The Harrison Sundown Purge, 1909

In September of nineteen oh nine, white residents of Harrison, Arkansas, in Boone County in the Ozark highlands, organized a coordinated series of attacks on the town's Black community. Over several days, homes were burned and Black residents were threatened, beaten, or driven out. By the time it was over, Harrison's Black population had been expelled entirely. A smaller expulsion had occurred four years earlier, in nineteen oh five. The nineteen oh nine event was more thorough and more final.

Harrison was not alone. Across the American South and Midwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, communities carried out similar expulsions, establishing what the sociologist James Loewen later documented as sundown towns, places where Black residents were absent not by choice or economic circumstance but by threat of violence that had been organized to make their presence impossible. Harrison became one of the more complete examples of this practice in Arkansas.

The town remained effectively all-white for decades. Well into the twenty-first century, Harrison carried an association with organized white supremacist organizing in the region, including the presence of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and affiliated groups. In more recent years, the city has initiated public conversations about this history and erected a historical marker acknowledging the expulsions of nineteen oh five and nineteen oh nine. The marker stands in a town whose Black population remained near zero for most of the twentieth century.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas and the Arkansas Historical Association hold the primary documentation. James Loewen's "Sundown Towns," published in two thousand five, places Harrison in national context.