In a Klan enclave, questions about Trump aren’t welcome

Shane Jones, owner of a gun and barber shop in Harrison, AR. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)
Shane Jones, owner of a gun and barber shop in Harrison, Ark. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)

In the weeks leading up to the inauguration, Yahoo News visited towns and cities across the country, speaking to voters who had supported Donald Trump in the election. As the shape of his administration emerged, we asked voters if they were happy with their choice and optimistic about the future. Here is some of what we found:

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HARRISON, Ark. — Shane Jones simply did not believe a pair of journalists had wandered into his barber shop/gun store on a Wednesday afternoon a few weeks after Election Day to talk about Donald Trump.

“No, no, no,” Jones said with a sly grin that barely disguised his evident hostility. Sitting back in his barber chair, he shook his head and narrowed his eyes. “That’s not why you are here. You’re here because of the billboards, because of the KKK. That’s why you are here.”

In truth, that was how we had ended up here in this tiny town deep in the Ozarks. Harrison, a town of roughly 13,000 people in northwestern Arkansas near the Missouri border, had been in the news for years, making headlines as the home of the Knights Party, formerly known as the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a prominent national offshoot of the KKK, founded in 1975 by David Duke.

More recently, the city, which is 96 percent white and, according to the 2010 census, home to just 34 black residents, had drawn renewed attention for a series of controversial white supremacist billboards that were erected beside the highways leading to the town, including one that read “Anti-Racist is a Code Word for Anti-White.”

When the controversial billboards were ripped down and defaced, they were replaced almost immediately. On state Highway 65 south of town, drivers are now greeted by two signs. One advertises “White Pride Radio” and “Alt Right TV” and the other reads “Diversity is a code word for #whitegenocide.”

Signs on the highway as you enter Harrison, AR. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)
Signs on the highway entering Harrison, Ark. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)

Slideshow: Scenes from the road in Donald Trump’s America >>>

People here had tried and failed to have the billboards removed, regarding them as an obstacle to their efforts to recast Harrison as a more welcoming place. That meant overcoming a dark past, including a series of riots in the early 1900s when residents were said to have run most of the city’s black population out of town. Efforts to rebrand the city were further complicated by the arrival of the KKK, which relocated its national headquarters to Harrison in the early 1990s. Though Thomas Robb, who now heads up the group, lives about 10 miles outside of town, the organization’s mailing address is in Harrison, and the town is also the base for its newspaper, the Crusader.

And that’s part of what had led us to Harrison. Last fall, local residents were alarmed to see copies of the Crusader dropped on doorsteps around town. Under the banner “Make America Great Again,” the issue featured a full, front-page endorsement of Trump, tying his campaign slogan to the newspaper’s promotion of white supremacy.

“While Trump wants to make America great again, we have to ask ourselves, ‘What made America great in the first place?’” the endorsement read, according to the Washington Post. “The short answer to that is simple. America was great not because of what our forefathers did — but because of who our forefathers were. America was founded as a White Christian Republic. And as a White Christian Republic it became great.”

The Trump campaign quickly disavowed the endorsement — perhaps mindful of the controversy the New York billionaire had generated when he did not immediately reject an endorsement from Duke, who had returned to the limelight as a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in Louisiana.

Gun and Barber shop in Harrison, AR. (Business is next to a Metaphysics shop). (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)
Gun and barber shop in Harrison, Ark. (Business is next to a Metaphysics shop). (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)

In November, Trump easily won Boone County, where Harrison is located, defeating Hillary Clinton by nearly 60 percent. But a few weeks after the election, residents did not have much interest in talking to reporters about Trump and what they expected from him as he heads to the White House. Among them was Jones, who displayed a large handmade “NOBAMA” sign on the front door of his barber shop, where he recently also started selling guns in addition to giving haircuts.

Grilling the reporters who had wandered into his shop, Jones questioned why anyone would have an interest in why he backed Trump and the issues he cared about. On the mirror opposite his barber chair was a Trump/Pence bumper sticker, hung alongside a poster of a rifle-toting Clint Eastwood from one of Sergio Leone’s famed spaghetti Westerns. Asked what he expects of Trump as president, Jones said, “I want him to restore and uphold the Constitution.”

He declined to elaborate and signaled that the interview was over. “Nobody is going to talk to you here,” Jones said, as he waved the reporters out.

But that wasn’t quite right. Outside, a woman walked out from the shop next door called the Cosmic Mama and introduced herself as Lisa Howard, a “spiritual adviser” who had just moved to town from North Dakota after falling in love with the rolling hills and woods of the Ozarks. She had no idea of the city’s history or its racial tensions. Maybe, she said, smiling, they needed spiritual and life advice from someone like her.

Lisa Howard, owner of a metaphysical shop in Harrison, AR. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)
Lisa Howard, owner of a “metaphysical” shop in Harrison, Ark. (Photo: Eric Thayer for Yahoo News)

There was one thing the two shopkeepers could bond on. Howard, who described herself as a left-leaning liberal, did not like Hillary Clinton. But she also did not care for Trump. Although she followed the campaign closely, she said she didn’t vote because she had long ago lost faith in a political system that she believed was corrupt, bought and paid for by special interests, and did not serve people like her. Unlike many, she was not swayed by Trump’s outsider message and did not believe he would bring change to Washington.

“I just don’t believe in any of the system anymore,” Howard said. Politics, she felt, gave people like her a “false sense of being involved in something that we have no control over.” She lamented that “it’s all about money.”

Though Trump had run against the establishment and cast himself as an anti-politician, she said she simply didn’t believe it. Among other things, she pointed to the type of people he had started to appoint to his new administration, lobbyists and Wall Street types that he had denounced in his campaign. It’s “circus,” Howard declared. And she didn’t want any part of it.

“As long as we continue to support the system, we’re feeding it,” she said. “And we need to change. It all needs to go.”