PRYOR — By its own accord, the city of Pryor is made up of “interesting and diverse” people, as stated on the city’s website.
On Sunday, several Pryor residents woke up to find leaflets outlining Scriptures against “race mixing,” decrying local Pryor businesses and criticizing the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
“I just assumed it was another religious flyer until I picked it up,” resident Aaron Stites said. “It took me a second to figure out who it was for, and then I immediately texted a buddy and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’ I threw it down and didn’t pay any attention to it.”
People living in the suburban community off Mill Street got up on Fathers Day to find two folded pamphlets in a zip lock bag with stones inside to weigh them down. Face up, the words “GOD GIVE US MEN!” can be seen on the front, along with a logo from the Northeast Oklahoma Klavern of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
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A second pamphlet in the package, from Kingdom Identity Ministries, a Christian Identity group based in Harrison, Arkansas, features quotes from Scripture, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, and a graphic indicating disproportional crime rates by race.
One woman who lives in the neighborhood characterized the quotes as being out of context and self-serving. A man there described the leaflets as a form of terrorism.
Pryor Police Chief Steven Lemmings said his department received some complaints regarding the pamphlets but that it appeared no crime had been committed.
“We’re looking into it, but I haven’t seen where it’s broken a law,” he said. “We do have some attorneys looking at it.”
Mayor Jimmy Tramel said he didn’t know whether the people who left the pamphlets were from Pryor, but “the bottom line is we don’t want that in our community,” he said.
One of the pamphlets specifically calls out two local restaurants as being anti-American and anti-white.
“Deny them your Patronage!” it urges.
It goes on to criticize a Pryor bank for celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Lemmings said he could think of only two other occasions in 22 years when residents in the city have received literature from the KKK.
About 72 percent of Pryor’s population is white. Blacks account for 0.66 percent, with about 17 percent American Indian and nearly 8 percent identifying as two or more races, as of the 2010 Census.
The messages portrayed in the pamphlets are not indicative of the town’s perspective as a whole, Stites said.
“As ethnically undiverse as this place is, you would be surprised at how tolerant it probably is,” he said. “We work with all races. That’s not even any issue. I guess it is in other places, but it doesn’t seem like it is here.”
