Long Form

The 2021 Arkansas Times Academic All-Star Team, the 27th team the Times has honored, includes quiz bowl savants, budding novelists, future engineers and doctors and championship athletes. There’s rarely a B on the transcripts of these students in not just this, their senior year, but in any year of their high school careers.

They escaped from the Nahziryah Monastic Community in Marion County.

When Chase Outlaw (that’s really his name) goes into the bucking chute now, the announcers broadcast the story of his infamous comeback across the arena, and an X-ray of his mutilated face flashes on every screen, projecting an image of his eye socket looking like a chewed up piece of tobacco.

Thanks to World Central Kitchen, the Clinton Foundation, the Little Rock School District and a broad coalition of local players, all Little Rock kids have access to free food on a daily basis.

Research shows Arkansas schools punish African-American students more frequently and more harshly than their white peers.

Thousands of students and educators prepare to return to the classroom as the debate over health and safety continues.

Sen. Joyce Elliott was the second Black graduate of her newly integrated high school. If elected, she’ll be the first Black lawmaker Arkansas sends to Congress. 

Publisher Walter Hussman tries to save the news by stopping the presses.

Little Rock's Pettaway neighborhood, once plagued by gang activity, is amid a revival, thanks to incomers and novel construction. New residents say they want the area to remain as diverse as the architecture.

In a broken present-day Elaine, locals strategize about economic revival.

The boom that got away.

It was the year of spinnin' and grinnin'.

The city manager system and the collapse of racial moderation in Little Rock, 1955-1957.

A year into a pandemic that stole jobs, lives and any sense of stability, Arkansans might have hoped for some help when lawmakers convened in January for the 93rd General Assembly. What they got was a kick in the face.

While barbershops and churches and gyms and restaurants across the country are easing their doors open incrementally, theaters, nightclubs and performing arts centers remain mostly dark. Worse, many of them have been deprioritized or left out altogether when it comes to monetary relief packages.

Arkansas funeral home staff and coroners' offices prepare for a rising death count.

Sue Cowan Morris won the battle to equalize pay of black and white teachers. It cost her her job.

High school alums celebrate their 45th class anniversaries with reunions, why not us? We’re celebrating our sapphire year by looking outward, rather than inward, with stories that reflect the times. Here’s the way we were (the most popular song of 1974, by the way), the way we went and the way we are now, year by year.

It's become the Johnny Appleseed of Arkansas arts education.

Can the city's first elected black mayor heal the racial divisions that have long plagued the city's fire and police departments?

By connecting classical dance to a broader history of black movement, C. Michael Tidwell influenced generations of teenagers.

Across the state, from Bentonville to Crossett, thousands of Arkansans have taken to the streets in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and to protest police brutality. Some are seasoned organizers. Some are first-time protesters. Some have served on task forces, met with elected leaders, received death threats. They are racially diverse, and they span generations. And they have decided, despite a pandemic that put them at risk when gathering, to keep coming out. Here are a few of their stories.

September 2019 will be the 100th anniversary of what has come to be known as the Elaine massacre in Eastern Arkansas’s Phillips County. A century ago, white posses and U.S. soldiers shot and killed what may have been hundreds of African Americans, most of them tenant farmers, over a period of four days.

Meet the best and brightest high school seniors in the state.