Fans made monkey noises and crow caws at this Kansas basketball team, report says

Men’s and women’s college basketball players from a Kansas college were subjected to racists chants during a game in Arkansas last week, according to media reports and a coach at the game.

The Labette Community College teams traveled from Parsons, Kan., to North Arkansas College on Wednesday for the games. Fans of North Arkansas hurled monkey noises and crow caws at the players, the Parsons Sun reported.

“In snippets of game footage viewed by the Sun, one member of the North Arkansas crowd made sounds of a crow cawing several times when black Labette players shot free throws,” the Sun reported.

The chant was a reference to Jim Crow laws of the segregation era, the Sun reported.

Mark Watkins, president of Labette, said the college encourages diversity.

“The opposing team will try to distract us, to cause us to lose our focus,” Watkins said in a statement to the Sun. “But, as long as we continue to focus on utilizing our strength through diversity, we will overcome distractions, such as discrimination.”

Micki Somers, a spokeswoman for North Arkansas, said the school has found no evidence of the slurs after interviewing fans and coaches and reviewing its own game footage. The school also hasn’t received any complaints.

“Unfortunately the whole town of Harrison has been judged by these accusations,” she said.

But Jason Hinson, an assistant coach for the Labette men’s team, told The Star he heard racist chants clearly during the men’s game.

“I can assure you this isn’t a hoax,” he said. “I heard the chants firsthand, both the ones directed towards me and the ones from across the gym.”

North Arkansas plans to ask the Sun to view the video in order to “see where they (the chants) came from, so we can investigate it,” Somers said.

“We definitely don’t condone any kind of conduct that includes any kind of insults or slurs, especially any that would target any kind of ethnicity,” she said.

“If there were offenses perceived as racist, we want to make sure those don’t happen again in the future.”

The person who shot video of the incident wished to remain anonymous and did not allow the Sun to publish the footage, Yahoo Sports reported.

North Arkansas College President Randy Esters released a statement following the allegations.

“If those offenses were made by Northark students or employees, we will take appropriate actions to ensure it does not happen in the future. ... This situation is truly unfortunate since we make every effort to be inclusive and welcoming to all of our students, community and visitors,” he said.

North Arkansas College enrolls about 2,000 students in Harrison, Ark., north of Little Rock and about 25 miles from the Missouri border. Parsons is about 150 miles south of Kansas City.

This is not the first time Harrison has made headlines for perceived racism.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette wrote last year that Harrison has a reputation as a “haven for white supremacists.”

The Arkansas Times wrote an article about Harrison being named the “most racist town in America” in late 2016. The article cited the presence of Thomas Robb, the national director of the Ku Klux Klan, in the town. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists Harrison as the site of the national headquarters of the KKK.

This story was originally published January 16, 2018 at 12:13 PM with the headline "Fans made monkey noises and crow caws at this Kansas basketball team, report says."