Over the weekend, Black Lives Matter protesters marched in Arkansas just four days after a video crowning Harrison, Arkansas the “America’s Most Racist Town” went viral.
According to the Springfield News-Leader, the KKK’s website confirms that Harrison is it’s national headquarters and its national director, Thomas Robb, uses at least three post office boxes there.
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Black Lives Matters protesters from all over the state marched in nearby Zinc on Sunday. It was a demonstration organized by Bridge the Gap NWA and also promoted by Ozarks Hate Watch.
40/29 News reports that the activists met at the Harrison Police Department before traveling in a caravan towards Zinc. They claim to have passed people holding up signs that warned them to “turn back.”
Once they were in the Ku Klux Klan’s Grand Wizard’s hometown and got near the dirt road leading to his compound, witnesses say armed men – many in military-style fatigues – were standing in front of cars blocking their path and making it clear they were unwelcome.
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“Militia blocking the road to the Klan Compound,” Ozarks Hate Watch’s photo caption states, before noting, “Too bad they didn’t realize we had no intention on going to his compound.”
Even though the news station reported that the several dozen protesters had gone to the town to hold a peaceful protest, they were met with hostility as soon as they got there.
“You’re out here in your little neck of the woods where you think you don’t have to see the people that you hate,” protester Sonny Cropper told KY3, while explaining why the group had traveled to the small town. “We know that hatred is here and we still don’t tolerate it.”
Officers from the Boone County Sheriff’s Department were on hand watching over the protesters as they confronted the white supremacists. Many of them identified as members of the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as a hate group with a neo-Confederate ideology.
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