KKK claims it’s not racist in Arkansas billboard ad for ‘White Pride Radio’
TRAVIS GETTYS
rawstory.com
02 JAN 2015 AT 10:51 ET
A Klu Klux Klan group is advertising its web-based radio station with a billboard set up alongside an Arkansas highway.
Thom Robb, the national director of The Knights Party, confirmed his group had sponsored the sign advertising White Pride Radio, reported the Harrison Daily Times.
The sign shows a forlorn-looking white girl holding a tiny puppy, alongside the words, “It’s NOT racist to (love) your people,” along with the radio station’s website address and the words, “Harrison – love lives here.”
Robb lives just outside Harrison, where race riots chased all but one black person out of town a century ago.
According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the county had just 131 black residents and 35,624 whites.
The sign was rented on the same billboard where someone previously set up a sign in 2013 promoting the racist “mantra” that “anti-racist is a code word for anti-white.”
Another sign was set up beneath that advertising a Word Press blog that promotes Harrison as a town with 98 percent white residents and “no bad neighborhoods.”
It’s not clear who set up the website, which also points out Harrison’s ties to Robb and anti-semitic preacher Gerald L.K. Smith, or rented space for either sign.
Claude West, owner of Harrison Signs, said he no longer leases signs without posted contact information.
A McDonalds in Harrison bought out the ad space in October where the white nationalist sign had been and posted a message that claimed its restaurant had “something for everyone to love.”
Robb, who operates the white supremacist Christian Revival Center in nearby Zinc, said he rented the sign to promote the radio station he has worked on for about a year.
He’s lived in the area for more than 40 years, but city leaders have recently been pressuring to stop using Harrison as his mailing address.
Six other hate groups, including Kingdom Identity Ministries, operate out of Harrison, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Harrison has the image that it’s a white-racist town, and I’m glad the town has that image,” said Mike Hallimore, leader of Kingdom Identity Ministries. “It probably prevents some of the nonwhites from settling here.” |
