Episode 07: Zachary Stocks
Zachary Stocks: Public Historian and Director of Oregon Black Pioneers | Interviewed by Rashad Floyd
When I first moved to Astoria, I remember the population was 10,000 people, and it was 0.01% Black. And I stopped and did a little math and thought, "Wait a minute, is that 10 people?" This is the oldest American town west of the Mississippi River. I think it's the greatest small town in America.
I am the executive director of Oregon Black Pioneers, Oregon's African American Historical Society, and I'm a National Park Service park ranger. The things I geek out over are history and the outdoors. And now, I've found an opportunity where I get to make the two actually come together. If you tell the story of Oregon and you don't include the experiences of people of African descent, then you didn't tell the story.
My name is Zachary Stocks and this is Expressions in Black.
People are surprised to learn how deep black history runs in Oregon. That's always at the forefront of my mind. If we don't share these stories, who will? And so, that's my mission, to try and figure out how can I use the resources that I have and share them with people in the communities, and get them to realize that there's a deeper story here.
One of my favorite stories lives at the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park. One thing I didn't know before I started working here is the story of York. York, of course, is the only person of African descent who was on the Lewis and Clark expedition. York's status on this trip was someone without any civil rights, without any privileges in the United States. William Clark still couldn't imagine doing this trip without him because he needed him to be successful in it. When I think about the things that he had to overcome, I feel sort of a bond. And now, I get to share that history with other people. From literally the first day, the first footsteps of non-indigenous peoples in this place we call Oregon, Black people have been a part of these communities and they contributed to the development of these places.
Fort Stevens was built at the height of the Civil War. For me, when I walk through sites like this, I feel like I'm walking shoulder-to-shoulder with all the people that have ever been there before. After disrepair in the 1880s, they decided that they were gonna start to build new batteries here. Unfortunately like many places, I don't see reflections of Black history in those places, even when I know from my own research that Black people have made meaningful contributions there. They were constructed under Moses Williams. Moses Williams was a Buffalo soldier. And from 1895 until 1898, when he retired, he was the only enlisted soldier stationed at Fort Stevens.
A lot of times, I think there's an attempt to minimize, or say that we were bystanders to history as it was happening. But the truth is you can't tell the whole story of Oregon without telling the story of Black Oregon. As an Ordnance Sergeant, Moses Williams was responsible for making sure that all these things worked, to be that last line of defense for the United States here on the Columbia River. But nonetheless, today, very few people even know his name. Today, Oregon is not a particularly diverse place. But when you go back to the early history, you find that this actually used to be a very diverse place. And the fact that subsequent laws were passed to keep people of color from having those same opportunities, I have a service to share that history with other people because when we can learn about the things that happened in the past, we have greater opportunities to call out those inequalities when we see them in the future.
For me, I think about how this city has changed so much over the past 200 years, but these views have stayed the same, right? The mountains we stand here and look at were the same ones that our ancestors stood and looked at all that time ago. It's really important to me that I get to share history with other people, both through my work with Oregon Black Pioneers, but also as a park ranger. And living where I live, I get to share the experiences of this incredible place that we get to have together. I guess I just wanna be remembered as someone who cared. Someone who took the time to learn my history. Someone who took the time to appreciate the settings around me and bring all those things together, and share them with other people.
