Image Problems

1.

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“It’s twenty-six thousand cars a day going up and down that road,” Tim Poynter told me as we sat in the small office he shares with the breakroom fridge at Crockett Outdoor Media. “People will see your ad. It will work.” He wasn’t wrong. There are few places better suited to be the poster child for billboard advertising than Harrison, Arkansas, which was dubbed “the most racist town in America” after a string of racist billboards appeared there beginning in October 2013. 

Every town has its skeletons. In Arkansas there were once close to one hundred sundown towns. Very few have been forced to have a public reckoning with their past. In Harrison, however, those efforts have taken place in the most public way possible, on the side of the highway. 

When I visited in December 2020, there were 111 billboards, including: home of the world’s okayest bartender, king dermatology, and jesus. There were also, thanks to former mayor Jeff Crockett, electronic billboards running messages like no one is born a racist, it’s taught. quit teaching it! and black lives matter. 

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Only one billboard—for WhitePrideRadio.com—had provoked an online petition with more than 200,000 signatures calling for its removal. So it was replaced with another that read, it’s not racist to ❤️ your people. whiteprideradio.com. Their sentiments were no different than billboards that had advertised diversity is a code word for #whitegenocide or even #secede. What made this billboard peculiar was its legal stubbornness. Both the sign and the land beneath it are owned by Jason Robb, the son of the national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who lives in the nearby town of Zinc. So it’s doubtful whether it would ever come down. But would removing a billboard get to the heart of the matter anyway?

“Taking down that sign, it’s not going to change it,” Poynter said. “It’s like taking the sign off a porn store. People are still going to rent the porn. They’re just not going to see the sign.”

Perhaps there was a deeper meaning in the public push to see the sign come down. Harrison could be anything that it wanted to be—if only the messaging was right.

2.

On April 1, 2014, nearly six years before 200,000 people called for Harrison’s last racist billboard to come down, the town buried racism in a small, shallow coffin. Fifty-nine inches long, eighteen inches at its widest point, and just six inches deep, its top was white pine, its sides Eastern red cedar. The coffin maker told the local newspaper that the coffin was “as empty inside as racism is.” 

The majority-Black crowd at the ceremony—less than one percent of Harrison’s population was Black at the time—put the coffin in the ground face down and scattered red and yellow roses across its back. Among the hundreds gathered graveside at Fire Station No. 1, there was no grieving; instead there were speeches, music, a parade. It was a good death, but an odd death. The sun went down at 7:34 p.m., and the festivities continued.

Harrison was hosting a Non-violence Youth Summit in partnership with the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, starting the next day. This felt like the image Harrison wanted the world to see: A town that would not allow its past to determine the course of its future. And yet, there was very little evidence that racism was dead and gone. The previous fall, a billboard had gone up that read anti-racist is a code word for anti-white. A few days before the funeral, another billboard appeared that said welcome to harrison. beautiful town. beautiful people. no wrong exits. no bad neighborhoods.

Already, Harrison was coming up on inconvenient truths: Relegating something to the grave doesn’t keep it from rising again. 

3.

When the Harrison Community Task Force on Race Relations meets this August, it’s fairly uneventful. Formed in February 2003 after a string of newspaper articles highlighted past and present racism in Harrison, the task force has led numerous initiatives—diversity workshops, scholarships for minority students, film screenings—to combat the town’s negative image. Today, there are no fires to put out. Nine members, all white, cluster in a grid on Zoom.

A representative from the Ozark Arts Council starts things off by describing a potentially fraught situation—wanting to stage Little Shop of Horrors but having no Black actors to play the Doo-Wop girls. Not only did the OAC seek the composer’s blessing, they also changed their bylaws to be more “proactive” going forward. (Longtime task-force member Layne Ragsdale notes that this is “a sign of so much maturity in our community about cultural competency.”)

Another item on the agenda: After reviewing a new, diversity-focused billboard that will be placed just south of the still-standing WhitePrideRadio.com billboard, the task force considers the matter of Clyde Holmes, a missing Black man from Little Rock whose car was recently found in Jasper, just twenty miles south of Harrison. Ragsdale says that she’s seen posts online that give the car’s location as Harrison, which could make for some terrible headlines. 

“We need to be aware this could end up being a bad story that we don’t have any control over, that’s not really rooted in reality.” The meeting wraps in just over an hour.

The task force will only allow me to review the minutes from four recent meetings (“Unfortunately, that's it for the minutes I want to share,” Ragsdale tells me via email). So I visit the Center for Arkansas History and Culture, which holds the task force’s collected papers. I’m curious to see how it responded to the original racist billboard that went up in fall 2013. Three boxes offer an in-depth look at the task force’s history, but there’s virtually nothing documenting those months—history erased by omission—just an email dated Oct. 18. 2013 (subject line: “Meeting yesterday”), and a press release for the death of racism.