In Arkansas, white town is a black mark

For people like Mike Hallimore, leader of Kingdom Identity Ministries, another Harrison-based group on the list, the recognition is welcome. “Harrison has the image that it’s a white-racist town, and I’m glad the town has that image,” he says. “It probably prevents some of the nonwhites from settling here.”

But for many others, that distinction is an embarrassment — and something they’re hoping to change. Today, the number of Harrison residents who subscribe to hateful viewpoints seems to have dwindled, but the perception of the town as a major racist enclave persists. And in the 11 years since the task force was created, the town’s residents have yet to fully embrace it. Coverage of the group by local media and by white-supremacists outlets is often met with online comments questioning its credibility and denigrating its members.

Residents disagree on whether the town has a race problem, an image problem or both. Many say the town of today is being unfairly blamed for events of a century ago, when white mobs allegedly chased out black residents in the first decade of the 20th century. Today, Harrison has about 70 African-American residents, who make up 0.5 percent of the population (a share that’s consistent with those of nearby towns). Some say that the hate groups’ push to paint the town as a friendlier place for white nationalists than nonwhites contradicts their own experiences — and that Harrison’s reputation is worse than reality.

“People don’t want to stay here. People don’t want to come here, because we have a reputation,” says Layne Ragsdale, one of the more vocal members of the task force. “You can see our future being taken away.”

On a rainy day in late July, inside the Harrison Chamber of Commerce building, the task force is holding its new-member orientation. The event has brought out only a handful of people, but that doesn’t deter the event’s organizers — five white women — from making a 45-minute presentation about the town’s history. They are a friendly, welcoming bunch. One woman wears a T-shirt with the Martin Luther King Jr. quote that has come to help define the task force’s efforts: “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

The room grows quiet as Carolyn Cline, the elder stateswoman of the group, begins to speak. Cline, a local blueberry farmer, is one of the more seasoned voices on Harrison’s history and its current image issues. She scrolls through the history and documents on Harrison’s black residents in the early 1900s on the posters across the room.

“We are not pretending to be perfect,” Cline says. “But we know we are not the community that people portray us to be.”

The history Cline and the task force stress has been either forgotten, pushed aside or left undiscovered until recently. Jacqueline Froelich, a Fayetteville-based journalist, began to uncover the town’s complicated past 15 years ago.

In 1905, racial tension in the community hit a boiling point when as many as 10 black laborers were tied to trees and beaten. According to Froelich’s research, some of the town’s roughly 100 black residents were forced out, both in 1905 and again in 1909, turning Harrison into a “sundown town”: an all-white area where blacks weren’t allowed after sunset.

“The ethnic cleansing of Harrison … is arguably the most important event in the town’s social history,” Froelich wrote in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, “devastating the lives of those African American citizens for whom Harrison had been home, encouraging the use of violence to force social change and protect local interests, and petrifying the town’s approach to race for many years to come.”

In 2003, George Holcomb, then a reporter for the Harrison Daily Times, wrote a series on how Harrison’s history of racial strife had influenced its contemporary culture. “When I lived in a more culturally diverse town, you didn’t hear people just casually talk about n------” says Holcomb, who moved to the town in 1976 and has served as president of the task force. “But here, it was accepted. That’s how it was.”

The fallout from the articles led to swift action. In danger of having their town forever labeled racist, 13 pastors gathered and acknowledged its reputation. They decided it was time to form a group to improve race relations and respond to the town’s characterization by hate groups and local and national media as unfriendly to nonwhites.

Since then, the group has organized dozens of speaking events at colleges around the state through its I Am the Movement effort, and paid for billboards that promote civility and respect. But progress has been slow. Members say some of this is due to a lack of focused messaging and branding.

When Jeff Crockett, then a real-estate developer and an owner of several liquor stores, arrived in Harrison from Chicago in the late ’80s, he did business with a black man from the Ozarks. Crockett, charismatic and open, invited the man to join him for dinner. The man politely declined the offer, telling Crockett he didn’t visit Harrison at night.

Those conversations have stuck with Crockett, the town’s mayor since January 2011. He says the town has made strides in terms of attracting younger families, but that there’s still a struggle in persuading families of color to move to Harrison. Says Crockett, “Unfortunately, it’s there in your face all the time.”

Kevin Cheri, an African-American superintendent for nearby Buffalo National River, remembers the comments and looks he received from residents when he moved to the area decades ago. He blames the stares on people’s lack of exposure to African-Americans. When his father first visited, Cheri told the older man that he just kept smiling at people. That way, they would think he was either a nice guy or crazy, but would leave him alone.

But Cheri can’t hide his frustrations with members of the hate groups and local and national media who, he says, keep pushing the myth of Harrison as a dangerous, unwelcoming place. Cheri says the town’s reputation is unfair and that he feels safe in Harrison, which has been a good place to raise his family.

“This reputation is hurting us,” says Cheri, who recently joined the task force. “And here we’re thinking we’re nice and happy, but we don’t realize that other people see us in this other light when we’re not that way. What’s really been affecting the town right now is this reputation that continues to be exaggerated by those who are really ignorant of the truth.”

The front yard of Robb’s ranch is littered with old Fisher-Price cars and other toys for parishioners’ kids. A pink bike lies on the ground, across from a swing set. Inside are the sorts of trinkets and items often found in small churches — flyers of upcoming events, pictures of members’ children, rows of chairs lined up in front of the altar. Robb says his KKK organization has always been this way, putting family and morals first. Then, his attention turns to a phrase he’s mentioned a few times already: “white genocide.” Immigration and high birth rates among nonwhites are changing the economic and social landscape of Harrison and the country, he says.

“I think they feel guilt,” says Robb, referring to the task force. “Harrison is a nice community that’s made up of white people, and we supposedly mistreated blacks 100 years ago. They don’t feel guilty for what’s happened to white people. It’s all one-sided.”

Sixty yards down the hill stands a one-story white building with a red door, the red-and-white KKK insignia painted above it. The building serves as the official center for business matters relating to Robb and the KKK. At one end of a hall is the merchandise room from which official Klan gear, ranging from key chains to DVDs, is shipped out. At the other end is a video library of sorts, featuring videocassettes of hundreds of TV interviews, stories and pop-culture references to Robb or the Klan. There’s Robb’s interview with Geraldo Rivera in the ’90s and “Pinkeye,” a South Park episode in which one character inadvertently dresses up as a Klan member on Halloween.

“They don’t care that Beaver can’t come back home,” says Robb, referring to the fictional character in the 1950s sitcom “Leave It to Beaver” and the changing racial landscape in American culture. “They don’t care that millions of white people are forced out. They don’t care that there’s a white genocide being committed against our people.”

Sipping a coffee at the Neighbor’s Mill Bakery & Café, just outside of downtown Harrison, Hallimore, of the Kingdom Identity Ministries, offers what he believes to be a simple solution to the town’s — and the country’s — perceived race issues.

“I do believe in ethnic cleansing,” says Hallimore, whose group has an estimated 50,000 followers, a large share of whom identify with the Aryan Brotherhood, the white-supremacist prison-gang and crime syndicate. “I would cleanse the U.S. and send [the African-Americans] back to Africa, but I’d do it in a kind way by providing for them and getting them started back toward their homeland. The same for the Orientals and the Mexicans and so on.”

Despite living a few miles outside of town, Hallimore, a California native and one-time electronic-engineering major at California State Polytechnic, Pomona, has been a Harrison stalwart for almost 50 years. A former owner and manager of a Radio Shack, Hallimore became heavily involved in various Christian ministries in the state, but became disappointed by what he felt was a culture of compromised doctrine and ethics. As a child, he’d camped in the Harrison area with his family and was drawn back to Arkansas in 1966. Sixteen years later, he decided to put his full efforts into his ministry work in order to have, he says, “the most doctrinally sound, ethical ministry anywhere.” At the bakery, Hallimore, a regular, is greeted with “How are ya, Mike?” by a couple of patrons.

Hallimore agrees with Robb on doctrine, but they aren’t friends. The Kingdom Identity Ministries leader describes Robb’s Knights Party as “Ku Klux Klowns,” while Robb brushes off the notion that Hallimore’s group is comparable to the Knights Party, saying his work amounts to little more than the distribution of pamphlets or newsletters.

Still, the two men, both in their 60s, remain the most notable public figures in what has turned into a struggle with the task force to define the town. Robb says it’s the task force, not groups like his, that is the source of the town’s strife. “In all my [43] years at Harrison, I never had to ask somebody what side they were on,” he says. “And it was suddenly because of the diversity council … they’re taking sides. They’re dividing the community.”

The task force’s fight to get its message out continues. Inside the Harrison Chamber of Commerce office, Cline and the others describe the feedback they’ve received in support of their work. But they realize they’ll need a break or two if they are to change the town’s issues — whether it be race, perception, the Klan, whatever. And whether they’ll ever get there is anyone’s guess.

“We want to fix this problem here,” Ragsdale says. “I hope in 10 years we are not still talking about the same thing.”