Black Lives Matter in rural America (Part I): Protests spread to unexpected places, small towns, flyover states

Facebook post about a BLM protest in Vermillion, South Dakota

Anne Helen Petersen, who writes for Buzzfeed and lives in Bozeman, Montana, started this week collecting information on Black Lives Matter protests in "small towns and rural places."  Her initial collection was on her Twitter feed, and I was skeptical off the bat because it included major cities like Portland, Maine (largest city in Maine) and Lexington, Kentucky (second largest city in that state).  But some of the places she was highlighting were more truly rural, and I appreciate the point she is making.

Petersen also wrote a Buzzfeed story headlined "Why the Small Protests in Small Towns Across America Matter." The dateline is Havre, Montana, population 9,310, where the protest was organized by Melody Bernard of the Chippewa Cree from the nearby Rocky Boys Reservation.  Petersen reports that an African American football player for Montana State University-North (but who grew up in Atlanta), Dorian Miles, wrote this encouraging post on his Facebook page after participating in the march:

SPEAK AND YOU WILL BE HEARD! Today we did what had to be done in Havre. A SMALL town of predominantly older white Americans stood with me to protest the wrongdoings at the hands of police EVERYWHERE....Today we stood together for an injustice. Today people who don’t look like me or relate to me showed love and support. I was overwhelmed to see the people I saw today marching in protest to the public lynchings that have been done by the only people whose job is to PROTECT and SERVE their community.

It's a theme you'll see throughout this post:  Defying stereotypes that rural people are consistently  conservative, static, ignorant and racist.

Here are just a few of the places Petersen's Twitter feed has documented as hosting protests.

Twitter screenshot from June 6, 2020
re: BLM protests in East Texas

Benton, Kentucky
Healdsburg, California
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
Solvang, California
Alpine, Texas
Taylorville, Illinois
Charlottetown, PEI, Canada
Ridgway, Pennsylvania
Lander, Wyoming
Enterprise, Oregon
Paoli, Pennsylvania
Kalispell, Montana
McCall, Idaho
Merrick, New York
Belfast, Maine
Riverton, Wyoming
Vidor, Texas
Conway, New Hampshire
Palmer, Alaska
Williamstown, Massachusetts
Canton, New York
Emporia, Kansas
Brownsville, Pennsylvania
Huntsville, Texas
Forks, Washington
Spencer, Iowa
Boulder, Utah
Lynchburg, Virginia (home of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University!)
Hoover, Alabama (high school students arrested for violating curfew)
Andrews, Texas
Frostburg, Maryland
Mt. Shasta, California
Edna, Texas
Lewiston, Maine
Moab, Utah
Hazard, Kentucky
Murphy, North Carolina
Mad River Valley, Vermont
LaGrange, Illinois
Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada
Hartwell, Georgia
Avon, Connecticut
Williston, North Dakota

Craig, Colorado

Moses Lake, Washington

Butte, Montana (along with Missoula and Bozeman)

Wolfeboro, New Hampshire

From June 7, Kalispell, Montana

I've seen lots of reporting in the vein of Petersen's, though I believe hers was the first.  Here's a Washington Post opinion piece by Judy Muller about a protest in Norwood, Colorado, where she lives.  The headline is "My tiny, white town just held a protest. We’re not alone." Norwood, population 510, is in San Miguel County, in the southwest part of the state.  

And here's a story by Peter Salter in the Lincoln Journal-Star about protests in Harvard, Nebraska, population 1,013, part of the Hastings Metropolitan Area.   The headline is "'We won’t allow that foolishness in our small town' — In the heart of Nebraska, a peaceful and powerful protest."  Here's an excerpt which, like the Buzzfeed story out of Havre, Montana, features a black football player, one of the only African Americans in the town:

Twitter account out of Nebraska panhandle 

Harvard’s police chief showed up at the protest in short sleeves, because he wasn’t expecting trouble.

“I’m not in favor of any excessive force at all,” Wayne Alley said from the steps of the small city hall. “And I’m for everything that you guys stand for. I wish you the best of luck.”

The town’s only black man was there with a microphone, because he’d started this.

“I woke up that morning and thought we needed to do something,” Jermaine Guinyard said a day later. “Even in small-town Nebraska, we may not deal with police brutality, but we have injustice and inequality to deal with.”

The running back who helped carry Harvard to the six-man football state championship in November was there, too, because Guinyard, his former teacher and coach, needed his help — and his connections.

“My role was putting it out there,” said David Reazola. “Mr. G’s not a social media guy. I have a pretty decent platform. But it was pretty cool how quickly the word spread.”

And that is how an estimated 50 people — many of them students, but some of them families pushing strollers — gathered Tuesday in the center of their small town, in the south-centeral part of the state, to protest the killing of a black man by a Minneapolis police officer, and to call attention to the work that needs to be done in their own community

My friend and colleague Prof. Hannah Haksgaard, who teaches at the University of South Dakota School of Law, shared the image at top of this post from her Facebook feed in Vermillion, South Dakota, population 10,571, home of the University of South Dakota.

Sarah Smarsh (author of Heartland) is also collecting "rural" protests on her Facebook feed and posted some screen shots on Twitter, where she wrote:

I've commented many times on the class lines of political movements. The working poor folks I come from weren't (aren't) civically engaged, not because they didn't care but because, in the hard pursuit of basic survival they had no time to look up from fields and factory lines and retail shelves.   

While many such essential services have not lessened, there is nonetheless a global slowing--of production, of consumption--that, while causing economic loss in one sense, is creating a new wealth of energy in another.  This is true to varying extents for every economic class, albeit amid the energetic payment we will all make to the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Smarsh notes that USA Today has been mapping BLM protests, and Petersen mentions in her Twitter feed this story by Reuters.   

Meanwhile, these shots of a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Harrison, Arkansas came across my Twitter feed on Thursday night.  

This left-leaning commentator from
Fayetteville, Arkansas, the
University town two hours away,
observes the perceived politics and
lack of anonymity associated
with rural places.

I know Harrison, population 13,087, very well.  It is the town where I was born, in the regional hospital previously known as the Boone County Hospital and now the North Arkansas Medical Center.  I grew up 20 miles south of there in an even smaller town, Jasper, county seat of Newton County, population 8,000.  Boone County, population 37,000, is 96% White, 2.6% Hispanic or Latino, and 0.4% Black.  This post from several years ago is about Harrison and Boone County's history as an outpost of the KuKluxKlan.

I shared these screenshots with my mom, who has lived in Newton County her whole life, and it was important to her to tell me that "the protest in Harrison is organized by a local person and is not affiliated with organizations that are rioting in more metropolitan places." Like lots of folks--apparently including many police--Mom is struggling to differentiate between peaceful protestors protected by the First Amendment and looters who are committing crimes.  (Don't miss this Codeswitch episode on the "outside agitator," including Martin Luther King, Jr., being labeled as such). My mom's comment also reveals her love for the rural and her rural lifestyle; she's always been sensitive when I have written anything negative about my hometown--however fact-based and newsworthy--on this blog.

In any event, three prior posts about Harrison are here, here and here.

In a similar vein, the Southern Illinoisan published this story, by Molly Parker "In wake of Floyd death, rural, white Southern Illinois towns are reckoning with racist past."  Parker writes:

Some of these communities — Benton, Herrin, Carterville, Anna — were “sundown towns” where, by official policy, black people were not allowed after dark into at least the 1960s in some cases, according to research by James W. Loewen, author of the book “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism.”

Kalispell Montana, in the screenshot above, is also a place associated with racism; in particular, white supremacist Richard Spencer is a part-time resident of nearby Whitefish, also in Flathead County, gateway to Glacier National Park.

In short, all of these protests run counter to our expectations of rural folks, just like the women's marches spreading to rural places did in 2017.

But then there have been other types of protests this past week, like this one out of Idaho, where people turned out to turn away a rumored "antifa" protest.  The headline for the Washington Post story by Isaac Stanley-Becker and Tony Romm is "Armed white residents lined Idaho streets amid ‘antifa’ protest fears. The leftist incursion was an online myth."  A similar report from Humboldt County in far northern California is in the Lost Coast Outpost.  And here's a story from the same news outlet about a BLM protest in the city of Fortuna.  

And while "redneck" is non synonymous with "small town" or "rural," it is often conflated with these geographies--and with the South--in the national imaginary.  I therefore share this piece from medium.com by Southern Crossroads headlined "Rednecks for Black Lives."  

This seems like a good opportunity to also share a story from NPR this morning.  Michele Block, reporting on the hundreds of voices singing, Lean on Me in Washington, DC, two days ago, noted that Bill Withers, who wrote and recorded the song, considered it a "rural song."  She explained by playing an interview with Withers who shared an incident when he was in the Navy and returning home to West Virginia from where he was stationed in Florida.  He had a flat tire while driving through rural Alabama and a man who Withers said looked like he could have been out of the movie "Deliverance" came upon him.  In due course, the man walked to his home and returned with a tire for Withers, and even helped him change the tire.  Withers said incidents like that gave him hope, and it gives me hope, too--just like these protests in rural places give me hope.

Postscripts:  Here's an op-ed published in the L.A. Times on June 9 by a high school student Lilian Smith of  C'oeur d'Alene, Idaho:  "My Idaho town shows how the Black Lives Matter movement can resonate in deep red communities."

The Takeaway with Tanzina Vega did a great interview with Anne Helen Petersen re: her writing about rural and small town where Black Lives Matter protests have occurred.  I especially appreciated the attention to the rural concept of "lack of anonymity." 

Here is the Daily Yonder story on the matter.