UU members pause for a photo with Mariah Roker, spokesperson for the of Oregon Black Pioneers history project this week. Her talk was sponsored by the Ashland Sunrise project at the Oregon Shakespear Festival’s Carpenter Hall.

Rocker’s talk was a chronology of the state’s earliest black settlers and the hardships they faced through black exclusion acts, prohibitions to owning land, expulsion, confiscation of property and often enforced suppression. Shown here are members and friends of RVUUF’s Anti-Racism Team.