A Black Lives Matter protester carrying a flamethrower led a march on the Arkansas compound of the Ku Klux Klan’s grand wizard — where demonstrators were met by heavily armed “militia,” the group said.
The protest, organized by Ozarks Hate Watch, gathered in Harrison on Sunday — before finally arriving in Zinc near the compound housing KKK leader Thomas Robb, calling it the “motherland of racism in America.”
Photos showed march organizer Quinn Foster carrying a flamethrower — which he insisted was “warranted” given the threat he felt, claiming there had been “140 death threats” in the run-up to the march on Zinc.
“Believe me, I did not want to lug that around. But I felt it was completely necessary just in case,” Foster said in a Facebook Live video after the event, conceding his weapon left others “extremely agitated.”
The group said it was blocked by a group of heavily armed security in the road leading to the compound housing Robb, who has led the Klan for more than 30 years, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The protest group posted photos of several so-called militiamen who met them — including one woman who pointed her rifle at the group while her finger was on the trigger, the group said.
But it ended peacefully despite Foster’s fears that it could have ended up being “dangerous, deadly, violent.”
“It could have been a whole shootout,” he said of the march that took a month of “many sleepless nights” to organize.
“Today was a historic day for Black Lives Matter,” Foster insisted.
