A new billboard in Harrison that advertises the web-based "whiteprideradio.com" has been rented by the Knights Party of Zinc, formerly the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and comes just a year after another billboard carrying a racist message was taken down.
"Yes, that's us," Thom Robb, national director of the Knights Party, told the Harrison Daily Times (http://bit.ly/1x3MWeS ), saying that the group is leasing the billboard for a year. Robb was national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which The Southern Poverty Law Center said he has renamed the Knights Party.
The billboard shows a young girl holding a dog and reads "It's NOT Racist to (love) Your People," with an image of a heart in place of the word love. It includes a website address that redirects automatically to a website called KKKRadio, whose program listing includes "This is The Klan," "The White Side," and "White Women's Perspective."
Robb said that he has been working on the web-based radio station for more than a year and wanted to advertise it. Race riots a century ago chased all but one black person from Harrison, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, and in the 1980s the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan moved its headquarters there.
Another billboard in Harrison that read "Anti-Racist is a Code Word for Anti-White" was taken down in 2013 after being in place for just more than a year. A second billboard beneath it read: "Welcome to Harrison. Beautiful town. Beautiful people. No wrong exits. No bad neighborhoods," also was taken down.
The person or groups who leased those spaces were not identified. Mayor Jeff Crockett, who expressed dismay at the billboards in 2013, said the latest billboard was even more direct.
"I hate to see it in the community. The last one that was up, we had a lot of negative comments about it. We had a lot of people that were potential residents of the community, potential businesses that might relocate here that when they saw that it made them uncomfortable," said Crockett.
The city has formed a race-relations task force that has been trying to change the city's image.
