HARRISON — It was an elderly, black woman behind the counter at McDonald’s who so upset Arno Michaelis one day in the late 1980s.
She had smiled at him.
“She had this beautiful smile that you couldn’t help but notice when you walked in that door,” said Michaelis, who was then a violent, neo-Nazi white supremacist. “This smile was genuine. It was bright. It was unconditional. …
“I’m trying to hate black people, and here’s this black woman smiling at me. I can’t really hate her when she’s smiling like that.”
On a subsequent visit to the restaurant, she asked about the swastika tattoo Michaelis had on the back of his middle finger.
He mumbled, “It’s nothing.”
“She looked at me and said, ‘I know that’s not who you are. You’re a better person than that,’” remembered Michaelis.
That comment stayed with him, Michaelis told a crowd of about 500 at the Durand Conference Center on Wednesday.
“I spent seven years trying to forget that that ever happened, but I couldn’t,” he said. “Because when she said ‘I know you’re a better person than that,’ she planted a seed in my heart that remained there and rooted and blossomed despite my best efforts to dig it out and suffocate it. That seed grew until there was no longer room in my heart for the kind of hatred it takes to hurt people.”
Michaelis was one of two authors who spoke Wednesday at a Nonviolence Youth Summit that attracted hundreds of junior and senior high school students from across Arkansas. The one-day conference was sponsored by the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, with the assistance of the Arkansas Department of Human Services.
Michaelis, who grew up in Wisconsin, is the author of the book My Life After Hate and has a monthly online magazine with a similar name: lifeafterhate.org.
“It was in part because of her kindness that I made the right decision in 1994 to change my life and leave hate groups,” Michaelis told the crowd. “An act of kindness on your part, especially to someone who doesn’t seem to deserve it, could change the course of their life.”
Daryl Davis, who is black, is author of the book Klan-Destine Relationships.He said he has become friends with some members of the Ku Klux Klan who left the organization after getting to know him. Davis said one of his closest friends is Roger Kelly, a former Klan leader in Maryland.
During his speech, Davis displayed robes and hoods given to him by several former Klan member who had left the group and changedtheir minds about race relations.
“If you have an adversary, somebody with an opposing point of view, give that person a platform,” Davis told the crowd. “If you don’t accept their point of view, you challenge them politely and intelligently, not violently.”
Then, he said, they will usually reciprocate and listen to the other side.
“If you create a spark in somebody that goes against what they have believed from Day One,” they may start to think about it and decide they were wrong, said Davis, a Chicago native who now lives in Maryland.
Davis told the crowd that he met Tuesday with Thom Robb of Zinc, who is national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, one of several Klan groups in the United States. They had lunch at the restaurant in the Hotel Seville, across the street from the Durand Center.
“Some people talk the talk; he walks the walk,” Davis said of Robb after they met Tuesday. “He believes in what he stands for, and he goes out and proves it. He says, ‘I don’t hate black people, I just love my own race.’”
As evidence, Davis noted that Robb agreed to have lunch with him.
Davis said he disagrees with much of what Robb says, “but we agree to sit down and discuss it.”
Asa Hutchinson, a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor, recounted his experience prosecuting a white supremacist group called the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord when he was U.S. attorney for the Western District of Arkansas in the 1980s.
“They were a violent terrorist group, neo-Nazi, white supremacists,” Hutchinson told the crowd.
Hutchinson said he went with FBI agents to Mountain Home to negotiate with the group’s leader, James Ellison.
After he boarded the airplane, an agent threw Hutchinson a bulletproof vest and said, “You mightneed this.”
“I thought, ‘This is not why I went to law school,’” remembered Hutchinson.
After three days of negotiations, Ellison surrendered without a shot being fired, said Hutchinson.
“I tell this story because it’s important to remember that the threat of terrorism in the United States is not always coming from radical jihads,” he said.
Hutchinson said he believes in teaching racial tolerance as Martin Luther King Jr. had taught it.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” said Hutchinson, quoting King from his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”
“I believe it is important that every generation learnsfrom history or we will repeat the mistakes of history,” said Hutchinson.
The commission has had Nonviolence Youth Summits in West Memphis, Pine Bluff, Fayetteville, Little Rock, Hope, Forrest City, El Dorado and Helena-West Helena.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 04/03/2014