A dozen people gathered before dawn Thursday at Centennial Park.
Armed with buckets and shovels, they squelched down into the wet sand while the tide was still out.
They stopped underneath a concrete wall that marks the original Coronado ferry landing.
“This is where he took his last steps,” said the community remembrance coalition’s co-chair, Fern Nelson.
In 1946, Black Coronado resident Alton Collier boarded the ferry and never reached the other side.
White-run newspapers claimed Collier, who couldn’t swim, leaped overboard.
His death certificate lists the cause as suicide.
It took almost 80 years for a local historian to dig up accounts and evidence that painted an entirely different picture — that Collier was attacked by Navy sailors and left to drown.
Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a national civil rights organization, named Collier California’s third-known racial terror lynching victim earlier this year.
The coalition was now tasked with collecting sand to send to EJI’s lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, where Collier’s name will join thousands of others.
San Diego State University anthropology professor Seth Mallios presented special trowels for the first ceremonial scoops.
He said they were used at sites in Jamestown, Virginia, where the first enslaved Africans landed in 1619, and on the land of Nathan Harrison, San Diego County’s first African American homesteader.
The trowels were a fitting representation, Mallios said, of the through line from slavery to segregation to Alton Collier’s fate.
“This is for you, Alton Collier,” Nelson said as she approached the bucket. “We remember you. We honor you. We're sorry about everything that happened to you.”
As a Coronado resident and water polo player, Asante Sefa-Boakye was struck by Collier’s story.
“Realizing that drowning is, in fact, a form of lynching — it was something that really shocked me in the worst way,” he said, before cutting the trowel into the sand. “I think it's important that we take this step to remember. We do our part. We break the ground. And we continue to say his name.”
The ferry passed by as the coalition worked.
They swapped the trowels for a large shovel. Water began streaming off it as they dug deeper.
“Alton walked here and didn't walk back,” Nelson said as she patted sand onto the top of the bucket. “He lost his life because of hatred, evil, which still exists today. We just honor you, Alton. We're sad you're not here and that you didn't get to finish your life.”
The sand will be dried over the next two weeks.
A public ceremony will be held on Saturday, Sept. 7 at 10 a.m. at Coronado’s Centennial Park.
There, the sand will be placed into a jar for shipment, so many more can say Alton Collier’s name.
