The expulsion of Black Harrison

Harrison, in the Arkansas Ozarks, counted 115 Black residents among its 1,501 people in the 1900 census - a small community with deep roots, working the railroad, the hotels and the laundries. When the St. Louis and North Arkansas Railroad that had come through town in 1901 went bankrupt in July 1905, the hardship that followed found a target.

On 2 October 1905 a white mob took Black prisoners from the jail, whipped them and ordered them out, then went through Harrison's Black neighbourhood burning homes and telling every Black family to leave that night. Most did. A second expulsion followed in January 1909, after the arrest and conviction of a Black man accused of raping a white woman: the mob stayed in the streets, and nearly everyone who had returned or stayed left on the night of 28 January.

One Black resident remained in Harrison afterwards - Alecta Caledonia Melvina Smith, known locally as Aunt Vine. By the 1910 census Boone County recorded almost no Black population, and that held for the rest of the century.

Harrison is one of thousands of American places that became and stayed all-white by force rather than by chance - the pattern historians call the sundown town. Its later reputation as a centre of white-nationalist organising rests on that foundation: the expulsions of the 1900s produced the demographics that the organising of the 1990s took for granted.