African American

At a brainstorming session after school recently at district headquarters, a group of black school employees sit around a U-shaped table discussing how to become principals. Coach Shawn Burgess, head of human resources at the Pulaski County Special School District, speaks to two women in the room who recently interviewed for leadership positions and didn’t get the job.

“And it’s not what you did wrong, per se. It’s about, ‘When is it my time?’” she said.

“That’s right. Um-hmm. That’s it,” echo the staff.

A new survey of racial attitudes and perspectives in Arkansas finds that whites and blacks diverge significantly on the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Joel Anderson Institute on Race and Ethnicity at the UA Little Rock this week releases the results of its annual Race, Ethnicity and Religion survey. John Kirk is the survey’s author.

"There's a very polarized idea about what Black Lives Matter means what its successes will be, and African Americans very strongly believe Black Lives Matter is making an important impact and having an important role, than whites, who tend to be very much in the opposite direction, that Black Lives Matter isn't making an impact and doesn't have a role to play."

Gov. Asa Hutchinson is endorsing a proposal to end the dual recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert E. Lee on the same day each year.

He took to the lectern Wednesday to say that, as Americans celebrate the slain Civil Rights icon, residents of the state are presented with a choice.

“That choice that is there, it divides us as Arkansans and as a nation,” Hutchinson said.

  Little Rock director Jeff Nichols’ movie Loving, about the Supreme Court case that extirpated anti-miscegenation laws in 1967, opens nationwide today. But what does that mean for folks in Arkansas City, where the nearest movie theater is the Hollywood in Monticello, about 50 miles away, where it's not playing anyway?

Little Rock director Jeff Nichols’ new movie “Loving” opens statewide this weekend. It’s based on the love story of Mildred and Richard Loving, an interracial rural Virginia couple whose marriage became the basis of a 1967 Supreme Court decision that struck down all laws prohibiting interracial marriage or mingling.

Nichols has said his own experiences attending Central High School formed some of his connection to the material. He formed some more connection when he got a call from Martin Scorcese, as he told Deadline in an interview:

“I grew up in Arkansas, and I went to Little Rock Central High, which was the site of a desegregation crisis in ’57. I graduated in ’97. So I was inundated with Civil Rights history and impact, but I’d never heard of Mildred and Richard Loving before. As uninspiring as this sounds, I got a call from my agent, who said that Martin Scorsese wanted to speak with me. He had been kind of a shepherd of this project and wanted to see it made into a narrative film.”