HARRISON, Ark. – “The most racist city in America.” It’s a stigma that residents and leaders in the city of Harrison, Arkansas, are aware of and have been trying to eliminate for many decades.

“It’s not only not true, but it’s such an opposite of what the truth is,” Harrison Mayor Jerry Jackson said.

Jackson believes part of the city’s racist reputation dates to the 1980s, when Thomas Robb, the national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, moved to the area after replacing former grand wizard David Duke.

Robb also pastors at the Christian Revival Center just outside of Harrison.

“We still have the same people, same beliefs and same love for everyone. But because he’s living out in the country somewhere, we become the most racist small town in America,” the mayor said.

The deep-seated stigma isn’t helped by what drivers see a short distance from entering the city, where a white pride billboard greets travelers heading north Highway 65 into Harrison.

Drive just a little bit farther down the road, though, and travelers see the billboard featuring Ebony Mitchell, Miss Arkansas 2022 and a Harrison local.

“Now you get to be welcomed by a woman of color into the city of Harrison instead of something so hateful,” Mitchell said of the billboard.

Mitchell grew up in Harrison and said that since she was a child she always noticed something was off in town.

“I grew up around a lot of ignorance, but I don’t hold that against them because they don’t know,” she said.

Mitchell explained that throughout her life she often thought about saying she was from a different town so she wouldn’t be associated with the stigma.

“People from all over the United States, even outside of the United States, would hear I was from Harrison and would always gasp, and that would be their first reaction,” she said.

Mitchell added that several of her friends “are terrified to tell people where they are from because they don’t want that attached to their name.”

Reactions like that, she said, were a driving force behind her running for the crown so she could educate and change the reputation of her hometown, just like the Harrison Task Force on Race Relations.

The city started the task force in 2003. Layne Ragsdale joined and helped with efforts to partner with the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission to bury racism.

“I think what we’ve been able to do in Harrison was to normalize the conversations around race,” she told FOX 16 News.

Ragsdale said the city of Harrison has been successful in taking down three out of four unwelcoming billboards, and she explained that the final billboard sits on property owned by the Robb family with ties to the Ku Klux Klan.

“So, they own the land, own the billboard and they are the only ones advertising on the billboard,” she said. 

While many in town are proud of the progress they have seen in their efforts, the steps forward in Harrison seemed to have been wiped away after a viral video of 24 people with negative reactions to a man holding a Black Lives Matters sign went online in 2020.

Jackson said watching the video, “was so devastating because we didn’t believe that was out people.”

The mayor put together a team to investigate and locate the people in the video. After further investigation, he said only three people were confirmed to be from Harrison and two of them claimed to have been “set up.”

Jackson said he did talk to one of the three people in the video who his team located.

“He said, ‘I am proud of what I said,’” the mayor recalled. “And one is not a good thing, but it’s a whole lot different than 24.”

For Mitchell, just like the dream and dedication of becoming the queen of the Natural State, the mission of eliminating the stigma as the most racist city in America continues until victory is achieved.

“I think there is always going to be work to be done just because of the stain Harrison has on it,” she said. “As much as I worked to be Miss Arkansas, I think Harrison will continue to be a better place and a more inclusive place for all.”