Month: March 2021

The last time I wrote was on January 5. I was full of hope that day that turning over the calendar page would put the negatives of 2020 behind us and all would be positive and rosy in 2021.

The events in Washington DC the next day told us all that we weren’t on a direct path to that.

In this intriguing and timely exhibition, on view through April 7 in the CALS Roberts Library, Galleries at Library Square, artist Terry Brewer takes the hateful rallying cry for racial purity “Blood and Soil!” used in the past by Nazis and in the present by white supremacists and morphs it into the idea of working with both substances as media for thought-provoking art.

In September 1957, the federal government mandated and enforced the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. In August 1958, Governor Orval Faubus directed the Arkansas General Assembly to legislate that any school facing desegregation be closed. Because of court orders, the legislation closed all four public high schools in Little Rock: Central High,

Over 20 years ago, as an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, I took Arkansas History with C. Fred Williams. One of the course requirements was to trace your family history back three generations and write a narrative about those family members. The brilliance of this assignment was it required students to develop research skills while exploring their own personal history.

You may have noticed that Arkansas was in the national news a few weeks ago. This is rarely a good thing.

In this particular case, the national ire and incredulity directed toward the Natural State related to two bills, House Bill 1218 and House Bill 1231, which would have prohibited schools from offering any curriculum that might broadly promote the idea of social justice and prohibited schools from using any curriculum linked to the New York Times’s 1619 Project,