Lyllye Reynolds-Parker, a black woman who works in the university’s Office of Multicultural Affairs, has lived all 53 years of her life in the Eugene community. She says some people want to understand racism only as something they can see, such as lynchings. She says when subtle racism occurs, folks think "it just sounds like whining" because they aren’t willing to look at the situation from a minority viewpoint. "It’s not that they can’t notice it," Parker says. "They just don’t want to know."

Gainer knew little about racial profiling growing up in Newark, New Jersey, in the mid-1950s. He lived in a diverse community of Irish Catholics, Puerto Ricans, Jews, and Italians, where church played an instrumental role in his young life. But after soloing in front of his church for the first time as a 7-year-old, Gainer realized how much he could influence people’s emotions through song. When he was a junior in high school, Gainer’s youth pastor asked the church’s teenagers to read the entire Bible and know the word of God for themselves. The Bible promoted unconditional loving and giving. Gainer knew his real talent came from music, so he decided he could spread harmony just as easily through song as from the pulpit.

But Gainer chose to deliver that message in cities that lacked the racial diversity of his childhood home. He headed to Arizona for college in 1972 and organized a gospel choir on campus. The choir served as a gathering point for blacks of all different backgrounds. After eight years, Gainer was again ready to move on and left the Arizona desert for the plains of South Dakota, where he had secured an administration job at South Dakota State University in Brookings.

It quickly became clear to Gainer that South Dakota was not yet ready for his dream. While helping a college friend move back to his small hometown north of Brookings, Gainer and his friend fell asleep in the back room of the Laundromat that his friend’s family owned. Gainer awoke around 10:30 p.m. to the sound of someone tapping the butt of a gun on the window. His friend saw two police officers standing outside and went to open the door. Gainer got up and peered out from the back room. The officers insisted that Gainer come out, which he reluctantly did. The officers gave no explanation, but put him against the wall, spread his legs, and frisked him through his bathrobe. His friend went to his parents’ house to get help.

Police asked for Gainer’s identification, and one officer told him she’d have to verify it at police headquarters. In the meantime, the second officer kept him against the wall, his gun pulled and pointed at Gainer. He stood staring at the flower pattern on the Laundromat’s wall for 15 minutes, thinking about how he’d been in town less than six hours. The first officer returned with an apology. "We had a report of a man who had assaulted and raped a woman, and you fit the description," Gainer recalls the officer saying.

The next morning, Gainer went to the post office and saw the wanted poster for the suspect. The poster was about five years old, and the man’s skin color looked so dark that Gainer thought it couldn’t be mistaken for his own, which was much lighter due to his Creole ancestry. Gainer says some of the local officials apologized; other people in town said the police officers were just doing their job. Gainer, 26 at the time, let it go. He left the state 10 months later.

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