PENDLETON — Despite a palpable sense of anger, a Black Lives Matter march in Pendleton remained peaceful and unimpeded on Saturday, Aug. 29.

By 3:30 p.m., about 150 people had gathered opposite of Roy Raley Park on Southwest Court Avenue with an array of American, Confederate, “Trump” and “Thin Blue Line” flags. Others carried signs indicating their support for police, while officers with the Pendleton Police Department stationed themselves at the street corners.

Counterprotesters joined in chants of “Blue lives matter,” “All lives matter” and “USA” as roughly 200 protesters against police brutality and racial injustice trickled into the park to listen to community speeches at 4 p.m.

At least one protester on the Black Lives Matter side of the street began trading barbs with counterprotesters, and organizers told them to stop engaging or leave.

“We will not acknowledge them. We will not be them. Ignore them,” Briana Spencer, one of the protest’s organizers, said at the opening of the event as attendees donning masks and carrying signs circled around the park lawn.

Spencer, a Black, Puerto Rican woman of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, worked alongside Nolan Bylenga, a Black Pendleton resident running for House District 58, and John Landreth, a white Boardman resident, to organize the protest. The three met weekly with Pendleton Police Chief Stuart Roberts to create safety plans for each stage of the protest.

The event included groups and organizers from the Walla Walla and Tri-Cities areas, and reflected its young and diverse crowd in its pre-selected speakers.

“The youth is what is going to change what is wrong,” said Max Jean Maddern, a 17-year-old nonbinary member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

Maddern also spoke to their experiences with racism in local schools, and detailed some changes they’d like to see implemented in policing, such as higher training and education requirements for officers.

Cia Cortinas Rood, a Court Appointed Special Advocate for Umatilla and Morrow counties, spoke to the “cavernous crevices” that exist in systems meant to protect and educate Black and Indigenous children, and directly addressed the counterprotesters chanting behind her from across the street.

“I genuinely ask you, when have all lives mattered in America?” she said.

At times when counterprotesters began to chant over the speeches, speakers lead the protest in opposing chants of “Black lives matter.”

Other speakers included Eugene Vi, an organizer with Tri-Cities Black Lives Matter; Amber Rodriguez, an African American Latina who was the lead organizers for the 2020 Tri-Cities Women’s March; and Carina Miller, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs who is running in Senate District 30.

Each speech varied in message, but many featured references to historical injustices and oppression faced by people of color in America and called on those in attendance to educate themselves and take action within their communities.

In addition to reading other prepared statements from Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, Bylenga ended the community speeches with some of his own remarks before the demonstrators entered the streets of Pendleton.

“Only light can drown out darkness,” he said. “Only love can drive out hate.”

The ivy backdrop of the Roy Raley amphitheater provided a natural barrier between the Black Lives Matter protest and their opponents, but tensions immediately spiked as soon as protesters took to the streets.

As protesters began to march across the 10th Street Bridge, a contingent of anti-Black Lives Matter demonstrators approached the rear of the march to confront the crowd. Police officers and the protest’s internal security separated the counterprotesters from the rest of the marchers. As the road narrowed as the protesters turned onto Northwest Bailey Avenue, some shoving broke out but was quickly broken up.

The march paused before crossing the Main Street Bridge, protesters locking arms to fill the entire width of the road.

As the Black Live Matters protest descended down Main Street, demonstrators faced an audience that alternated between gawking and hostility. Shouting matches between protesters and bystanders occasionally erupted, but the march continued to advance west back toward Roy Raley Park.

Throughout downtown Pendleton, men carrying assault rifles would sometimes appear to either stand in front of a business or track the protesters. The police escort was also accompanied by protester security mounted on motorcycles that constantly circled the route.

As the march returned to the park, many of the counterprotesters awaited them across the street in the parking lot on the north side of Dave’s Chevron.

Organizers assembled the protesters at the amphitheater and requested they all lay on their stomachs for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the same amount of time a dying George Floyd was pinned down by Minneapolis police in May.

In her closing remarks, Spencer urged the crowd to leave in groups and avoid confrontations with the counterprotesters before congratulating them on a successful day.

“What we just did was magic,” she said.

Most of the Black Lives Matter protest dispersed from there, but a group of demonstrators stayed behind to keep the protest alive in front of a counterprotest that had yet to dissipate. As the sun began to set, police remained between the two sides as they yelled and chanted across Court Avenue.

Multiple counterprotesters declined interview requests with the East Oregonian for this story.