SPEAKING OUT: Ad signed by five students who originally told the Arkansas Blog about Beckham’s past and have organized a campaign to prevent him from winning public office in Arkansas.

Charles Beckham, the Republican challenger to incumbent Democratic Sen. Bruce Maloch of Magnolia, is under fire from multiple places today for our disclosure that he was expelled from high school in Mississippi in 2000 for donning Ku Klux Klan outfits on Halloween and, with two pals, terrorizing students in the dorm of the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science.

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Seven groups issued a statement calling on Beckham to withdraw from the state. Not likely. Governor Hutchinson and the chair of the Republican Party, Doyle Webb, have declined to ask him to do this and have stood silent as he continued dishonest, racially tinged mailings against Maloch. The release:

Our organizations, rooted in the values of racial equity and social justice, call on Mr. Charles “Bubba” Beckham III to drop out of the race for Arkansas Senate District 12 in Southwest Arkansas, and we call on the Republican Party of Arkansas to condemn the behavior of Mr. Beckham and immediately stop their support for his candidacy.

Certain actions in life disqualify you from elected office. High on that list is dressing up as a Klu Klux Klan member and terrorizing black youth. Even if it was done as a Halloween prank. Even if it was in high school. Mr. Beckham made it worse when he lied and denied the first-hand account of his victims when they first came forward, only to be forced into admitting it when confronted with facts discovered through excellent journalism.

We are frustrated that we even need to write this letter. It seems plainly obvious that Mr. Beckham should drop out of the race and that the Republican Party of Arkansas should denounce any candidate such as this. These actions simply disqualify someone from holding elected office and representing the people of Senate District 12, especially the thousands of black and brown constituents he seeks to represent.

Racial inequity is deeply entrenched in Arkansas. The racial justice reckoning and grossly uneven impacts of the COVID pandemic highlight that we need to have an honest and frank conversation about racial inequality. We hope that leaders of every political persuasion seek to address these inequities.

Sadly our political system has too many individuals who deny that systemic racism exists while they pass and protect policies that result in disparate outcomes in our school, health care, economic, housing, criminal justice and other systems. Too many political leaders seek to divide and marginalize those leaders who call out these disparities, rather than engaging in an honest conversation about how to reconcile them.

Those days must end. Our racial justice reckoning needs the honest engagement of all of us. That can not happen in Arkansas while candidates like Mr. Beckham are allowed to be the flag bearers of one of our major political parties.

Sincerely,

  • Arkansas Public Policy Panel

  • Arkansas Citizens First Congress

  • Arkansas United

  • Arkansas NAACP

  • Concerned Citizens of Prescott

  • Concerned Citizens Waldo

  • Magnolia Community Awareness Council

Then there’s the full-page ad (at top) purchased in the Magnolia newspaper by former schoolmates of his, five of them people who talked to the Arkansas Blog about their memories. He said our account was baseless in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. But records in Hinds County circuit court in Jackson showed that was a lie. He was expelled and went so far as to file a lawsuit to attempt to get the discipline overturned.

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