On Tuesday night, a coffin will be buried in downtown Harrison, symbolizing a century of racial stigma put to rest.
A funeral procession will travel on foot three blocks from the Lyric Theater to Fire Station No. 1, where the coffin will be interred.
The deceased? Racism and hatred, said DuShun Scarbrough, executive director of the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission.
Scarbrough said he got the idea after a recent trip to Harrison. He had already decided to host thecommission’s annual vigil at Harrison City Hall this year instead of on the steps of the state Capitol, where it has been for the past six years.
Then he thought of the funeral.
“I thought, ‘Let’s be a bit dramatic and give it some symbolism of burying the racism and hatred of years ago,’” Scarbrough said.
The burial will take place at 7 p.m., after a Unity Arts Celebration scheduled for 6 p.m. at the Lyric Theater.
After the burial, the procession will take on the air of a jazz funeral as festive music accompanies themarch back to City Hall, where a concert will feature Tessa Kate and Thunder Crow, Scarbrough said.
“I think it’s an awesome idea to come up with,” Harrison Mayor Jeff Crockett said. “It says what we’ve been trying to say all along. This is over. It is past. We’re moving on. The past is past, and we’re ready to get on with a new stage in our lives and our city and trying to present the image of who we really are here now.”
Two race riots in 1905 and 1909 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 Zinc.
Crockett said a small group of people in the Harrison area continue to tarnish the town’s reputation, and it’s time for that to stop.
Scarbrough said he got the idea for the funeral after hearing March 12 that a second billboard may go up in Harrison with a message about race.
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.
This month, a billboard was placed under that one reading, “Welcome to Harrison. Beautiful town. Beautiful people. No wrong exits. No bad neighborhoods.”
No one has taken responsibility for either billboard.
Thom Robb, national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, said his organization didn’t pay for the billboards.
“The billboard was put up by a local business owner,” Robb said via email. “A couple of them did confide in me that they were doing it, but we did not put it up.It is nice to know that there are others in this community that are willing to resist white genocide.”
Harrison’s Community Task Force on Race Relations responded to the October 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.”
On Wednesday, a Nonviolence Youth Summit will be hosted at North Arkansas College in Harrison. It is sponsored by the King commission and the Arkansas Department of Human Services. The theme is Life After Hate. A similar conference was held in Harrison in 2012.
Scarbrough said hundreds of students from Arkansas will probably attend the conference Wednesday, and many of them will be in town Tuesday for the vigil.
Throughout Harrison, the response to the upcoming vigil and conference has been positive, Crockett said.
For the funeral, a casket and headstone were donated by local businesses.
For the past week, Norm Friar has worked late into the night building a casket.
“It’s permanently sealed shut and is as empty inside as racism is,” Friar said.
The casket is 59 inches long, 18 inches wide and only 6 inches deep, he said.It’s made of eastern cedar and pine.
“I am doing it for free,” Friar said. “I’m only asking for reimbursement for materials. I would have done it all for free if they had asked, but they had volunteered to pay for materials.”
On the top of the casket are two clasped hands carved from wood - one black and one white. The hands are part of a plaque that will be removed and given to Scarbrough before the burial, Friar said.
Underneath the removable plaque is a heart of stone in the top of the casket.
“We will be burying the heart of stone face down,” Friar said.
“It’s a long time coming,” Friar said of the funeral. “The community is behind this. There’s been that awful racial stigma that has haunted our community for decades. It’s got to be buried. It’s just a couple of people and their money that keeps it running. A couple of people here are spoiling our image here for the entire state, and it’s not representative of our community.”
Eldon Roberts, owner of Hart Monument Co. in Harrison, is donating the 30-by-12-inch headstone.The inscription will read, in part: “Here lies the stigma of racism that has burdened Harrison’s past.”
Roberts said he donated the stone to try to help promote Harrison. It wasn’t a comment on race, he said. Roberts said he didn’t know if shining a light on the city’s past was a good thing to do.
“It will get attention,” he said of the stone that will be next to the fire department. “Whether it’s the right kind of attention, I don’t know. I hope it gets good attention for Harrison.”
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.Both sides were civil, based on audio and video recordings of the event.
Robb has said he wouldn’t encourage any of his followers to go to the vigil or conference scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday. He reaffirmed that in an email Thursday.
“It would serve no purpose for anyone to show up at their meeting,” Robb said in the email. “As to the funeral procession: The mayor fails to understand that he will have to live with that on election day.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 03/28/2014