A statewide vigil honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. will be held this year at Harrison City Hall instead of on the steps of the state Capitol, where it has taken place for the past six years.
And the next day, hundreds of students from across Arkansas will meet in Harrison for a Nonviolence Youth Summit - sponsored by the state Department of Human Services and the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission - with the theme Life After Hate.
Some people might consider Harrison an unusual choice for the events.
Two race riots a century ago forced almost all black residents from the city. Now, about 34 of Harrison’s 12,943 residents are black.
The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan - one of several Klan factions in the U.S. - is based 15 miles east of Harrison in the town of Zinc, and for years its outspoken leader’s comments about race have been associated with Harrison.
In recent months, white supremacists have made their presence known in Harrison. In October, a billboard with the message “Anti-Racist Is A Code Word For Anti-White” went up along Harrison’s busy U.S. 62/65 bypass.
On Feb. 11, a dozen white supremacists showed up at a Black History Month event at the Boone County Library in Harrison, “hijacking” the question-and-answer session, in the words of one library employee. The event attracted about 75 people, none of whom were black.
Mayor Jeff Crockett, who attended the event, said it didn’t get adversarial.
“Everybody maintained themselves very well,” he said.
Crockett said it’s a “minute” group of people who cause trouble in Harrison and continue to sully the city’s reputation.
“We have to break through that perception people have had of us for years,” he said.
BILLBOARDS AND BIAS
One of those who attended the event at the library was Thom Robb, a fundamentalist Christian minister and resident of Zinc who since 1989 has been national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Robb takes issue with Harrison’s Community Task Force on Race Relations, which was formed a decade ago to help the city improve its reputation. Robb calls it “Harrison’s task force on white genocide.”
“How diverse does the task force want Harrison to be?” asked Robb. “Who knows? The task force may be quite successful and in 10 years, we’ll look like Pine Bluff,” a city whose population is 76 percent black.
In a post on Stormfront.org, a “white pride” website, Robb said the library event was a political success, in part because the two sides were so civil to each other.
The city’s task force has responded to the billboard with a “Love Your Neighbor” campaign, and the mayor donated space on two billboards he owns in Harrison for that counter message. Task force billboards and T-shirts include the King quote: “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
In the Stormfront post, Robb said one of his supporters wore a “Love Your Neighbor” T-shirt to the library event.
DuShun Scarbrough, executive director of the state King Commission, said the group chose Harrison for the vigil and youth conference because of the healing the events can provide.
“The message of this summit is, after something that took place in Harrison a long time ago, there’s still an opportunity to love in Dr. King’s name,” said Scarbrough. “There were race riots in Harrison a hundred years ago. … You hear rumors about not going to Harrison. If we keep doing this with the same kind of thinking, how many hundreds of years will this go on?”
Scarbrough said racial bias is a learned behavior. By holding the vigil and conference in Harrison this year, people will have the opportunity to learn that they are welcome there, he said. And Harrison residents can interact with people of diverse racial backgrounds from across Arkansas, he said.
“One of the things we’re tying to do in Harrison is improve race relations,” said Scarbrough. “ It’s a great opportunity to allow everyone to participate and feel included. … It’s a blessing to have the kids be part of such conflict resolution within that city. A lot of our future depends on our kids. To participate in this endeavor speaks volumes about the direction Harrison could go in, in a positive way.”
Carolyn Cline, a member of the Harrison task force, said she was surprised to hear that the vigil will be in Harrison. The task force hadn’t proposed the idea because its members never imagined the vigil would be moved there.
“I don’t think we would have ever thought we could have gotten it,” said Cline. “And so, for [Scarbrough] to do this is just a magnificent gift.”
The candlelight vigil on April 1 will honor King, the civil-rights leader who was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
More than 1,200 people have attended the vigil when it was held in Little Rock, said Scarbrough. He has no estimate of how many will attend in Harrison.
A Unity Arts Celebration will be held at the Lyric Theater at 6 p.m. on April 1. Then participants will march two blocks to City Hall, where the vigil will take place. Scarbrough said the march will be led by Lamar Davis, deputy chief of staff in the governor’s office.
On April 2, participants will gather from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Durand Conference Center at North Arkansas College in Harrison for the youth conference. Details are available under the programs and activities tab at arkingdream.org.
The conferences are held three times a year, with the one after April’s scheduled for May 16 in Pine Bluff.
FIGHTING IMAGE
It’s not the first time the youth conference has been held in Harrison.
About 600 students attended the event in Harrison in 2012, and 400 marched from the Durand Center to City Hall. Before that conference, some families from the central Arkansas asked that Pulaski County sheriff’s deputies escort the buses of youths going to Harrison, and they did, Crockett said.
“I doubt that they will think they have to send them this time,” Crockett said of the police escort. “There was some trepidation on the part of some attendees to even come to Harrison at that point because of the perception we have to the outside world, because of the hate group that’s located 15 miles from here.”
Because the 2012 conference went so well, he thinks those fears have been alleviated.
Robb said he doesn’t plan to attend the vigil or the conference, and he’s not encouraging his followers to do so.
“They can do their little, whatever they’re going to do,” he said. “We’re not going to go there. I am not suggesting anybody go there.”
Mark Potok, senior fellow with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, said Harrison has been “struggling to shed a really terrible image,” and the vigil and conference are positive steps in that direction.
“Many cities with this same situation would not face its demons as squarely as Harrison is today, and that’s worth applauding,” said Potok. “The sad reality is that in the community of color, Harrison still has a bad reputation.”
According to an article by Guy Lancaster on the “Harrison Race Riots” in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History& Culture, “Though nowhere near as murderous as other race riots across the state, the Harrison Race Riots of 1905 and 1909 drove all but one African American from Harrison.” In 1900, Harrison had 115 black residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
A mob of about 30 people swept through Harrison’s black neighborhoods, burning homes, shooting out windows and ordering black residents to leave, Lancaster wrote of the 1905 riot.
Scarbrough said the problem is “the stigma that looms over Harrison.” The solution, he said, is working with people in the area to promote change, understanding and discussion.
“I understand that we may not be able to reach everyone, and that is fine,” Scarbrough said. “If we can reach one person, we have been successful because every person is connected to another.”
THE DIVIDE
The controversial billboard on Harrison’s bypass has been vandalized once, with “Anti-White” obscured and replaced by the word “Love,” but it has since been repaired. Nobody has taken responsibility for the billboard, and Robb said he didn’t know who paid to have it put up.
Robb blames the city’s task force for causing a “racial divide.”
“Ten years ago, we didn’t talk about our side and their side,” he said. “We were just a community. The task force didn’t heal us. They certainly didn’t unite us.
“They feel guilty for what happened over 100 years ago in Harrison. They feel so guilty about that they’re still flogging themselves 100 years later trying to get this guilt off their shoulders. I tell people I’m not responsible for the good or bad my forefathers did. I’m responsible for what I do.”
George Holcomb, a member of the task force, took issue with Robb’s comment.
“Racists are continually flogging the concept of guilt,” Holcomb said in an email. “It has nothing to do with guilt, and everything to do with self-defense.”
Cline said Robb, as national director of the Knights, became “the self-appointed spokesman for the town of Harrison on issues of race” decades ago, but he didn’t then and doesn’t now speak for the city or its residents.
The task force wasn’t formed to be “anti-Klan,” said Cline. It was formed to get the message out that the vast majority of people in Harrison are welcoming to people of other races, she said.
“What had happened in Harrison is that we managed to let the racists do the talking for us,” she said.
Cline said the task force’s purpose is to respond to an inaccurate, negative image of Harrison.
“We want to foster and promote the image and reality of Harrison as a cohesive, warm community to all people of peace and goodwill, regardless of race,” she said. “The portrayal of Harrison as a racist community undercuts the efforts of the city to attract the very resources needed to build a strong future.”
Arkansas, Pages 13 on 03/16/2014