celebrations.”
He said the group chose Pilot Butte as the site for the march because of its history.
“Bend’s such a great place to live and such a great place to be, and we don’t want Pilot Butte to have that stigma," Waites said. "They have weddings there now, and people don’t even know that was a place of hate before. We want to take that stigma away.”
According to the Deschutes County Historical Society, a Bend chapter of the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on Pilot Butte twice in 1923 -- once in July and again in September.
Kelly Cannon-Miller, executive director of the Deschutes Historical Museum, said there were about 350 KKK members in the Bend chapter that formed in 1922.
"We had this huge influx of Catholic migration to Central Oregon, so as the Klan is rising again in the '20s, they had an anti-migration platform, in addition to their long-standing stance against African Americans," Cannon-Miller said.
Acknowledging that history, event organizers say the goal of Friday’s march to the summit of the northeast Bend landmark is to “silence the ghosts of Bend’s past” and “claim it in the name of peace and equality.”
Cannon-Miller said using the butte for public expression has always been a part of Bend's history, and that it's exciting to see it continue that way.
“History doesn’t actually repeat itself, it rhymes," she said. "It feels the same, but it’s not exactly the same. We’ve had these places, in terms of physical space, that are really important and prominent, and Pilot Butte is one of them.”
Waites said COBLA will also be joining in the Black Lives Matter rally in Prineville on Saturday. He said it will be the first time COBLA attends a Prineville Black Lives Matter event.
