Suspicion of racism bedevils tiny town
Posted on Sunday, July 13, 2008
DONALDSON — People in this mostly white southwest Arkansas town don’t want to be labeled as bigoted.
But after a cross burning and a suspicious fire that destroyed the home where a white woman and her three biracial children lived, residents say they fear they will be fighting that perception for years.
“I’m heartsick,” said Melissa Catlett, whose husband was the first mayor of Donaldson after it was incorporated in 1990. “If it’s proven it’s a hate crime, it’s a mark on our community.” Officially, Donaldson is home to 326 people, including five people of mixed race, two Hispanics, and two American Indians or Alaska natives. Its education achievement and income levels are below state and national averages, according to the last U. S. census.
To residents, it’s a town where children are safe to play in the street without the watchful eye of their parents, doors are left unlocked, street signs and paved roads are a fairly recent luxury, and the constable’s worst troubles are hauling drunken young men home to their parents.
“We got some good people living here,” Buddy Boyette, a longtime resident and Hot Spring County sheriff’s deputy, said while patrolling his neighborhood. “People are trying to portray the town as being racial. It’s not.” In the days since the cross burning and the house fire brought the FBI and news crews to town, residents have been forced to explain things such as the white “KKK” painted on the asphalt in the heart of town.
But like so many things, residents say, it’s not black and white.
The KKK letters were done by a young boy years ago that earned him a public beating by his dad, said Randy McGhee, constable and second-generation Donaldson resident.
He said the June 21 cross burning was a “stupid” act of “two drunken boys” and is not representative of how the town feels about black people.
“It makes the whole town look bad,” he said.
One teen who lives several miles outside of town faces felony charges in the cross burning, and at least one other person is suspected of being involved.
Jacob A. Wingo, 19, was arrested on charges of terroristic threatening and aggravated assault after police said he admitted making the wooden cross out of fencing, dousing it with lighter fluid and sticking it in the yard of Loretta Marie Slaughter-Shirah.
Slaughter-Shirah, 23, a Mc-Donald’s employee who moved to town from the outskirts of New Orleans just a week before the cross burning, had moved out of the home just days before it burned to the ground on the morning of June 27.
The FBI is investigating the cross burning and the house fire.
While canvassing the neighborhood after the house fire, one FBI agent took note of the Confederate battle flag in Clay McKim’s mobile home, which sits on the property behind the burned house.
McKim, 21, a corrections officer, said the agent offered that “it doesn’t mean you’re racist,” to which McKim said he shrugged in agreement.
“It really doesn’t bother me, black or white,” he said. “Everyone’s just trying to make money to get through these gas prices.” The cross burning in Donaldson marks the third in Arkansas to come to the attention of the FBI since 2005, an FBI spokesman said. All three have been in southwest Arkansas, including one outside a black man’s Malvern home in 2006.
The cross burnings have been reflective of others across the country, which tend to be committed by individuals who aren’t tied to an organized hate group, said Mark Potok, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., which tracks hate crimes mostly through media reports. Potok estimates that the agency learns of about 30 cross burnings a year nationwide.
Wingo, a 10 th-grade-educated plumber-in-training, is described by his family and others as hardworking and friendly with biracial and black people.
Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.
His mother, Yvette Briggs, has said that her son wasn’t trying to terrorize anyone and that she believes it was some type of joke.
To Rickey Avington, 49, a black man who lives just outside Donaldson, cross burnings are no joke.
“They [are ] picking on the weak people, some lady with kids — that’s wrong,” he said.
He said his family has had some trouble with bigotry over the years.
When they moved to the area more than a decade ago, he said he encountered people who didn’t want him there.
“They were talking about the n-word wasn’t going to stay up there,” he said.
When his son moved into a trailer in Donaldson with a white woman several years ago, he said some people were hostile.
“They were trying to give him some trouble, so they finally moved out of there,” said Avington, who cuts timber for a living.
For Laura Adams, 21, a mother of two who moved back to Donaldson this year with her husband, the events have shaken her pride in her hometown.
“I didn’t think anyone around here was capable of that,” she said standing on her front porch, looking across the street at the burned home. “It really takes your breath away.”
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