In honor of a friend, comrade, and guiding light – her power, love and influence will be with
us always. The following are excerpts from a eulogy written for Candice King(1984-2025).

I know it isn’t lost on anyone that someone who dedicated so much of her time to
strategically and incrementally fight for land back for black, indigenous, and people of color,
for disabled people, for the working poor in Eugene, died two years after her land, the land
her husband died on, the land they raised her kids on, the land so many of us fought
alongside her to keep, was stolen from her.

Our love for her and our rage at a system built to extinguish fires like Candice’s is palpable. I
know everyone is struggling with this and, I want to use this opportunity to remind everyone
that, despite its goal, this system will never, cannot, put out her fire because, lucky for us, she
dedicated her life to embedding that fire in each and every person she met, regardless of
politics, affinities, status… In Candice’s honor, we must continue her legacy of rejoicing in
togetherness through tragedy. We must carry that torch she heralded for all of us. We must
love and support each other in our fight to win.

Within Candice’s unwavering commitment to revolution was an unwavering commitment to
love each and everyone of us wholly, through all the ups and downs, through staunch
disagreement, through despair and pessimism, and through celebration and unwavering
optimism. She’d tell me, tell us, to fuck right off with self-blame, to trust and believe in
ourselves and our ability to carry on her work, and more than anything else, to be kind to
ourselves. She was in her heart the kindest person, AND she was the first to throw a punch
at anyone of us who needed it.

Candice was also a mother, wife, friend, comrade, housing navigator, and the best hustler of
social capital I’ve ever met. And by social capital, I mean intentional community, the only
capital we’ve got.

The loss of Candice King leaves gaping holes, not only in our lives, but in the housing justice
movement here in Eugene and more broadly. We need to hold onto and honor the
community Candice built, her revolutionary vision, the work she started, and the values she
embodied.

Candice’s revolutionary movement work was creating the future we want in the present, with
a focus on community care, connection, interdependence, and empowerment of folks.
Instead of focusing her organizing energy fighting against all the shit that is wrong in this
world, Candice’s movement and organizing work was opportunistic and focused on positive
action she could take, which often resulted in material changes in the lives of her
community. She helped house, shelter, feed, and provide safety for so many people,
thousands of people.

Candice(in the legacy of black feminists) taught us that, “Those of us who stand outside the
circle of this society’s definition of acceptable…those of use who have been forged in the
crucibles of difference…know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to
stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with
those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in
which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them
strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow
us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about
genuine change.” – Audre Lorde

May Candice’s vision and work be our compass and rally cry.

The state and the fascists are relying on us being overwhelmed, and decimated, and
depressed, and absolutely energetically spent….And we are. And also, I am ready to get up
and go. We can be both things. May we gather ourselves, gather our forces, gather our
energy, gather our love, gather our joy, gather our reasons for living, for celebrating, for
loving, and for fighting, and may we move forward with those.

– by somebody’s mom