Just over six years ago, on March 29, 2019, a Tennessee social justice center that served as a training ground for civil rights legends like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks was tragically burned along with decades of archives. Last week, a suspect was finally arrested in connection with the burning, and, unsurprisingly, he has also been linked to a white supremacist movement as well as another arson.
According to the Associated Press, 27-year-old Regan Prater was arrested last Thursday and charged with one count of arson after authorities linked him to several group chats affiliated with white supremacist organizations. In one chat, Prater was allegedly asked if he had committed the burning of the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tenn, according to an affidavit filed in federal court in East Tennessee.
From AP:
In one private message, a witness who sent screenshots to the FBI asked a person authorities believe is Prater whether he set the fire.
“I’m not admitting anything,” the person using the screen name “Rooster” wrote. But he later went on to describe exactly how the fire was set with “a sparkler bomb and some Napalm.”
A white-power symbol was spray-painted on the pavement near the site of the fire. The affidavit describes it as a “triple cross” and says it was also found on one of the firearms used by a shooter who killed 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019, about two weeks before the Highlander fire.
Then there’s the fact that Prater had already been charged, convicted and sentenced for another arson he committed less than three months after Highlander was burned.
Prater previously pleaded guilty to the June 2019 arson of an adult video and novelty store in East Tennessee. He was sentenced to five years in federal prison and ordered to pay $106,000 in restitution for the property he destroyed.
One can imagine that after six years with no arrests or suspects being named, local activists and community members were growing restless while wondering if anyone would ever be held accountable for the damage done to such a historic site.
“Every time the wind blew, we would see what was left of it go up in flames again, for weeks,” Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, a former co-executive director at Highlander, said, describing what she saw when she arrived at the scene of the fire in 2019.
Woodard Henerson said she recalled feeling frustrated and how investigators had been vague and uninformative regarding the investigation, despite early signs that the arsonist had ties to white supremacist groups.
“We were told that it was like finding a needle in the haystack to prove who did it — that that’s in fact the point of an arson,” she said. “You’ve got to remember this was 2019, so Donald Trump was still in his first presidency. Frankly, for years, we didn’t get any updates.”
(Side note: Before readers start wondering why Woodard Henderson would mention Trump, it should be noted that his current administration recently ended a settlement agreement regarding wastewater issues in a mostly Black rural Alabama county, citing Trump’s anti-DEI directive as if diversity efforts have anything to do with a court ruling just because it may have corrected environmental racism. It’s not difficult to imagine his federal government not caring about some Black activist center that got burned down by one of his “very fine people.”)
Here’s a little more history on Higlander via AP:
Highlander is known as a place where Civil Rights icons such as Rosa Parks and John Lewis received training. Parks attended a workshop there on integration in 1955, about six months before she famously refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She always credited Highlander with helping her become a more determined activist.
Parks returned to Highlander two years later with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for the school’s 25th anniversary celebration, where King gave a keynote address on achieving freedom and equality through nonviolence.
First established in Monteagle in 1932 as a center for union organizing, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt was among its early supporters.
Highlander’s co-founder and longtime leader, Myles Horton, a white man, created a place that was unique in the Jim Crow South, where activists white and Black could build and strengthen alliances. In his memoir, Congressman Lewis wrote of how eye-opening being at Highlander was.
The Highlander Research and Education Center will be 93 years old this year, and six years after the fire, administrators say a rebuild of its administrative office is expected to be completed soon, according to Allyn Steele, a co-executive director at Highlander.
SEE ALSO:
Clayborn Temple, Historic Landmark In Memphis With Ties To Martin Luther King Jr., Catches Fire
Candace Owens’ MAGA Meltdown: The Hypocrisy, The Flip-Flop, And The Fallout
Alleged White Supremacist Charged In 2019 Arson Of Activist Center Where MLK, John Lewis And Rosa Parks Trained
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