Center focuses on education

Coeur d’Alene’s new human rights education center may be a little behind schedule, but it’s still on track, supporters say.

“Come fall, we should have some real exciting news,” said Tony Stewart, president of the board of the Human Rights Education Institute, which is planning the new center in downtown Coeur d’Alene.

“In October, we’ll be able to announce and introduce our executive director,” Stewart said. “And we’ll be able to update the status of our center itself. … We’ve made some major changes in architectural plans and those kinds of things.”

The death of longtime local neo-Nazi leader Richard Butler this week marked something of an end of an era for the local human rights movement, Stewart said. Though he was in frail health and his followers had dwindled, Butler was active until the end of his life in pushing his racist views, including holding public parades and running last year for mayor of Hayden, an election he lost overwhelmingly.

“We now can give a much higher percentage of our time to dealing with education, rather than responding to activities that are going on where there are hate crimes and all those kinds of things,” Stewart said.

Human rights education plans have been percolating locally for several years, but Stewart said a key turning point came when computer entrepreneur and Idaho Falls native Greg Carr donated $1 million to the project.

Initially, the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations had been giving scholarships to North Idaho College for minority students and some grants to teachers for diversity programs. Former state Sen. Mary Lou Reed spearheaded a new foundation to take on those roles.

Then Stewart got an e-mail from Carr, saying he’d decided to give the new foundation a million dollars.

“I called Mary Lou and said, ‘I have somewhat of an interesting e-mail here,’ ” Stewart recalled. “That’s when life began to change.”

The foundation became the Human Rights Education Institute and began planning the new center, which is scheduled to occupy a remodeled historic railroad substation in City Park that’s been leased from the city. The center is envisioned as a place that will tell the Inland Northwest’s human rights story, and also educate people about civil rights in America and worldwide.

In addition to the structure itself, programs in schools and elsewhere will constitute a major portion of the center’s work, Stewart said.

“We’re just so excited about the whole thing,” he said.

More than 70 people from around the world applied for the executive director position.

Carr, in an interview Thursday, said he believed the story of Butler’s activities in North Idaho really is about how the community rejected them and rallied around human rights.

Carr, 44, former chairman of Prodigy Inc., has committed millions of dollars to human rights efforts in Idaho. The era of the Aryan Nations and Butler was one in which the little-known state of Idaho became synonymous for many with racists – a misperception that Carr and many others worked to change.

“The only good thing that you could say comes out of something like that is that it causes people to rise to the challenge,” Carr said.

He recalled a banquet that was held in Coeur

d’Alene at the time of the purchase of the former Aryan compound. Carr bought the compound after Butler lost it in a multimillion-dollar civil judgment and then donated it to the North Idaho College Foundation as a peace park.

“I remember there were 600 people that came to the banquet, and they all paid money because it was a fund-raiser for human rights education,” Carr said. “And outside on the street, there were six people, one of them Mr. Butler, protesting us. And I thought, you know, 600 to six – that’s probably reflective of the reality. Ninety-nine percent of the people are in favor of human rights.”

He added, “I’m just happy that the vast majority of people do believe in equality and do believe that Butler’s message of hate and racism is unacceptable. And for me, that was the story.”

Carr, who funded an $18 million Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1999, has been active in many human rights causes, and also funded a major museum in Idaho Falls. A graduate of Utah State University with a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard, Carr co-founded a successful technology firm in 1986 that he sold a decade later and then became chairman of Prodigy, a global Internet services provider. In early 1999, he sold a portion of his interests in Prodigy and formed a charitable foundation.

Carr credits the local community with the idea of turning the former Aryan compound into a peace park.

“That idea came from community leaders in Coeur d’Alene who invited me to join them in that effort,” Carr said. “They said, ‘Let’s buy the compound and let’s tear down all the buildings and let’s make a peace park,’ and I said, ‘Great, I’ll help you.’ … I was proud to just be an Idahoan and proud to work with those folks.”

Stewart said, “He’s such a quiet person and non-assuming, but my, is he powerful in what he’s doing. … The Greg Carrs are the trend of the future, and that’s the good news.”