Black Lives Matter In a Haven For White Supremacists

Harrison, Arkansas is a small town in the Ozarks, notable for being a haven for white supremacists. Yet it too, held a Black Lives Matter protest. This is a powerful, moving, and in the end, hopeful story. 

HARRISON, Ark. — I arrived here 10 days after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, sparking massive protests around the country. The historic Harrison town square, with its memorial to the Confederate war dead, was already closed to traffic as I drove into the area. Civilian men with military-style rifles and sidearms peered into approaching cars as if it were a border checkpoint.

Armed men and a few women, some carrying American or Trump 2020 flags, were posted up around the square and on rooftops, waiting. A few patrolled the sidewalks as if it were an insurgent village. It was eerily quiet. I started to think maybe the protesters weren’t actually coming.

Then a source texted “on the move to the square,” and I started recording video. I grew up in Arkansas and have reported from this town for years, and I was almost stunned by what I witnessed next. Coming down the hill toward the courthouse was a lone Black man, dressed in tactical gear, wearing a green military backpack and carrying a shotgun strapped with bullets. Marching behind him was a large group, almost all white people, waving protest signs and chanting “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, silence is violence.”

Here was a Black Lives Matter rally in one of the country’s most notorious havens for white supremacists.