Racial slurs painted on EMOBA Museum

LITTLE ROCK, AR - Racial slurs cover the EMOBA Museum in downtown Little Rock. Now, Little Rock police are trying to track down whoever spray painted the hateful words on the building.

Within the past three days, someone spray painted racial slurs and death threats all over the historic First Baptist Church at 12th and Louisiana in Little Rock, which is now the EMOBA Museum. The museum celebrates African-American culture.

"It's really sad," says Fretonzia Hickman with EMOBA.

The museum got a call from one of its neighbors Tuesday afternoon reporting the hate crime.

Hickman has worked for the museum for 15 years, and she thinks it is a shame someone chose to do something so hateful during Black History Month on Valentine's Day.

"We're supposed to be celebrating love, and you hope in Arkansas that we had passed this, but there are some people out there that don't know how to express themselves other than defacing someone's property," she says.

Little Rock police also found playing cards on the building and in the parking lot with threats written on them. Detectives will now process those cards for prints.

"What would you say to the person or people who did this if you could talk to them face to face?" asked FOX16's Kelly Dudzik.

"I would say that it's really a shame, you know, we're already closed trying to renovate the museum so that we can showcase African-American history, and this just adds another financial burden on the museum," says Hickman.

Hickman tells FOX16 that she got an estimate Tuesday from a company to see how much it will cost to clean the graffiti up, and she expects the graffiti to be gone by the end of the week.

Hickman adds it is just too tough to position security cameras to see someone spray painting the building. She hopes new street lights proposed for the downtown Little Rock neighborhood go up soon to deter criminals.