Harrison leaders insist the city’s reputation is being unfairly tarnished by a small group of people. The group tracked 14 hate groups in Arkansas last year. “Once they get a toehold people follow them in there,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, referring to the remote, wooded area. In recent years, billboards occasionally have appeared with white supremacist messages such as, “Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white,” or promoting a white pride website. The Klan uses a Harrison post office box for its mailing address, while its national director lives a short drive outside town. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, one of several Klan factions, and the white supremacist Kingdom Identity Ministries are based in the Harrison area. The largest town, Harrison, population 13,000, was the site of riots in the early 1900s that drove out most of its black population. Such groups have long flourished in the Ozark Mountain region near the Missouri border where towns are small and scattered far apart and the population is overwhelmingly white. Santino William Legan, the gunman who killed three people at a food festival in California, had compiled a “target list” that included religious groups.Īrkansas hasn’t experienced any similar mass shootings recently, but few states are more familiar with the threat from white supremacy. The suspected gunman in the El Paso attack, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius of Allen, Texas, is believed to have posted an anti-immigrant screed online shortly before opening fire in the Walmart, targeting Hispanic shoppers.
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