‘Lynden’ film chronicles racial divides in Whatcom County town, playing in Bellingham soon

The subtitle of Chris Baron and Bryan Tucker’s latest film is “a portrait of a small town, divided.” But a drive through the documentary’s windmill-lined namesake town doesn’t give that impression.

“Outside issues don’t really come into Lynden,” Amsa Burke, the film’s primary subject, said in a phone call with the Bellingham Herald. “That’s not the structure of the town. We like to keep appearances and have it be a — it’s a happy town. It’s kind of like nothing can taint it.”

Burke, who spent her early years in Ethiopia before being adopted and raised in Lynden, led a rally for racial justice in the town in July of 2020 dubbed the March for Black Lives. It caught the attention of filmmakers Baron and Tucker.

“I went to Lynden Christian, so I was familiar with the town,” Baron said in a phone interview. “A lot of my family lives there still. I was raised with those sort of conservative values. But I lived in Bellingham, so I had this dual citizenship almost.”

When he heard about Burke coordinating the March for Black Lives, Baron thought it would make for an interesting documentary subject. But he couldn’t make it to Lynden at the time, so he called Tucker, his friend, who was living in Bellingham.

“I said, ‘Bryan, I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but I feel like something’s gonna happen, and it’d be interesting if we capture it,’” recalls Baron.

Tucker didn’t need much convincing. He’d already mentioned the possibility of directing a film about Lynden to Baron.

“He was like, ‘I heard about a small town in Washington that has a sort of unusual amount of transracial adoptees,’” Baron said. “I was like, ‘Oh yeah. I know that town.’” Tucker acknowledged that the claim was based on anecdotal observations.

So Tucker showed up at the march with his camera, not knowing what to expect.

“I just went there, not knowing anybody or anything,” Tucker said. “I was filming with the marchers. It was a super long march. It was hot. And there was a halfway point where people stopped. That’s where I saw Amsa [Burke] speak for the first time.”

Burke, who was about to enter her senior year in high school, said in an interview that she got the idea to start the march after attending a similar event in Everett.

“I realized that outside of Lynden, I kept on hearing this conversation about race. And it was loud. And it was present,” Burke said. “When I entered back into Lynden city limits, it was just muffled, nobody talked about it, it was outside of Lynden. I realized that, oh, I’ve had these experiences, too, and they are real, and I just haven’t had a chance to voice them. It doesn’t mean that they didn’t affect me.”

March for Black Lives and a conservative protest

After her experience in Everett, Burke realized that Lynden needed to have conversations about race. Today, 0.9% of Lynden residents are Black, compared to 1.4% of Whatcom County residents, and 4.7% of Washington state as a whole, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau Data .

Burke enlisted the help of some friends, along with community members who had already been protesting, and the group was able to finalize plans for the march . But when the day came, they were met with pushback.

“It was just so incredibly tense,” Tucker said of what he observed. “Like there was a dividing line where police were there. On one side, there’s all these people yelling and shouting, ‘USA, USA.’ They were singing ‘God Bless America,’ ‘Amazing Grace.’”

Burke said she wasn’t surprised there was a negative reception, but she thought it would be more tame.

“We specifically did not call it a Black Lives Matter march. We called it ‘March for Black Lives’ because we knew that we needed to be able to get people in Lynden to listen to us, we needed to kind of dilute the severity of some of the words — like not to use the term racist not to use the term Black Lives Matter because that’s an organization that they might not be OK with seeing on posters and stuff like that,” Burke said.

Burke’s speech that day caught Tucker’s attention, and he decided to use her story to frame the film. Over the days that followed, both directors met with Burke to get the details of her role in the march and her life beyond it.

“I just thought she had tremendous courage and grace under pressure,” Tucker said. “So at the end of the march, I went up to her and introduced myself and said I wanted to interview her.”

Capturing both sides of the protest

Centering the film on Burke’s experience wasn’t always Tucker and Baron’s plan. But the directors met with Burke for their initial interview, they ended up spending two hours discussing everything from Burke’s early years to her adoption and upbringing in northwest Washington. In the end, they decided that was the best lens through which to tell the story.

The film doesn’t only tell Burke’s perspective though. Both Tucker and Baron said they wanted to capture how the entire Lynden community felt about the day’s events, including extensive interviews with vocal conservative Wylin Tjoelker. Tjoelker, who was featured in a Cascade PBS story later that year for making films at rallies attempting to contest the results of the 2020 election, stood out from the crowd of counter-protesters because he brought a camera to document the day’s events.

“He caught our attention, just because he was dressed up I think in all camo and he had his own camera. He was sort of doing what we were doing, documenting it for his own audience,” Baron said.

But despite their efforts, Tucker said the duo was met with some skepticism from members of the Lynden community.

“I know people who have been supportive of us filming and telling the story all along who are now changing their tune since we dropped the trailer,” Tucker said. “They’re now very concerned about the film and saying things like how the film is going to be … divisive to the town.”

The reception hasn’t been all negative, though. The film’s July 31 and Aug. 31 screenings at the Pickford Film Center have already sold out. They’ve added another July 31 showing earlier in the day, which still has seats available. Additional showings between Sep. 9 and 12 are in the works as well, according to Tucker, and tickets will be available soon.

While its been four years since the events captured in the film, no one involved is surprised that audiences still find it relevant. In a way, its an even more important story to tell now than it was in 2020, says Burke.

“I was thinking about it the other day, and I’m glad that it’s four years later,” Burke said. “Because I think that sometimes there can be such high emotions and consistency in hearing about it on the news, and it can sometimes seem a little trendy. Then these these movements or trends are no events die down and people go back into the motions of their lives.”

Whatcom County’s KKK history

While much of Lynden is reluctant to talk about race now, that wasn’t always the case. The town, along with Whatcom county as a whole, has a history of Ku Klux Klan involvement.

According to the University of Washington’s Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project , a 1925 KKK rally saw between 12,000 and 25,000 attendees. For context, Lynden’s population at the time was roughly 1,500, according to the Washington State Office of Financial Management . At the time, the Lynden Tribune called it the “largest crowd that has ever assembled in the Lynden district.”

Whatcom and Skagit counties served as the center of Washington state’s KKK presence in the 1920s and ‘30s, according to UW, with their presence being especially strong in Bellingham and Mount Vernon. A 1929 statewide Klan convention was held in Bellingham, including an address by the city’s mayor at the time, and a parade through downtown.

While the Klan’s presence in Whatcom County waned over the following decades, its influence persisted, including a 1934 attempt to oust the president of Western Washington University (then Western Washington State College). Two decades later, a cross was burned in Sehome Hill, according to WWU’s Bellingham Racial History Timeline , and in 1994, Lynden saw a cross burning outside a camp of migrant workers.

Seattle & Lynden screenings of ‘Lynden’

In addition to the showings at the Pickford, “Lynden” will also be shown:

• Seattle on July 22 at the SIFF Cinema Uptown
• A limited-seating free screening will be held at Lynden’s Jansen Art Center on Aug. 3 .