A Pride event took place in the spiritual home of the Ku Klux Klan – and some local bigots weren’t happy about it.

In the wake of the Orlando shooting, local LGBT activists in Arkansas decided to hold a Pride event in the town of Harrison – often considered the home of the KKK.

Visitors are greeted in the town with a billboard claiming ‘Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white’, and the ‘Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’ are officially based in the town.

There were fears of a potential backlash to Harrison Pride – with one local white supremacy website ranting about the “faggotry pride festival” celebrating “sodomites and other sexual deviants”.

“We will not allow such degeneracy to go on in our town without it being decried.”

The white supremacists claimed that the Pride event was inviting in paedophiles, saying: “This is what happens when good people accept degeneracy.”

Opposite the Pride parade, an anti-gay protest was led by R G Miller from Arkansas League of the South, with abundant confederate flags and anti-gay signs.

Miller told local news outlet KSFM: “[God’s] law condemns this and says that it is evil and we don’t want our children to be growing up in a city where homosexuals can parade around the town square or get married on the courthouse steps.”

But the attendees didn’t let it get them down.

One Pride-goer Cynn Parton said: “Our part of the country has been well known for bigotry and backwardness for so long, and there’s a whole lot of us who live here who don’t believe like that, and we don’t want to be labeled like that anymore.”

Organiser Alexx Breedlove added: “I mean everybody’s got their freedom of expression… they’ve got their significant choice of words, and I’ve got love, acceptance, community, that kind of thing.”