On a sweltering afternoon in the summer of 2020, Amsa Burke climbed atop a cement picnic table and shared a truth she had long held close.
“Racism happens, even in a small Christian town,” she told dozens of demonstrators who had gathered to march for racial justice in Lynden, Wash., a predominantly white, rural community. “I have experienced it myself.”
A palpable tension hung in the air. National conversations about racism were at a boil, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder on May 25. Ms. Burke, then 17 and heading into her senior year at the public high school, saw her fellow marchers around her. Many were white classmates, others were supporters from near and far who believed this polite town needed to confront its views on race.
But Ms. Burke also saw a fired-up crowd of counterprotesters. They were angry. They were armed. She felt they exuded rage as they waved Trump signs and American flags. As she spoke, she could hear them loudly singing a hymn weighted with historical resonance: “Amazing Grace.”
It felt like a weapon. The hymn, which was written by an abolitionist and was significant in Black history and the civil rights movement, was being used in that moment to overpower the voice of a young Black woman.
The singing stopped for a while, partly at the exasperated urging of Lynda Burke, who is white, and the adoptive mother of Ms. Burke.
Then the singing began again, louder.
This confrontation exposed fault lines running beneath Lynden’s tranquil exterior, forcing the community to grapple with its differing views on race, whether prejudice could exist in its midst and how deeply the problems could be ingrained.
The emotions linger nearly five years later, stirred by memory, ongoing national tensions and a documentary titled “Lynden,” which recently brought the town’s reckoning to movie screens. For Ms. Burke, the march was pivotal, the beginning of a journey toward speaking out and embracing an identity she had long suppressed. For Lynden, it remained a challenging chapter, viewed by some as an unwelcome intrusion and by others as a necessary moment of truth that forced the town to look inward.
The heart of this small town, nestled near the Canadian border, typically beats with the steady, predictable rhythm of tradition. It is a rhythm visible in the clipped edges of the lawns that border Front Street, in the stern, handsome churches dotting the landscape with improbable frequency, in the very air, scented by berry blossoms and dairy farms. Lynden is known as a place where Dutch heritage and a staunch strain of Christian faith form a protective weave. The Dutch Reformed Church has long played a significant role in shaping the town’s social and cultural landscape, emphasizing community, tradition and a conservative theological viewpoint.
“If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much,” is a well-known saying in Lynden, usually expressed cheekily but capturing the heart of an unspoken hierarchy.
Ms. Burke, now 22, remembers that saying with chagrin. She grew up in an adoptive family that she says spoke little of race, all while feeling a subtle but constant pressure to conform and minimize her differences. Being Black in a town of approximately 16,000 residents, with a Black population estimated at less than one percent, meant developing what she called a suppressed sense of self, a deep-seated drive to “assimilate enough to the white culture that was overwhelming, just to be accepted.” She recalled wishing she were blonde and disliking the summer sun, which darkened her skin and made her feel further from the perceived need to appear white to belong.
A transformative trip studying abroad in Senegal offered her solace. Surrounded by Black people for the first time, she felt a sense of belonging, of being seen and understood, that she had not known existed. Returning to Lynden, she felt stifled. “Lynden has blackout curtains to keep the outside world from view,” Ms. Burke said in a recent interview.
As Mr. Floyd’s murder catalyzed dozens of protests throughout the country in 2020, Lynden, in her experience, remained silent. Fueled by this frustration and the awakening of her own hurts, Ms. Burke felt compelled to act. “This town needs to be woken up,” she recalled thinking.
Mindful of Lynden’s conservative nature, Ms. Burke and her fellow young organizers chose the name “March for Black Lives,” which she hoped would prove palatable. They received approval from the police department and emphasized, again and again, that their demonstration would be peaceful. Ms. Burke nonetheless received death threats and criticism. A social media post suggested trees near the center of town would be good for hangings.
On July 5, 2020, as the young protesters began their march — walking on sidewalks, careful not to tread on lawns — counterprotesters positioned themselves across the street. As the marchers chanted, speaking of vulnerability and pain, across the street the crowd jeered, waving Trump flags and American flags, chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” and “Blue Lives Matter.” Many of the counterprotesters carried long guns or what looked like semiautomatic rifles. Their trucks engaged in “coal rolling,” veering toward the protesters and billowing thick black exhaust in their faces.
Toward the end of the day, Ms. Burke rose to the picnic table. She knew the risks; that given the day’s taboo focus on race, and given palpable, seething anger from the crowd that had formed in opposition, violence could strike. But she stood tall, brushing her long braids from her face, and spoke into the bullhorn.
Racism happens, she said, even here, a place where she had so often felt “isolated and lonely and unheard.”
In the five years since that day, Lynden has navigated internal tensions, amplified by national cultural and political currents that have deepened divides across the country. Competing narratives on the demonstration are rampant, starting with what motivated protesters and those who turned out against them. When asked to respond to Ms. Burke’s characterization of Lynden’s politeness as a veneer masking an unwillingness to confront issues such as race, Mayor Scott Korthuis said her perspective stemmed from a lack of life experience. “She’s young,” he said, “and hasn’t been around.”
Gary Small, a retired pastor who helped organize the counterprotest, explained that his opposition stemmed from his belief that the national Black Lives Matter organization was Marxist and that he wanted to prevent the kind of looting and burning seen elsewhere. He conceded that the counterprotest did not go exactly as planned, criticizing the open carrying of guns and blaming far-right extremists for “co-opting” the demonstration, seeking a fight.
Steve Neff, another counterprotest organizer, also said his group was motivated by a perceived threat to the town and its way of life. News and rumors, mixed with reports of destruction in other cities, led to fears that outsiders were coming to show the town “what it’s really all about,” Mr. Neff said.
Mr. Neff, a retired beef farmer, believes the display of weaponry was necessary and that it quelled violence. He holds a strong belief that racial prejudice was not an issue in Lynden, describing it as a place where residents “don’t see color,” an often-heard refrain in the community. He, and many others, find it baffling that Ms. Burke would portray the town as prejudiced, given what he saw as the benefits of her upbringing — popularity and friends, being the class president and a cheerleader. He also noted that she was raised by a loving family in a place that encourages adoption of children from other countries, seeing it as a proper manifestation of the Christian Gospel.
Mr. Neff, Pastor Small and others maintain that Ms. Burke and the marchers based their protest on falsehoods. To them, nothing has changed in Lynden since that painful day — because nothing needed to change in the first place.
Their view reflects common opinion in Lynden and is likely that of the majority, but it’s not universally held.
“Race is always a factor in American life — everywhere,” said Jeremy Dorrough, who in 2022 left a job in Lynden at a Christian organization to run Racial Unity Now, a first-of-its-kind reconciliation group in town. Locals created the organization after the demonstration to focus on racial dialogue and education. It also extends help to local immigrants and refugees.
Mr. Dorrough said he had been shunned by some in the town’s evangelical movement for his new work, but he remains hopeful for Lynden, believing that “slow improvement” is possible, and that the protest, for all its pain, was “good for truth itself” because it exposed underlying issues.
While Mr. Dorrough and many others take pains to acknowledge the good things about Lynden, like its picturesque serenity, they also cite scars. These include historical events, such as a Ku Klux Klan rally that drew thousands to the town fairgrounds in the 1920s.
More recently, Lynden experienced other divisive moments: In 2016, Donald Trump, who was campaigning for the Republican presidential primary at the time, held one of his first rallies in the state there, rather than in Seattle, the state’s biggest city. One morning last summer, residents woke to find racist fliers on their porches and front lawns warning that diversity threatened to replace white America.
David Vis, a former Lynden school-board member who participated in the march with three of his sons and two of his grandchildren, believes the counterprotest, coupled with a vehement defiance of Covid restrictions in town, reveals a rise in anti-government sentiment and Christian Nationalism that has happened over the last five years. Since 2020, Christian Nationalism, he observed, “has not crept in, it’s jumped in,” making dialogue impossible and poisoning local discourse.
The documentary “Lynden,” became a flashpoint when it was released in 2024, since it raised the specter of the march and forced residents to confront the events of that day. The film’s co-director, Chris Baron, who grew up nearby and graduated from Lynden Christian High, said he aimed to present a nuanced cinematic portrait, but the film’s portrayal incited defensive reactions from some in Lynden. While it played to sold-out crowds in the liberal neighboring city of Bellingham, finding screening venues in Lynden proved difficult, Mr. Baron said, with no churches willing to host it.
For Ms. Burke, the path since the march led her away from Lynden. The persistent ache of being an outsider intensified during Thanksgiving in 2023. She was visiting her adoptive family when a group chat with former classmates turned ugly. They bombarded her with a racial slur and questioned her return, a stark confirmation of the persistent prejudice she had experienced. Lynden, she realized, could no longer be her home, and she resolved never to return.
Since then, Ms. Burke has also cut ties with her adoptive family. She said the decision stemmed from her belief that the family could neither adequately grasp the depth of her feelings about racism nor provide the full-throated support she needed.
For Lynda Burke, her adoptive mother, the estrangement has been a source of heartbreak and confusion. “It’s not at all my family’s choice,” she said, noting she still often walks to the park where the demonstration reached its peak and touches the picnic table there — a gesture to honor her daughter’s courage to stand up that day.
Now at Howard University, Amsa has found a community that embraces her Black and Ethiopian identity. Surrounded by peers with shared experiences, she is learning her history and culture, a process she described as joyfully healing. Sometime soon, she said, she will legally change her last name to the one she was born with — Desalegn.
“I hated being Black,” she recalled feeling as a child in Lynden. Five years after standing on the picnic table to share her truth, her perspective has shifted. Now, she said, she is building an identity rooted in pride, learning to “look myself in the mirror and say, ‘This is who I am, and I love myself.’”
The town may still grapple with its fault lines, but for one of its own, the shaking of that summer day in 2020 led to finding solid ground somewhere else.
Kurt Streeter writes about identity in America — racial, political, religious, gender and more. He is based on the West Coast.
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