Memorial honors civil rights activist Bruce Klunder

County Commissioner Tim Kerns will serve as master of ceremonies and will speak when a plaque and photograph are dedicated in Klunder’s memory. Kerns will be joined by perhaps a dozen of Klunder’s BHS classmates, who will be in town to celebrate their 55th reunion.

Construction was halted for a time, but it was later completed after tensions had eased.

“He was a man who did the right thing at the right time,” Kerns said of Klunder. “He was a local boy who has been memorialized in other places, and it seemed like he should be in his home community, too.”

Kerns’ sister-in-law, Joyce Kerns of Haines, was Klunder’s classmate.

JoAnne Hardy of Unity, another of Klunder’s classmates and the organizer of next weekend’s class reunion, shares the same name as Klunder’s widow, Joanne Hardy, who also plans to attend Friday’s ceremony.

Here are his widow’s memories of the day Bruce Klunder died, as told to the Baker City Herald in 2001:

“Reluctantly, we decided civil disobedience was the only way to stop the building — as Bruce put it — placing our bodies between the workers and their work.

“On the second day of civil disobedience a team of four ran out to stop a bulldozer. Three lay down in front, and Bruce lay down behind. In a matter of seconds, Bruce became a martyr, and I became a widow with two small children — and we were no longer considered ordinary people.”

Police ruled the death an accident. The crowd became so incensed over the killing that they began to beat the bulldozer operator, but police quickly restored order.

According to “Free at Last: A History of the Civil Rights Movement and Those Who Died in the Struggle,” a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center, some black residents of Cleveland reacted to Klunder’s death with rage and were on the brink of rioting when Joanne Klunder made a plea for calm. The violence was sporadic and short-lived.

Klunder’s widow later wrote that her husband’s death shook whites and blacks out of a sense of complacency about racial injustice.

“There is now a feeling of  ‘Yes, we can do something about it — and we must,’ ” she wrote. “I pray that by the time the children grow up, their father’s death will have been redeemed, and they will be able to see the effect of what his dying did for the consciences of at least a few people — at least a few.”

Klunder is one of 40 civil rights leaders included in a Montgomery, Ala., memorial established by the Southern Poverty Law Center that includes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers.

The Civil Rights Memorial, said Penny Weaver, the SPLC’s deputy director for public affairs, is open to the public 24 hours per day and is inscribed with the names of 40 people who lost their lives in the civil rights struggle between 1954, the year of the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision, and 1968, the year of King’s assassination.

The martyrs include those who were targeted for death because of their civil rights activities, random victims of vigilantes and those who, like Klunder, in the sacrifice of their lives brought a new awareness of the civil rights struggle to people all over the world.

Klunder attended Baker High School with other people who went on to accomplish great things, including Bobb McKittrick, the five-time Super Bowl-winning offensive line coach of the San Francisco 49ers, who was also class valedictorian in 1954; and Mike Doherty, who now coaches at Oregon City and is the winningest high school basketball coach in state history.

McKittrick died in 2000. Doherty has promised to send a letter about Klunder,  his friend and roommate at Oregon State University, a letter which will be read during Friday’s ceremony.

“Bruce was a friend of everyone’s, a wonderful person,” remembers the Joanne Hardy of Unity, the class reunion organizer. “Bruce was your friend, no matter who you were.”