It can never be a good thing when someone attempts to express or even resolve a town's racial attitudes via a roadside billboard.
Or on Twitter.
What’s the point?
The removal of billboards containing racial messages in Harrison is an opportunity for progress.
Or in any other way that doesn't involve heartfelt conversation that invites participation by everyone in the community.
The people of modern-day Harrison, the town of more than 13,000 residents in Boone County, are burdened with a history of racial animus. In the early 1900s, white residents twice forced black people out of the community in an effort supposedly designed to reduce crime. In more recent decades, Harrison has been associated with white supremacist groups such as a branch of the Ku Klux Klan based in nearby Zinc. It's Harrison, though, that gets mentioned in national coverage of racial issues.
The town has not been able to divorce itself from those attitudes in part because of billboards.
In October 2013, someone paid to have a billboard installed reading "Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white," garnering national attention of the undesirable variety. Someone else -- nobody seems to ever take ownership of the ideas expressed on these signs -- installed a billboard below that one reading "Welcome to Harrison. Beautiful town. Beautiful people. No wrong exits. No bad neighborhoods."
The signs were on the U.S. 62/65 bypass, one of the busiest highways in Harrison. After a lease ran out, the signs were removed in 2014. A church then leased one of the signs with a message, "Where everyone is welcome."
However, another sign in the community advertises a "White pride radio" station.
In 2014, Carrie Myers' family offered two billboards for lease on her family's farm near Harrison, along U.S. 65. One of them contained the aforementioned "Beautiful town" message. One below it offered, "Diversity is a code word for white genocide."
Myers recently told a reporter she didn't care for the messages, but she feared she had few options to eliminate those messages during the five-year lease without getting into legal trouble over free speech issues.
Those signs recently came down, however, thanks to the work of two attorneys -- Catherine Golden and Kelsey Bardwell -- who provided free legal work when a member of the community task force put Myers in touch with them.
It turns out the person who leased the billboards neglected to pay a $20 permit renewal fee due every two years to the Arkansas Department of Transportation. Out of compliance, the signs were not legal and had to come down.
Now, Bardwell said she is encouraging all landowners to put a clause in their lease contracts giving them the right to approve or disapprove of any message before it goes up on their property.
"Landowners have their own free speech rights when it comes to their property," Bardwell told a reporter.
Indeed, they do. And they should protect those rights. The people of Harrison and the surrounding area are quite familiar with efforts of a few to spread hateful messages. None of those messages should find a home by accident.
All of this has gone on while Harrison's more enlightened residents have fought hard to turn away what they say are wrong impressions about the town. In 2014, the town's Community Task Force on Race Relations featured a billboard campaign urging viewers to "love your neighbor" and included a quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr: "Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
Signs or no signs, let's not pretend a lot of work isn't needed to address racial attitudes, but that's not limited to Harrison. Across the nation, news developments from time to time expose the emotions wrapped up in how our nation has, and sometimes hasn't, dealt with race. Harrison's image continues to be damaged because it is home to a few people motivated by their personal animosities and willing to lend their time, money and energy -- but usually not their names -- to exacerbating divisions.
But why set out to promote damage to one's own community? In 2017, nothing is to be gained by promoting attitudes of racial division.
For goodness sake, get outside the protective bubble of horrible ideologies. One of the best testimonies about the value of real-life experiences overcoming baseless, inculcated beliefs came from state Sen. Jim Hendren of Sulphur Springs, who grew up surrounded by white people in Benton County. He says his service in the U.S. Air Force challenged whatever misconceptions his rearing might have afforded him. "The whole experience is destructive to racism," he said.
In other words, in the military, it's hard to base one's evaluation of a person on anything other than his contributions to the mission. Anyone watching the eye-opening Ken Burns/Lynn Novick PBS documentary "The Vietnam War" should be impressed with the reality that everyone going into battle bleeds the same.
Harrison now gets an opportunity to work on its image absent those signs. It's work the good people of Harrison should continue to embrace. An honest accounting, in Harrison and so many other locations across our country, will recognize there is much work to be done, and it will never be resolved with billboard slogans. But those signs have been an albatross around the neck of the community. Their removal is a chance for progress.
Commentary on 09/24/2017