Support for Arkansas Week provided by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

The Arkansas Times and Kuer FM 89.

Again, everyone thanks very much for joining us.

When comes the time to write the history of Arkansas in the pandemic or the first one of the 21st century?

Our principle question will be how high or whether we had our guard up.

Plainly, we're letting it down and the clinical community is warning that COVID fatigue the arrival of effective vaccines, lingering suspicions about medicine or government, or both.

Whatever the factors alone or in concert, Arkansas is at risk of additional and unnecessary illness and death in its latest report on the coronavirus in our state, the team at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences warns that the worst may in fact not be behind us, despite the almost universal availability of vaccine vaccination and testing rates in Arkansas are far below what the experts consider acceptable.

And if the case rate for the moment seems stable, there are some other alarming numbers to consider.

The UAM S Chancellor doctor Cam Patterson joins us now.

Doctor, if I could thank you first of all for being with us and making time for us again, I'd like to begin with a quote from the report.

COVID-19 is not over in Arkansas, it is at best smoldering.

How close to a fire.

Well, we don't know yet Steve we're seeing some signs that are concerning.

We certainly are not right now in the heat of the fire in the way that we were over the winter, when we had thousands of cases.

New cases reported today when we had close to 400 patients in intensive care unit settings across the state.

But you would anticipate that if we were doing.

All the right things and that the vaccine was accepted an working that our trajectory would be downward, and unfortunately, at least in among the sickest patients, trajectory is back up worse.

We had 35 patients across the state who needed intensive care unit care two months ago.

That number has more than doubled up to 75 patients across the state requiring intensive care unit care.

Here in Arkansas, and we're seeing the same thing here at you AMS.

Well using the smoldering scenario, let's look at the kindling or the embers if you will.

What it was.

Is there a single statistic or a pair or a set of statistics from where we are right now that you consider most alarming?

I would say right now the the the two trends that are concerning me the most are that the number of patients who are in our ICU's who are requiring heart lung bypass.

We call it ECMO who requiring mechanical ventilation.

Those numbers are going up, but the other alarming feature that I'm very concerned about is that we're seeing the sickest patients.

Are not necessarily the oldest patients.

When the pandemic started, the patients that we saw in our ICU's were over the age 65 over the age of 70.

We're now seeing young adults who are sick and on death's door, and those twin trends are the ones that most are alarmed me right now.

Why are they sick or Doctor Patterson is that hey are we?

Is this virus shape shifting here?

Are we seeing variants?

I so the variance are clearly a part of this.

You know the variant that we now have in the state that is causing the most illness.

Making individuals more acutely ill is the Delta variant is here and if it becomes the most common form of COVID-19 that transmits in the state, that's that's going to be a big concern.

I also think that part of the trend and the downward trajectory of from.

Age standpoint maybe because the older age group has been more accepting of getting vaccine and we may see some subtle signs of vaccine of communitywide vaccine efficacy and older age groups, but in younger age groups, young adults who may be more hesitant to get vaccinated, they may become the ones who are now the most vulnerable to infection.

Well, and of course the bulletproof syndrome, sort of.

Our mindset anyway takes its presents itself.

In that age group, but young or old, the vaccination rate in the state is far, far smaller, lower than what you and your colleagues want.

What can be done?

What's at work here?

But it is far lower.

You know?

We need 7080%, maybe even more of our population vaccinated in order to get to that herd immunity.

That really diminishes community transmission.

And right now only about 30% of our total population has been vaccinated.

We need to do a better job of educating.

We need to explain to people that science can be trusted.

In ways that the Internet maybe can't be trusted that you know the things that you hear on the news or from a friend may not be exactly the truth, but I think people also need to understand the consequences of not getting vaccinated.

You know, we've had it you AMS over the past two months.

Four patients who required heart lung bypass to stay alive because of COVID-19 infection.

Three of those individuals who are of childbearing age actually 33.

The individuals were pregnant, so you know there is nobody is bulletproof when it comes to COVID-19.

You have talked in the report or of a quote relaxed attitude and more wishful thinking.

Clearly there is a fatigue factor in here.

People who are or who have been conscientious are now discarding their masks.

They may not be washing their hands and socially distancing as they were.

Certainly a year ago, how do you combat that?

I think he compounded by saying that hey look, if you are vaccinated, you can go outside without a mask if you are vaccinated you can attend indoor events if you are vaccinated, you don't have to worry about who you are around.

Keep in mind here you know the people who have been admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 have one thing in common.

None of them have been vaccinated.

So the vaccination will protect you, but it will also allow you to live a better lifestyle if you've not been vaccinated.

You should be and you're supposed to be wearing a mask outside based on CDC guidelines.

You're supposed to avoid situations in which you cannot socially distance, so following the guidelines, getting the vaccine will help you.

It will help your family.

It will help your community.

I want it will help.

Our economy unwind from some of the difficulties that we've been experiencing with COVID-19.

Can we report any progress at all?

The rate of immunization vaccination among communities of color in Arkansas was lagging.

Can we report any progress in that on that front?

We are making progress and you know the equity in terms of vaccine distribution have been very important to us at UMSI know it's something that the governor has focused on.

Specific outreach to communities of color is making a difference.

We want people to feel that they can trust what we say and that the vaccine is safe.

I think our biggest concern right now is the struggle that we are facing in rural communities.

And there's definitely a disparity in our ability to reach individuals in rural communities.

We need to double down on that.

That's on us, and it's not getting the message out and targeting younger Arkansans now with the vaccination.

Absolutely, you know if you are 12 or above, you're eligible to get the vaccine.

It's been shown to be safe and highly effective, and those patient populations and you know, there's no room for concern.

There's no reason to defer or delay.

You're only putting yourself at risk.

You're only putting your friends and family at risk.

What is your sense, Doctor?

We've got as summer has just begun, but mid August it will soon be here.

Colleges, universities and K12 public schools.

What do these?

What does the current set of statistics?

What do they suggest?

What do they portend for the resumption of classes?

Well, you know I there are two inflection points that that I'm focusing on.

One are the holidays and we don't yet know what the impact of the Memorial Day weekend is on COVID-19 infections.

In this state, it takes about two weeks for us to get a sense of what those impacts are, and we have with the July holiday coming up as well.

So you know, we'll need to keep a close eye on whether we see up ticks around those two.

Holidays, but then you know you mentioned the fall coming up and two things happen.

People go back to school but also with cooler weather.

It's easier for respiratory infections like COVID-19 to be transmitted, so those are going to be serious inflection points that we need to pay attention to an if we are trending upward.

Steve as we get into late August early September.

I think we're going to need to be concerned that you know we may see, uh, you know, another big wave of COVID-19 in our state, unless we can get our vaccination rates are well on this program.

Doctor.

Several months ago, you and a couple of colleagues were cautioning the state that it was literally on on the knife's edge in terms of COVID have we have we moved measurably away from the edge?

We have, you know, and at that moment when we were on the precipice, I think our our state later leaders did the right thing.

People in our state paid attention an we pull back from there.

We are not on fire in the way that we were in January, February, but we're not going in the right direction right now, and we could be on fire again.

And the August or September time frame.

If we don't get our.

Current situation at a more stable and a more stable place with regard to transmission of COVID-19.

I think if we pretend right now like the problem is behind us, that's the worst thing that we can do.

Then Doctor Patterson will end it there and thank you for once again making yourself available.

Thank you, Steve.

Come back soon.

Born in the 19th century, it survived into the 20th and by that name or perhaps others into the 21st.

Or at least its philosophy does.

The Ku Klux Klan.

The movement and the mindset behind it.

The subject of a new work of scholarship by a veteran scholar of Arkansas history doctor Kenneth Barnes, now retired from the university, freshly retired from the University of Central Arkansas, the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas.

How Protestant white nationalism came to rule.

A state welcome.

Thank you, Steve.

Again, I should say, because you've been on our air before and as always, Full disclosure, yes, the author and your moderator are first cousins anyway, thanks for coming in.

What brought this book about?

Well, I had written another book that came out a few years back about anti Catholicism in Arkansas and that book really spanned the 20th century, at least up to the Kennedy election in 1960.

But the 1920s phase of that book.

The subject really was subsumed into activity of the Ku Klux Klan, so I've done a fair amount of work about the Klan in the 1920s in relationship to anti Catholicism and it just seemed like a good follow up too since I had.

A lot of material that nobody had uncovered before that I go ahead and just write the history of the 1920s clan in Arkansas.

There is a certain personal aspect to this which you acknowledge in the preface, yes.

That's true, I was interested in the clan actually answer Catholicism for that matter for personal reasons, and one of those is that my daughter is grown up hearing the story from my mother that her father had been a member of the Klan.

In fact, she said that when she was a little girl, this would have been probably in the mid to late 1920s.

She found his Klan robe at home and ask him what it was, and he explained that it was an organization that just did good things in the community.

So I had grown up knowing about the clan and about my personal connection to the clan.

I could say this is my mother's father, so not the side of the family nuts.

The bar inside the family that Steve shares here as you document they were client chapters all over the state for sure.

It was pervasive in Arkansas, and that's one of the surprising things that I found.

Nobody had really looked at the clan on a statewide level in Arkansas.

An I'd read a lot of newspapers.

Small town newspapers and clan newspapers.

National clan newspapers and just basically catalog information that came from different locations in Arkansas and found that there were at least 152 chapters of the clan in Arkansas.

So think about that there are 75 counties.

That means that you know there be an average, a couple of clans per county.

Some of them had as many as five or six.

There were a couple of counties that I found no clan in, but there were just plenty of them around.

Almost every little town, certainly.

Almost every county seat had a clan chapter and as unbelievable as it may seem today, it was by no means back then.

A badge of shame.

Oh not at all.

In fact people, it was a secret society so they couldn't talk about a lot of things with the clan.

They couldn't divulge membership in the clan unless you were a like designated lecturer for the clan.

Or if you're running for political office, sometimes people would reveal their clan membership to get votes, but generally there was a secret development to it, but it had a very public.

Nature as well, there would be parades, public lectures, activities that people were invited to bring, the wife and the kids to participate in.

It was really a very kind of public events throughout the state.

And what did your research demonstrate anyway about the origins of the OR its first appearance?

Significant appearance in Arkansas, the 1920s Clint arrived in Arkansas in 1921 when some recruiters.

Came to Little Rock from Texas to recruit people to establish chapters.

In the first chapter was organized in Little Rock and it would became the Little Rock clan number one.

They numbered them consecutively from the time of their organization and that's why I know there were at least 152 because I had found the 150 Clan #152 in Lockesburg, Arkansas, but they arrived in 1921, organized Little Rock clan and basically just rode the rails between Texarkana and Little Rock.

Between Little Rock and Fort Smith, and you can see Klan chapters popping up in Conway, Moralton, Clarksville, Ozark, Fort Smith, and then the same way towards Texarkana and just spread out really the delta as well.

Certainly statewide statewide.

Yeah, yeah.

What was it?

The 20s that marked the?

The apex of clown activity.

Yeah, so 1920s clan was very much a well organized corporation rally that had its headquarters in Atlanta was a huge money making machine for the people that ran the clan.

And so it was sort of like a pyramid scheme from top down.

Very well organized, almost like a military hierarchy.

So it was very much an organized system, unlike the clan of more recent years, which is decentralized.

In fact, there's not really just one clan.

There are many different groups that kind of carry on a clan tradition in the civil rights era to the present, but this one of the 1920s was a big business and really like a fraternal Mens organization like the Masons or the Elks or the Odd Fellows or something like that.

That had a quite a structure with it.

Yeah, if it was not necessarily a ticket to business success or commercial success in the say, it certainly wasn't an obstacle either for sure.

In fact, it might even be.

Sure, some people join the clan because it put them into contact with the leading citizens of their communities.

The clan of the 1920s.

Tried to recruit the respectable sort of Country Club set or Chamber of Commerce types or like could be the Rotary Club of the 1920s and had some success at yeah and not the sort of blue collar members.

I've done some statistical analysis of Klan membership for two clans, Bentonville and Monticello, where membership lists have survived and it's very easy to identify that it's not common laborers that were members so much as it was merchants, lawyers, professional people, clergy.

Actually people like me, college professors, teachers would be the typical clan members and prosperous farmers.

Yeah, what was the tip?

What did the what?

Consumed the clan I was there.

Any one thing was it?

Was it?

White superiority was a political power was a commercial power of what was the scope of that?

All of the above?

It was a very diverse organization in terms of what it stood for and we commonly today think of immediately of race when we hear about the clan and certainly that was a part of it in the creed of the clan in their oath that they would take when they became a member, they had to profess their attachment to white supremacy.

But in terms of the actions and the actually the rhetoric of the clan, they spent more time talking about.

Immigration trying to keep Southern and eastern Europeans out of the United States and trying to promote immigration reform to be a mechanism to do that.

They were very very anti Catholic.

I think they probably spilt more ink railing against Catholics and they did against African Americans.

They were also one of the big causes was just sort of a public morality issue, at least in a public way.

They went up against liquor.

Bootlegging moonshining, of course, is the heyday of prohibition anso speakeasies, gambling establishments, brothels, things like that were certainly targets that you could put a target on your back if you were involved in those kinds of activities.

To what extent was the threat to quote the threat to white womanhood, a part of the sales pitch as well as it was so much they certainly profess that that they would go after men who were involved in adulterous.

Relationships or if people cross the color line in a relationship, they would definitely you know, go after the man.

But sometimes a woman as well, so that was definitely part of the rhetoric that they were protecting women against possible vices that could come from immoral men and others, or from a threat of blackmail, right?

Did the after the 20s.

What happened to the claim?

Well, the clan that was it speak, write it in Arkansas and nationally.

It came, it rose very fast, like a bubble, but it also just deflated like a bubble burst about mid 1920s.

It continued on technically into the late 20s and 1930s, but just in a fraction of the membership that it had in its heyday, which would be between 1922 and 1925.

But it had a whole combination of different.

Factors led to the demise of the clan.

I'd say largely it was a number of scandals that were played out in law courts and the newspapers that aired The Dirty laundry of some of the prominent clan leaders who didn't really walk the walk that they talked, and that obviously was a publicity meltdown.

Really, for an organization that profess to hold a higher standards and the typical folks in the these scandals tended to be financial or financial sexual.

Public drunkenness, I'm pretty much you could run the gamut of of things that they would be embarrassed for to be revealed.

You know in the media, yeah.

The violence that is so often and not improperly attributed to the clan was this, specially in other states was the Arkansas clan over the clan in Arkansas?

Was it different?

Say from the client in that respect from Alabama, Mississippi, other parts of the Deep South?

The literature on the clan has in more recent years tend to emphasize the clan lack of violence, or that there wasn't so much a violent organization and I think part of that is that a good number of the really good pieces of scholarship.

I have come in writing about states outside the South like Indiana, Oregon, where the Klan was more like just a Mens club.

But the literature about the clan in the southern states has suggested there was this undercurrent of violence.

At least the threat of violence that was always there and what I found out with Arkansas looking at Arkansas was it was very much like that and on the southern model that it engaged periodically in violent activity and it was moreover that there was the threat people thought that.

If they stepped across a line that the clan might be showing up at their at their home in the middle of the night and take them out for a beating, tarring and feathering or other kinds of things that we were then different, I guess from say Alabama, Mississippi during movement days of the 60s and 70s.

Anyway, yeah, the 60s and 70s?

Yes, maybe so, but my research was on the 20s and I would say it was pretty similar to Alabama and Mississippi, except perhaps the claim was even stronger and better organized in Arkansas in the 1920s and that it was in those other southern states is the.

Is there a message in the book for today?

Well, I think there is an certainly as I was writing the book events that were happening in the world I live in were always in the backdrop.

As I was writing, I had finished writing the book before the events of the election, presidential election of last fall, and then January 6 that followed.

But very clearly.

You know, I would suggest that some of the language and sentiments and ideology really, that the clan made as a public movement in the 1920s has been consistently there in the year since the 1920s.

Just sort of migrating in from one place to another, one constituency in the American political system to another.

But certainly I think we've seen it show its face since 2016 and a very public way.

Some of the utterances that Amit said on the political arena could have been straight out of my book.

I mean the same exact phrases, sometimes the.

The particular group that's being targeted might be different instead of Catholics.

Maybe it's Muslims instead of Catholic immigrants from Italy.

Maybe it's Mexicans that are have been targeted, but much of the thinking has been fairly consistent and and flourish.

You know?

Obviously in the last several years, doctor Ken Barnes thanks very much.

The book the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas.

Come back, thank you Steve.

Support for Arkansas Week provided by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

The Arkansas Times and Kuer FM 89.