Sandpoint Battles Its Racist Image

SANDPOINT, Idaho - Mark Fuhrman is a resident. So is a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon.

The Bonner County Board of Realtors, Chamber of Commerce and Bonner County Human Rights Task Force are planning a defense of their town against a developing image as a racist haven. The new group was to meet privately last week for an organizational meeting.

"Part of the problem is we know what a wonderful, diverse place this is. When we are portrayed as racist we tend to shrug it off because we know it's not true," real-estate agent Debbie Ferguson said. "But that is what people all over the country are reading about us, and they believe it."

Ferguson has a collection of clippings from across the country that paint Sandpoint as being filled with bigots.

The image was bolstered when tapes filled with racial and sexist epithets uttered by Mark Fuhrman, a former Los Angeles police detective, became public during the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Fuhrman moved to the city in August.

"It's gotten crazy. There's hardly a day that goes by when we don't have someone asking about the Aryan Nations and Mark Fuhrman," she said.

The Aryan Nations is the political arm of the Church of Jesus Christ-Christian, a neo-Nazi sect run by Richard Butler near Hayden Lake, 40 miles south.

Renewed interest in white separatist Randy Weaver and his deadly standoff three years ago with federal agents at Ruby Ridge, 15 miles north, also has been a factor.

"Clearly, there are concerns about the publicity we have received," Chamber Executive Director Jonathan Coe said.

Members of the new task force are seeking help from the state Department of Commerce and the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, which won national acclaim for standing up to the Aryan Nations in the 1980s.

"Our concern is that if that image doesn't change, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Brenda Hammond of the county's Human Rights Task Force. "If we become known as an area for racists, then people who are racist will come and others will stay away."