As for the picnic photo with NSM members, swastika flags, and sieg heils?
"It was a group photo," he said. "They had a barbecue afterward. I was invited to it. J.T. Ready was my ride there and back. That was it."
Francisco Garcia
The African-American child that was painted over
Stephen Lemons
Artist Francisco Garcia with the image that replaced "blue boy"
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Harris told me that he had taken the profile down after I confronted him about it, and hadn't been on the site for months. As for Ready, Harris said he was a "good guy," with whom he sometimes had strong disagreements.
In the future, Harris said, he will be careful about who he associates with, and that the trip to Riverside was an "eye-opener."
"There are some very scary people out there, bro," he told me, not wanting to give additional details.
Harris also complained that he went to the Riverside "under false pretenses."
I can't get inside Harris' head to figure out why someone who claims to be such a brainiac would attend a neo-Nazi rally, hang out with the most notorious brown-shirt in the state, and post a NewSaxon account with a photo of his tyke on it.
One thing's for sure: Warren Buffett the guy is not.
BLUE BOY
The twin towns of Pine and Strawberry, just outside of Payson, are surrounded by the breathtaking beauty of the Mogollon Rim, a mountainous shelf of rock that seems to encircle and embrace the piney area.
But like the burg in the David Lynch flick Blue Velvet or his TV show Twin Peaks, the tranquility of the area masks disturbing tendencies. That's what I discovered when I drove up to the Pine-Strawberry Elementary School to take a look at a not-yet-complete mural by Phoenix artist Francisco Garcia.
One side of the single-story school is covered with outlines of images, some finished, some not. There's a brown buffalo, the school's mascot. Musicians. Kids playing baseball. And in the far left corner, there's a rustic cabin that represents a historic structure, a one-room schoolhouse that's purportedly the oldest schoolhouse in Arizona.
However, that schoolhouse was not always part of Garcia's mural. At the behest of the Principal Mike Clark and school board members such as Diane Roeder, Garcia painted over the original image of an African-American boy in a baseball cap. Garcia had made the boy blue and had planned to paint the other faces depicted in the mural other colors.
Garcia, a sophomore in art and Chicano studies at Phoenix College and recipient of the college's Eric Fischl Vanguard Scholarship and the Eric Fischl Award of Merit, explained that Clark and Roeder began getting heat from locals as soon as the blue boy went up. So Garcia was asked to paint over the boy with something "less controversial."
"I was shocked. It's a kid," Garcia told me on the car ride to Pine. "And he's not even black; he's blue. Then [they] asked me if I can change the features. This made me mad as an artist because I worked on it all day. And it was approved. Once you approve an image it's done."
Garcia said his initial sketch for the mural, created after a workshop he conducted with some of the 135 students who attend the school, included an image of Martin Luther King Jr. He said he was told that the kids could not relate to MLK. So he came up with other images, including the blue boy, that were approved by Principal Clark, he said.
Clark denied during a phone conversation that he had approved the blue boy, and he could not recall whether Garcia's initial sketch included an image of Martin Luther King Jr. But his comments in e-mails that Garcia saved, and in a conversation Garcia taped (unbeknownst to others present) of a meeting with Roeder and Clark, are eyebrow-raising.
In one e-mail, Clark outlined some of the comments he had received from the community, including a fairly reasonable one: "The gun the Transformer is holding must be deleted."
The principal also said, "The mural overall needs more of a country flavor to it. We live in the country/mountains, not Phoenix.
"[There are] some questions on why an African-American boy is depicted so prominently," Clark wrote. "This is not a racial comment; it's just that there are no African-American students attending Pine-Strawberry School."
(Clark admitted to me that there is one African-American child in the school, as well as a few Hispanic kids. Otherwise, he said the small student body was mostly Anglo.)
"Faces need to be less ethnic," Clark told Garcia. "Again, not a racial thing. The reality of our community is that the community [is] 95 [percent] Anglo."
In the digital recording of Garcia's meeting with Roeder and Clark, similar issues came up. Such surreptitious recordings are legal in Arizona, as long as one party knows it is being taped. Garcia told me he decided to make the recording after things started getting "crazy."
During the meeting, Clark noted that the mural had become "a political issue," and he described getting constant phone calls and critical community members showing up at the school.
"I don't even apologize," Clark said at one point. "I should have foreseen this happening."
