Harrison Battles Foe Of Racism

Our fellow Arkansans in Harrison have had a tough bout lately.

Last October, a billboard along the city's busiest thoroughfare was plastered with the message "Anti-Racist Is A Cod Word For Anti-White."

What's The Point?

Credit goes to many of the residents and leaders in Harrison who are fighting against a recent flare up of racist messages to ensure outsiders can see the few do not speak for the many.

In March, another billboard went up with an all-white family pictured. "Welcome to Harrison," the sign read. "Beautiful town. Beautiful people. No wrong exits. No bad neighborhoods."

No one has felt strongly enough about the messages of the billboards to step forward and lay claim to them. Such anonymity is very often a good reason to dismiss the message as the ramblings of cowards, but these signs picked at the scab of past afflictions. Race riots in the early 1900s ran black residents out of the town. Only about 34 of today's 12,943 residents are black. It's not hard to find people from other places in Arkansas who have a Harrison story involving at least the perception of racial tension.

It doesn't help that a man with the title of national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan lives about 15 miles away in Zinc, but who outside the region knows where Zinc is? Unlike Las Vegas, what happens in Zinc doesn't stay in Zinc; it attaches to its bigger neighbor, Harrison.

The people of Harrison circa 2014 have responded to the revival of racist messages with a message of their own: The past isn't the present. When most of the nation was joking around with each other on April 1, about 300 people in Harrison took to the streets to literally bury racism and hatred, both of which have lived too long and will not be missed at all by those willing to let them go.

Harrison knows its past demands work in the present. Its Community Task Force on Race Relations drummed up its own "Love Your Neighbor" campaign last fall. The mayor donated billboard space for anti-racism messages. He says its a small but vocal group in the Harrison area that causes the recurring troubles.

Those folks have a right to believe, and even say, what they want, but Harrison has taken great strides by responding to their messages with a competing message of compassion and brotherhood that will, at the end of the day, win out.

The problem with what's happening in Harrison is people around the nation are judging the town based on scant knowledge that barely scratches the surface of the town's identity. Of course, from a particular point of view, that sounds a lot like the racism demonstrated by the community's past and, at least by a few, in the community's present. Neither attitude results in justice. Neither one is fair. And both stem from an inability, or an unwillingness, to view all people as the complex humans deserving of equality they are.

The people of Harrison deserve better than they're getting from some of their neighbors. But it's good to see city leaders and residents taking a stand against racism. They're doing it for their community, but in the process, they're response is important to the state as a whole and the way it's perceived beyond its borders.

We credit them for the effort.

Commentary on 04/14/2014

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