Arkansas Times | August 2020

UR IES O Y AR T S EE EN M SP DI

JUSTIN BRYANT | WAITING TABLES AMID COVID | CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS

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BACK TO SCHOOL, AMID THE PANDEMIC THOUSANDS OF STUDENTS, LIKE LITTLE ROCK’S ADYSON SHELTON, PREPARE TO RETURN TO THE CLASSROOM AS THE DEBATE CONTINUES OVER HEALTH AND SAFETY.

BY LINDSEY MILLAR

AUGUST 2020

“If you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something about it.”

— John Lewis

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AUGUST 2020

ARCHIVAL ARTISTRY: Justin Bryant makes a silverpoint drawing of an African-American police officer in Stuttgart he learned about in a Stuttgart Negro Civil League book as part of his preparation for a project there. Story on Page 33.

FEATURE

21 BACK TO SCHOOL?

Parents, teachers, kids worry about school days during a pandemic that is not relenting.

By Lindsey Millar

ON THE COVER: Little Rock student Adyson Shelton. Photo

by Rett Peek.

4 AUGUST 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

9 THE FRONT

The Inconsequential News Quiz: Just Say No to Topgolf Edition.

The Big Picture: Righteous art on Seventh Street.

15 THE TO-DO LIST

Herbs and more with Hurma Akmyradova, Rah Howard’s “The Process,” the Perseids, a summer anthem from Kami Renee, civil rights cinema, Jeff Nichols webinar, Trillium features violinist Er-Gene Kahng and guitarist Thomas Echols.

19 NEWS & POLITICS

44 HISTORY

Trump’s stacked courts give him wins, losses.

The big lie of Confederate history.

By Ernest Dumas

By Guy Lancaster

33 CULTURE

48 CANNABIZ

By Tara Stickley

By Griffin Coop

40 FOOD & DRINK

56 CROSSWORD

Artist Justin Bryant creates a “living archive” of a historically Black high school.

What it’s like to wait tables in a pandemic.

By Rhett Brinkley

New cultivators may mean new strains, and maybe lower prices.

58 THE OBSERVER

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VOLUME 46 ISSUE 12 ARKANSAS TIMES (ISSN 0164-6273) is published each month by Arkansas Times Limited Partnership, 201 East Markham Street, Suite 200, Little Rock, Arkansas, 72201, phone (501) 375-2985. Periodical postage paid at Little Rock, Arkansas, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to ARKANSAS TIMES, 201 EAST MARKHAM STREET, SUITE 200, Little Rock, AR, 72201. Subscription prices are $60 for one year. For subscriber service call (501) 375-2985. Current single-copy price is $5, free in Pulaski County. Single issues are available by mail at $5.00 each, postage paid. Payment must accompany all orders. Reproduction or use in whole or in part of the contents without the written consent of the publishers is prohibited. Manuscripts and artwork will not be returned or acknowledged unless sufficient return postage and a self-addressed stamped envelope are included. All materials are handled with due care; however, the publisher assumes no responsibility for care and safe return of unsolicited materials. All letters sent to ARKANSAS TIMES will be treated as intended for publication and are subject to ARKANSAS TIMES’ unrestricted right to edit or to comment editorially. ©2020 ARKANSAS TIMES LIMITED PARTNERSHIP

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THE FRONT

INCONSEQUENTIAL NEWS QUIZ

JUST SAY NO TO TOPGOLF EDITION

PLAY AT HOME, WHILE FIGURING OUT WHY MAYOR FRANK SCOTT JR. WANTS TO DESTROY OUR PUBLIC PARK FOR GLORIFIED MINI-GOLF.

2) After months of hem-hawing while Arkansans died of COVID-19, Governor Hutchinson signed an executive order July 16 that mandates wearing a mask in most public places. Under the order, what’s the penalty for not wearing a mask?

A) Potentially catching and passing on to others a respiratory disease that could cause you to die in the most unpleasant way short of falling into a slow-churning industrial sausage grinder.

B) Potentially giving your grandma and grandpa a disease that causes a significant portion of elderly people who get it to drown in their own mucus.

C) Potentially giving your child Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome, a potentially fatal condition that causes the organs of some children who contract COVID-19 to become inflamed, including the lungs, heart, brain, skin, eyes, kidneys, gastrointestinal organs and more.

D) A fine of between $100 and $500 and a misdemeanor on your record.

surveillance camera footage, why are police sure the suspect will be quickly found?

A) It was former White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

B) The culprit was a trained, bicycle-riding bear that had recently escaped from a circus.

C) It was Sen. Jason Rapert, fleeing from a constituent who hoped to ask him some questions.

D) In the footage, the suspect appears to be a “little person” with a black, bushy beard worthy of Tyrion Lannister from “Game of Thrones.”

3) Under the governor’s executive order mandating masks, during which of the following situations is a person exempt from wearing a mask without receiving a warning or fine?

A) Don’t want to.

B) Voted for Trump, and will vote for him again, by gawd.

C) If you deliver a long, angry, conspiracy-laden sermon about your constitutional right to be an idiot who needlessly puts lives at risk because masks are hot and scratchy on your delicate face.

D) People younger than 10, people consuming food and drink, people driving alone or with passengers from their household, and other exemptions.

5) Brewski’s Pub and Grub, a bar on Main Street in downtown Little Rock, was closed by the Arkansas Department of Health in early July. According to state officials, including state health secretary Nate Smith, which of the following preceded the closure?

A) The state received multiple complaints about the bar being crowded by people not wearing masks, including a karaoke night that reportedly saw the establishment packed.

B) The health department had traced a “cluster” of cases linked to the bar.

C) According to then-Secretary of Health Dr. Nate Smith, when agents with Alcoholic Beverage Control made a follow-up visit, they were told by Brewski’s management there was “nothing they could do about this.” Smith added: “That prompted us to take action.”

D) All of the above.

4) Conway Police asked for the public’s help in catching a suspect they claim stole a bike belonging to a 6-year-old boy outside the local Walmart. As seen in stills taken from

ANSWERS: D, D, D, D, D

1) On July 1, the City of Little Rock issued a Request for Proposals that seems customgeared to allow Topgolf, a neon-lit eyesore, to build a “golf entertainment” complex in the middle of War Memorial Park. Which of the following is a real aspect of the RFP? A) It states that the city can grant a lease of up to 99 years to the eventual winner of the RFP. B) It would allow the winner of the RFP to bulldoze up to 18 acres of pristine public land, including a huge grove of old-growth pines near Interstate 630 and University Avenue.

C) The portion of the park that would be bulldozed to make way for “golf entertainment” and parking lots is in the same place where the city’s R3LR Task Force proposes putting a bike park, picnic areas, pavilions, ball fields, the park entrance, a dog park and open greenspace for all Little Rock residents to enjoy, even those who don’t have enough money to spend $12 for a Topgolf burger.

D) All of the above.

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AUGUST 2020 9

THE FRONT BIG PIC

‘THEY DIDN’T KNOW WE WERE SEEDS’

THE SEVENTH STREET MURAL PROJECT CONTINUES TO GROW. PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON

On Saturday, May 30, artists X3mex (also known as Ch3mex) and Eats began painting a mural on the Seventh Street underpass below the Union Pacific Railroad tracks a couple of blocks west of the state Capitol. Now, that depiction of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered by a white cop in Minneapolis on Memorial Day, has become both symbol and gathering place for social justice movements in Little Rock. The mural’s got company: older murals opposite the Floyd painting and new ones on either side of the Floyd memorial, broadcasting messages of peace and protest.

SEVENTH STREET MEMORIAL: (Left to right) “I Can’t Breathe”and protest scene by Nicole Stewart, X3mex and Eats; George Floyd portrait, by X3mex and Eats; the “Unity” mural,

by Kevin Kresse; and “Patchwork Peace and Protest,” by Tanya Hollifield, a portrait of Crystal C. Mercer with quilt patches to be completed in September 2020 by Central High School students as part of Arkansas Peace Week.

10 AUGUST 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

‘THEY TRIED TO BURY US BUT THEY DIDN’T KNOW WE WERE SEEDS’: A panoramic message lines the eastern entrance to the railroad underpass.

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AUGUST 2020 11

CREATE, REVISE: Many of the Seventh Street murals were created in 2016, and were expanded by X3Mex and others in 2019 after vandals painted swastikas on the walls.

NINTH STREET SCENE: Among the scenes on Seventh Street is Nicole Stewart’s depiction of Little Rock’s historic West Ninth Street (above), a Black business district that boomed in the 1940s and 1950s.

12 AUGUST 2020

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AUGUST 2020 13

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Lowell has maintained strong during Covid. Because of the determination of all the people in this great northwest Arkansas city, Lowell will continue to be a stable and dependable source that supplies the needs of this region.

Because of you, the doors are open in Lowell.

Lowell Thanks You. 14 AUGUST 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

the TO-DO list

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

IMDB

WATCH A FILM WITH THE ARKANSAS PEACE & JUSTICE MEMORIAL MOVEMENT In April, when the pandemic first drove most of us homeward in retreat, a number of groups partnered to create the Shelter-in-Place Film Series — Arkansas PBS, Washitaw Foothills Youth Media Arts & Literacy Collective, Just Communities of Arkansas, Arkansas Cinema Society and others. Now, with funding from the Arkansas Humanities Council, the Arkansas Peace & Justice Memorial Movement is organizing a series that highlights Black voices, with screenings of “Wilmington On Fire,” about an 1898 massacre in North Carolina, July 31; “Harriet,” about the life and activism of Harriet Tubman (and for which Cynthia Erivo, pictured at left, was nominated for an Oscar), Aug. 16; the final installments of “Black Lives,” a 10-part series of documentary shorts produced by the RT Documentary Channel; and many more. To watch, you’ll need to set up an account with the video platform Ovee, which you can do at ovee.itvs.org; the platform allows you to chat with other viewers during the screening, and with discussion panelists afterward. View the list of films at apjmm2019.eventbrite.com.

Like a lot of creators, musician/videographer Rah Howard has used the last several months of isolation to make strides on projects he’d long been incubating. While documenting protests in Little Rock after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Howard recorded a conversation with UALR Children International Director Ryan D. Davis for a video called “Why We Are Fighting,” pictured above. “I was recording Ryan’s part remotely,” Howard said, “and he was dropping so many gems I felt like it would have been a disservice to only use a portion of that.” Enter “The Process,” a podcast focused on Black musicians, thinkers and entrepreneurs. “You go to shows and you see

RAH HOWARD

TUNE IN TO RAH HOWARD’S PODCAST, ‘THE PROCESS’ people like Rodney Block, or Bijoux, or even in the realms of art, people like Diane Harper or Kevin Kresse, and people say, ‘Ah, these people are so amazing,’ and I think we take for granted the amount of time that these people spent developing their crafts. … I wanted to do something that was a deeper dive, figuring out why people think the way they do.” Tune in on Anchor, Spotify or your podcast platform of choice to catch that conversation with Davis, or to hear Dazzmin Murry speak about “How Artists Are Navigating Through the Health and Racial Pandemics,” or men’s footwear designer Chike Walker on his creative process, or Southwest Boaz on the genius of Sam Cooke.

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AUGUST 2020 15

the TO-DO list

STEPHANIE SMITTLE

OLIVIA VALE

CATCH CONCERTS FROM ER-GENE KAHNG AND THOMAS ECHOLS AT THE TRILLIUM SALON SERIES Fayetteville-based Arkansas Times contributor Katy Henriksen has been creating intimate house concerts and classical experiments for a few years now through the Trillium Salon Series in the name of, as its website states, breaking down “the idea that classical music is only for the elite, a high-brow experience for those only in the upper crust. This is music for everyone, music that helps us all and speaks to the human condition.” Now, the series is happening across the screen, with remote salons from the likes of pianist/electronic composer Amos Cochran. This month, you can catch the fruits of guitarist Thomas Echols’ (pictured, top left) July residency on Fayetteville’s Mount Sequoyah, made possible by a grant from the Northwest Arkansas Council: a blend of software and synthesizer and augmented classical guitar called “perspectives on the unique privilege of breathing.”

Also on the Trillium calendar is an Aug. 1 concert from violinist Er-Gene Kahng (pictured, at left), 7 p.m., featuring pianist Nathan Carterette and Arkansas Symphony Orchestra musicians Katherine Williamson on violin, Timothy MacDuff on viola and David Gerstein on cello, playing works by Florence Price and Fodé Lassana Diabaté. To watch those concerts, or for details, find Trillium on YouTube, or go to trilliumsalonseries.com.

LISTEN TO JEFF NICHOLS TALK ABOUT ‘CREATING IN NON-COASTAL COMMUNITIES’ Arkansas-born director and screenwriter Jeff Nichols (“Loving,” “Midnight Special,” “Mud,” “Take Shelter,” “Shotgun Stories”) has long advocated for the benefit of creating from wherever you are — and without worrying so much about getting to Hollywood or New York to do it. Now, he’ll make that case in a webinar called “Creating in Non-Coastal Communities,” part of a series called “Creative Sustainability Sessions,” presented here by the Arkansas Cinema Society and the film-centric crowdfunding platform Seed & Spark. “There is a lot of pressure to move to one of the coasts when you decide a creative career is your path,” the ACS’s press release said. “Jeff found a way to have a successful filmmaking career and (mostly) stay out of LA and New York.” The webinar takes place at noon July 31, but the link will remain active for later viewing; find Seed & Spark on YouTube to watch.

16 AUGUST 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

KAMI RENEE

One of the state’s most sonically crisp and melodically catchy albums of 2019, “Sophisticated Soul,” was made mostly in a bedroom and a car, and Kami Renee’s back at it this year. “Couldn’t Help It,” swaddled in a mirage of flute riffs and accented by Kami Renee’s call-and-response vocal hooks (which are actually all, in fact, Kami), is your summer anthem, as suitable for isolation and headphones as it would have been for all the dance parties we are definitely not having anytime soon; thanks, 2020.

PERSEIDS METEOR SHOWERS Hard truth is, if you missed the comet Neowise streaking across the sky in July, you may have missed the most notable sky event in 2020. The good news, though, is that it’s August, and that means the Perseids meteor showers await chasing.

The showers will peak, as they do most years, during the pre-dawn hours of Aug. 12-13. This year, though, waiting until Aug. 18 or so means you’ll have a moonless sky for viewing, greatly increasing your chances of catching some Swift-Tuttle action. Set your alarm for 3 or 4 a.m., find a comfy patch of grass somewhere — preferably away from city lights — and bring the bug spray. Lest that sound to you like a ridiculous time to be sitting outside for a couple of hours, consider that average daytime temps in mid-August are around 91, and nighttime temps around 72. Nap accordingly.

CHARY AKMYRADOV

CUE UP/DOWNLOAD KAMI RENEE’S ‘COULDN’T HELP IT’

FOLLOW YOUR LOCAL INSTAGRAM GARDEN INFLUENCER Hurma Akmyradova’s Instagram account bio reads as follows: “Germinated in Turkmenistan. Transplanted to the US. Fruits in Little Rock, AR. Zone 8b.” And the reasons she has 16,000 followers make themselves pretty immediately apparent: her astounding vegetable and herb yields, her adorable children Bahar and Murat, her gorgeous jars of Dulce Rojo pepper powder, her recipes for Turkmen rice and Kelem dolama (cabbage rolls), and the soothing, tranquil voice in which she delivers her ever-practical advice, peppered with the occasional story about her upbringing in Turkmenistan and her experiences as a first-generation immigrant. By this point in the pandemic, even novices have probably figured out that gardening comes with its own particular brand of heartbreak.

Or, as Hurma puts it, that it “requires a lot of trial and error; and even more determination and consistency.” Do yourself a favor and let Hurma save you some time and some plant-related mishaps. Find her on Instagram @garden_plant_lover, or under Garden_Plant_Lover on Facebook and YouTube.

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AUGUST 2020 17

Don’ t l eav es omeone’ sf ami l ywi t h not hi ngbut memor i es .

Boat Smar t , Boat Sober .

18 AUGUST 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

NEWS & POLITICS

TRUMP AND THE COURTS

A SIZZLING SUMMER OF RULINGS.

BY ERNEST DUMAS

N

othing like it has occurred in all of history. That has been written too often the past four years, but find a spectacle that rivals the great collision of the three branches of government over Donald Trump’s misadventures that was recorded in a cascade of cases before the highest courts in the land this summer as we face the most fateful election in 160 years.

Originally, several cases headed to the appellate courts to validate President Trump’s reach for unprecedented power ahead of his re-election, but, in the end, the mission of the courts that he had stacked with well-wishers was merely to do what they could to save his dying re-election chances or to keep him out of the penitentiary. The judges — at least the quotient that were supposed to be his allies — did the best they could without looking like shameless toadies. They pushed a full accounting for his deeds down the road a little further, at least until after Nov. 3. Meantime, every single Supreme Court justice, including his two personal anointees, had to find a way to assure everyone that no, they did not believe the president was above the law, as Trump, like Richard Nixon, had claimed he was when he refused subpoenas for his tax records and for testimony on a variety of misdeeds.

All nine justices found their own ways to separate themselves from Trump at least in that way.

Chief Justice John Roberts did it most pointedly,

citing the first chief justice, John Marshall.

“As Marshall explained, a king is born to power and can ‘do no wrong,’ ” Roberts wrote in one of the subpoena cases. “The president, by contrast, is ‘of the people’ and subject to the law.”

Even Brett Kavanaugh, who reached the high bench in spite of a history of trying to subvert the law (with more space and time, we will embroider on that topic later), wanted to get at least that on record: “In our system of government, as this court has often stated, no one is above the law.”

They were writing about the president’s efforts, now spanning four years, to avoid letting Congress, prosecutors or the American people see the records of the taxes that he is obliged by law to pay. Why he is so desperate to keep them secret may be the biggest mystery ever. He has, after all, bragged about making many billions of dollars and even about cheating a little, because he said it showed that he was smarter than other folks. Congress and the New York prosecutor want to see if the tax records do show that Donald and his dad had an elaborate system of cheating the state and federal governments of taxes to enrich him and other heirs to old-man Trump’s fortune, as a leak of tax documents by Trump’s niece to The New York Times in 2018 showed; whether there is proof of his bribes to silence a porn actress and a Playboy pinup about his sexual romps with them before the 2016 election; and if there was financial skull-

duggery with the Russians and with Deutsche Bank, the one financial institution in the world that kept doing business with him after getting stiffed for years by bankruptcies or other scams.

Roberts wrote for a divided court that the Constitution and statutes clearly required Trump to let a New York prosecutor and a grand jury see his tax and financial records and perhaps even Congress as well, but the court tossed both cases back to lower courts, where Trump’s lawyers can keep balls in the air until after the election and, in the case of Congress, perhaps far beyond.

As more than one observer of the courts have observed, Roberts and the other justices are braced for a contested election in November — perhaps a replay of 2000 — and want to avoid the clear message of Bush v. Gore that the Republican justices will again put politics and patronage above the law.

Trump’s one clear-cut victory was not at the Supreme Court but the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where two Republican judges stopped the Mike Flynn criminal proceedings and ordered a trial court to, in effect, immediately declare his innocence, despite his admission — twice — that he had violated the law on Trump’s behalf in the Russian investigation. Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying about his conversations with the Russian ambassador before he realized that Trump was not going to pardon him until after the election, asked the court of appeals to make the trial judge cancel his guilty plea and dismiss his indictment before he had to enter a cell. On the directions of Trump, who obviously worried that Flynn might still decide to turn state’s evidence to avoid going to prison this summer, Attorney General Bill Barr tried to drop the charges against Flynn, even while admitting that Flynn had lied and broken the law. Barr in 1992 had persuaded George H.W. Bush to silence his confederates in the Iran-Contra scandal by pardoning them before they went to prison.

Rarely has any tribunal screwed up so clearly as the two judges on the D.C. circuit. Neomi Rao, a Trump supporter who had just joined the court after a stint as Justice Clarence Thomas’ clerk and teaching at the Antonin Scalia School of Law at James Madison University, got nearly everything wrong in her opinion. She said it was “appropriate” that the government wanted to dismiss the case against Flynn immediately to prevent “the judicial usurpation of executive power.” But it was Flynn, not the Justice Department, that asked the appellate court to close the case. She obviously hadn’t even read the file.

Neither, obviously, had she or the other judge read the appellate decisions in the Jim Guy

Tucker case from Arkansas in 2002, where the appellate court said that once a person had pled guilty to a crime and his plea accepted the guilty plea and sentence could never be undone, even if it turned out that he had not committed the crime because the law he was supposed to have violated did not exist. The Supreme Court let the crimeless Tucker conviction stand. If Rao’s opinion is allowed to stand, the current state of the law in America apparently is that the courts can reverse a guilty plea only if it is shown that the defendant is actually guilty.

With his judges seeming to have cleaned up his Flynn problem, Trump was emboldened to commute the prison sentence of his old pal Roger Stone, who the Mueller investigation proved with Stone’s own emails that he had collaborated with Russians and Julian Assange in 2016 to steal Democratic emails to help Trump’s election. Stone made it clear to Trump that he did not expect to spend even one day in jail because

ing exactly what they said — rather than substituting a “practical” understanding of what the court thought the authors had actually meant to say. The principal work of conservative jurisprudence for two centuries has been the search for plausible explanations of why the authors of the Constitution never really meant what they wrote when they delineated the natural rights of all people.

• George W. Bush’s man John Roberts wrote the 5-4 decision that hurt Trump the most — that the president could not put aside the law that allows 650,000 young immigrants brought to America as children — the so-called “dreamers” — to stay. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh stayed loyal to him and against foreigners.

• Again in an opinion by Chief Roberts, the court outraged Trump and conservatives by sticking to its abortion precedents and invalidating a Louisiana law that made it nearly impossible for a woman to get an abortion, although Roberts had voted the other way on a nearly identical Texas law four years ago. Abortion foes had hoped the court would uphold the law and set the stage for reversing Roe v.

Wade. Kavanaugh and Gorsuch stayed with Trump, and pro-choice forces worried that Roberts’ peculiar reasoning in the case was a setup for an eventual repeal of Roe v. Wade — after the election.

• But then the Supreme Court seemed to write a new definition of the establishment clause and religious liberty — one that would astonish Jefferson and Madison, who were responsible for the religion clauses — to suit Trump’s obsession with not letting women avoid pregnancies. His administration sought to modify the Affordable Care Act to allow employers to withhold insurance coverage for health remedies like contraception from their workers if they could claim religious beliefs to support their opposition to it. Employers who claim a religious conviction can now elect not to insure their workers’ contraception remedies, whether it is for birth control or some other medical purpose like endometriosis, ovarian cysts or severe acne. Of course, the money they shell out is not theirs but the employees’ money. Employer contributions to health insurance are a substitute for wages, a remedy to government wage controls in World War II. Justice Thomas’ reasoning on contraceptives seems to open the Affordable Care Act to other ways to slash people’s medical coverage. And that is before the Supreme Court — actually, just John Roberts — considers whether to abolish the law altogether and eliminate health insurance for 20 million Americans. Republican senators facing re-election need not worry about the backlash because it will follow the election.

TRUMP’S ONE CLEAR CUT VICTORY: SPARING MICHAEL FLYNN.

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ARKANSAS TIMES

he had steadfastly refused to cooperate with the good Republican Robert Mueller and the FBI on exposing the Russian crimes. After the election, Trump will issue the pardons for Stone, Paul Manafort and other Russian collaborators — shortly before he gets his own pardon from the short-term president Mike Pence.

Here are the courts’ other summertime remedies to the Trump dilemmas, some more surprising than others: • The Supreme Court ruled against Trump, 6 -3, by holding that employment discrimination laws, particularly Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibited employers from discriminating against gay and transgender workers. It was a decision that flowed naturally from the court’s Obergefell ruling in 2015 that the Constitution assured gay couples the same right as others to marry. Trump had his Justice Department intervene for bigoted employers to defend discrimination against gays and lesbians, but then his own appointee, Neil Gorsuch, wrote the opinion protecting the workers! Trump’s other appointee, Kavanaugh, stood by him, arguing in a dissenting opinion that it was wrong for the Supreme Court to interpret the words of the Constitution and statutes “literally” — as mean-

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ARKANSAS FACES A SCHOOL YEAR LIKE NO OTHER.

BY LINDSEY MILLAR

22 AUGUST 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

I

n July, Kristin Addison-Brown walked by the school supply aisle in Walmart in Jonesboro and had to fight back tears. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, her son, Isaac Brown, will stay at home at least for the first semester of the school year and enter fourth grade in the Jonesboro Public Schools Virtual Academy. “I love the smell of the pencils, crayons, the paper and all that,” Addison-Brown said. “It was a stark reminder of what we’re doing.”

Governor Hutchinson has decreed that public school in Arkansas for some 480,000 students and 70,000 teachers and other staff will begin the week of Aug. 24. But even at this late date, what school amid COVID-19 will look like remains sketchy and fraught. Many parents with health and safety concerns, like the Browns in Jonesboro, will keep their children at home to receive remote, online learning. Others, whose jobs don’t allow them the flexibility to work remotely and oversee school work, will send their kids back to school in masks to teachers who will spend much of their day keeping students as far apart from one another as possible.

Health and policy experts generally make the same case to reopen schools: Kids learn better in person, and further time outside of the classroom will widen the equity gap. Many children rely on school for breakfast and lunch; 60 percent of Arkansas students qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Research shows that school is essential to children’s social and emotional development. School employees are also mandated reporters of abuse and neglect and, from March until June with school and many summer programs closed, there were nearly 40 percent fewer calls to Arkansas’s child maltreatment hotline than the same period last year. More broadly, without in-person school, parents can’t effectively return to work, and the economy will suffer.

But public health officials have also said that schools should reopen only when COVID-19 cases are declining. In Arkansas, COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths have been spiking

through the summer, and the state lacks the rapid testing and contact tracing resources that would help contain the growth of the virus.

Governor Hutchinson has dismissed concerns about the safety of reopening schools, arguing that the public benefit of in-person instruction outweighs health risks. But teachers argue that schools, many with poor ventilation and insufficient space to keep kids socially distant, are especially ill-prepared to mitigate spread of the coronavirus, and many say they fear for their lives.

“I have not hugged my parents, been in someone else’s home, gotten a haircut, gone to a restaurant, in months to stay safe,” one Little Rock teacher said in an email. “Now in less than a month, I’m supposed to forget all the safety as numbers of cases are higher than ever because I’m responsible for education, childcare and the economy. This cannot fall on public education.”

K

ristin Addison-Brown and her husband, Brandon Brown, reluctantly decided to keep Isaac home after seeing the plan for reopening from the Jonesboro Public School District. In the district’s initial outreach to parents, released before the governor issued a statewide mask mandate, there was no requirement for students or teachers to wear masks and little detail on how COVID-19 cases would be handled.

“We looked at the plan for school, and we weren’t very reassured,” Addison-Brown said. “I feel for the school administrators having to deal with this right now. I don’t know that they’re getting a lot of support from the state and federal government with key decisions they’re having to make. They’re between a rock and a hard place.”

Isaac’s parents didn’t come to the decision easily. Isaac, 9, has been attending the International Studies Magnet School, and the district’s policy is that students who enroll in virtual school won’t be guaranteed a spot in a magnet school in the future, but will be given preference. Addison-Brown said the family loves the school and fears the possibility of further disruption to Isaac’s friendships

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if he isn’t able to return. She’s a neuropsychologist who owns her own practice, and her husband has been working from home remotely. They plan to split days supervising Isaac, their only child.

Addison-Brown said she wasn’t worried about Isaac falling behind academically. “I understand we’re fortunate in that regard,” she said. “From the social, behavioral perspective, I’m a little more concerned. We really struggled with AMI [alternative methods of instruction, the spring version of remote school]. He kind of hated it. He does well with social feedback, praise from his teachers. He’s very sociable and really misses his friends.”

“I’d rather be in in-person school,” Isaac said.

“I get to see my friends. I get to do recess and play soccer with a lot of other kids. At home, I don’t get to see other kids.” He said he’s worried about the coronavirus. “It’s killed a lot of people. It’s really high in Arkansas.” He believes scientists will develop a vaccine, but thinks it might be a while.

For Isaac and his parents, the disease isn’t abstract. His great-grandmother died of COVID-19 in a nursing home. Isaac’s father had to quarantine at home after potential exposure, an isolation cut short by the devastating tornado that hit Jonesboro in late March. The family was spared in each case: Brandon Brown did not get the disease, and the tornado spared their home. Ultimately, concern for Isaac’s grandparents pushed the Browns to keep Isaac at home. Addison-Brown’s parents live next door, interact regularly with the Browns and are in their 80s. “We didn’t want him going to school and bringing [COVID-19] here,” Addison-Brown said. “My dad was like, ‘Well, we could [die] tomorrow.’ I said, ‘Yes that’s true,’ but A) COVID is not the way to go and B) just the potential guilt that I think [Isaac] would feel and I would feel.”

In Little Rock, Adyson Shelton plans to return to Pulaski Heights Middle School for her eighthgrade year. Adyson, 13, wants to be someone who “contributes to world peace” somehow when she grows up. Or maybe a psychologist. She said the coronavirus pandemic weighed heavily on her mind in the spring, but she’s tried not thinking about it as much lately to avoid stress. Still, she’s being cautious and rarely leaving the house. She worries that her classmates won’t all take safety precautions when school resumes. “I know that some people aren’t going to take it seriously enough,” Adyson said. “There are going to be kids who are going to play too much.” Most of all, she worries about the people who have asymptomatic COVID-19 infections and unwittingly come to school.

But she’s also worried about her academic future. In the spring, when Hutchinson shuttered school campuses, the Little Rock School District moved to AMI and learning management systems with stock lessons. Adyson thought it was horrible and far from the in-classroom experience.

She’s most excited this year about returning to school to take courses that will count toward high school credit: algebra, French II and physical science. She’s looking forward to seeing her friends, but knows that they’ll have to remain physically apart. She also knows there’s likely to be disruption. With cases of COVID-19 expected to peak in Arkansas in the fall, she thinks it’s unlikely she’ll 24 AUGUST 2020

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‘IN LESS THAN A MONTH, I’M SUPPOSED TO FORGET ALL THE SAFETY AS NUMBERS OF CASES ARE HIGHER THAN EVER BECAUSE I’M RESPONSIBLE FOR EDUCATION, CHILDCARE AND THE ECONOMY. THIS CANNOT FALL ON PUBLIC EDUCATION.’

remain in the classroom all school year.

Medical data suggests that children are less susceptible to COVID-19 and less likely to require hospitalization. That’s not the case for Arkansas’s public school educators, who face their own impossible options: They can return to school and face the health risks, they can take leave (if available) or they can quit. In a July survey of more than 6,000 Arkansas educators by the Arkansas Education Association, 90 percent said they were concerned about the health risks to students in reopening campuses, and 88 percent said they were concerned about the risks to their own families.

Almost 50 percent, 2,900 teachers and support staff, said they were leaving their jobs or considering retiring or leaving the profession early because of the pandemic.

The stress is particularly acute among teachers with health concerns about themselves and their own children. Leann is a teacher in the LRSD with an elementary school-aged daughter who was diagnosed several years ago with Kawasaki disease, a rare inflammatory condition. (All the teachers interviewed for this article asked that their real names not be published out of fear of retribution.

Most teacher contracts prohibit educators from talking to the media without permission from the school administration. All names are pseudonyms.) Her daughter spent a week in Arkansas Children’s Hospital with the disease. She was so swollen with a rash she couldn’t walk and had a fever so high that she appeared “lifeless.” Medical research has shown that a small percentage of children infected by the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, have contracted a similar, multi-inflammatory disease. Leann said she still has “a bit of PTSD” from watching her child suffer and is “terrified to think she could catch [COVID] and suffer through that again.” But, she has no option other than to send her daughter back to school. Leann’s father suffers from cardiovascular problems and her mother is at high risk because of her age, so she can’t call on them for help.

Susan, a teacher in Fort Smith, has six children, including one with Crohn’s disease and two adopted from foster care with fetal alcohol syndrome. She and her husband can’t afford their mortgage unless she continues teaching, but she’s “terrified of what it’ll do to my kids if I bring it home to them.” She and her husband have taken out a loan to convert a shed in their backyard into living quarters so she can quarantine there once school resumes.

Ophelia, an elementary school teacher in El Dorado, said she feels “gaslit” in her community when she hears from people who rail against masks and post pictures of vacations in Florida on social media that it’s safe to return to school and that her fears are unfounded. A mother to a toddler, she’s worried about putting her child back in daycare and about the potential that she’ll bring the virus home to her family. “It really just comes down to data for me. There isn’t enough for me to feel comfortable,” she said.

Pam, a teacher in a small Central Arkansas district, is a single mother of a middle school student. She’s worried not only about her daughter falling behind, but also about what would happen to the child if Pam were to contract COVID-19 and die.

BRIAN CHILSON

LEARNING REMOTELY: Kristin Addison-Brown decided to keep her son, Isaac, home this semester over health concerns.

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RETT PEEK

BACK TO SCHOOL: Adyson Shelton plans to return to her LRSD campus because she knows she learns better in person.

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“By opening schools in person this August, we are knowingly and willingly subjecting our educators, food service workers, custodial workers, paraprofessionals, substitute teachers, nurses, etc. to certain exposure to the virus,” she wrote in an email. “There is no question of whether it will be safe or not. We all know that it is a death march. My school has about 30 teachers. Out of those, at least 75 percent are either in the upper age bracket, have underlying health issues, or are the caregivers of others with health issues. We know for a fact that when those people are exposed, we will lose many of them. You cannot tell me that it is better psychologically for kids to see their teachers in person dropping like flies than it would be to spend (with perspective) a short amount of time with us virtually.”

D

espite a rising number of COVID-19 cases in Arkansas, Hutchinson and state Education Secretary Johnny Key have repeatedly said schools should reopen to in-person instruction in August, echoing a case that’s been made more pointedly by President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who have threatened to withhold federal funding from schools around the country that don’t reopen their doors.

Trump and other administration officials have said that the guidance on schools reopening from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is too restrictive and expensive. Among other things, the CDC says students’ desks should be placed 6 feet apart and schools in communities where there is “substantial transmission” should not reopen. Arkansas leaders and the Trump administration have also ignored the White House’s Opening Up America guidelines, which say that states shouldn’t proceed with phased reopenings, including restarting in-person school, without a downward trajectory of documented cases or positivity rate over a 14-day period. Governor Hutchinson has described both the White House and CDC guidelines as informing state decision-making, but he’s said the state will craft its policies “based on the uniqueness of our circumstances” in Arkansas.

In spring, Hutchinson cited public health guidance in shutting Arkansas schools. He initially closed them in mid-March, describing the move as temporary, but on April 6, he announced that campuses would remain shut through the end of the school year. On April 6, there were 1,000 positive COVID-19 cases in the state, 800 of which were considered active. As of July 23, Arkansas had seen 36,259 positive cases, 7,009 of which were considered active.

Like the Trump administration, Hutchinson and other Arkansas leaders haven’t offered a plan to safely reopen schools. In the U.S., school districts are politically autonomous for the most part, and many large school districts in communities with serious COVID-19 outbreaks, including ones in Atlanta, Dallas and Nashville, have opted to begin the school year online-only. In Arkansas, the state Department of Education has left most of the decisions on how to reopen schools in the 2020-21 school year to local districts — aside from the most crucial one: The state has said that all schools must reopen to in-person instruction.

LIKE THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION, GOVERNOR HUTCHINSON AND OTHER ARKANSAS LEADERS HAVEN’T OFFERED A PLAN TO SAFELY REOPEN SCHOOLS.

Dr. Gary Wheeler is the president of the Arkansas chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a part-time senior adviser at the state health department. Speaking on July 10, he said Arkansas pediatricians would be “very, very concerned if we were supposed to open schools tomorrow.” But, he said, “We know that there are ways to make the school environment relatively healthy and safe.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine have urged states to make reopening school campuses a priority. The pediatricians group’s initial guidance in late June said “all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school.” It called for all students to wear masks, for desks to be spaced 3-6 feet apart, for students’ movement between classrooms to be limited, and for outdoor classrooms to be used.

As President Trump, eager to deliver a jolt to the economy to bolster his dwindling re-election bid, began aggressively pushing for schools to reopen in July, he and others in his administration repeatedly cited the statement from the pediatricians as support for in-person school. Governor Hutchinson did the same on July 9 before he announced that he was pushing back the start date of the school year from Aug. 13 to Aug. 24-26 to give schools more time to prepare. Neither Trump nor Hutchinson have publicly embraced the specific guidelines in the document from pediatricians.

In likely response to the political appropriation of the guidance, the pediatricians group, along with national teachers unions, issued a second statement July 10, emphasizing safety and the important role science should play in decisions about reopening schools. On July 21, the Arkansas Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement saying it didn’t support a statewide return to school in August and advocated for county-level considerations of infection rates in determining when schools should reopen.

Medical literature suggests that children who contract COVID-19 are less likely than adults to become seriously ill or transmit the disease. “In addition to the national data that we’ve seen, the data in Arkansas support that the complications and morbidity from COVID-19 are very limited in children up to the age of 18,” Wheeler said. In Arkansas as of July 21, 4,123 children ages 0-17 have tested positive for COVID-19, 47 have been hospitalized and none have died.

Requiring masks is the No. 1 thing that should be done to make school safe, Wheeler said. The initial guidance to school districts from the state education department left decisions on whether to require school employees and students to wear face coverings to districts. But after the state developed its back-to-school playbook for schools, Hutchinson issued a statewide mask mandate, which went into effect July 20. It applies only to those 10 and older. Before that order, school leaders in many districts had already announced that all children and all employees would be required to wear face coverings when they can’t maintain a distance of 6 feet from one another. The four largest school districts in the state, Springdale, Little ARKANSASTIMES.COM

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BRIAN CHILSON

THE SCHOOL DEBATE: (Clockwise from top left) Carol Fleming, president of the Arkansas Education Association, says teachers’ concerns have been ignored.

Governor Hutchinson has repeatedly insisted that school campuses reopen. The Arkansas Public Policy Panel’s Bill Kopsky says that the state’s handling of school reopening is a dereliction of its constitutional duty. The LRSD plan for next year remains in flux, while the district waits for parents to decide on in-person or virtual school, Superintendent Mike Poore said.

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Rock, Rogers and Bentonville, will require everyone to wear face coverings.

(Little Rock, now in its sixth year under state control, bumbled the mask question, initially releasing in early July a frequently asked questions document to teachers that read, “When feasible, older children should wear face coverings within facilities. It is not required for children to wear a mask. Let the parent determine!” After the district received sharp criticism from the public, Superintendent Mike Poore apologized, said the language had been mistakenly borrowed from a state document, and when the LRSD released its official plan, it said face coverings were required.)

Wheeler said another important safety measure is keeping kids spaced appropriately, which will require limiting the number of children in a classroom, a goal that can be accomplished through using spaces like auditoriums that aren’t usually used for classrooms, or by shifting schedules so that children come to school at different times. Ventilation is another important consideration, Wheeler said. “If you can dilute the air, you can dilute the chance of acquiring the virus.” Many schools have put special emphasis on sanitizing protocols, but Wheeler said it was much more important to get kids in the habit of frequently washing their hands with soapy water or using alcohol gel.

Wheeler conceded that the steps needed to make school safe for educators and students — purchasing adequate personal protective equipment, making adjustments to school physical plants — will be expensive. “This is an immediate, time-sensitive issue,” he said. Policymakers in Arkansas need to make whatever funds are necessary available to school districts, he said.

But there’s no evidence the state is taking the necessary steps to ensure school is safe, said Bill Kopsky, executive director of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, a grassroots group that advocates for social and economic justice. Requiring school districts to reopen, but leaving them to figure out how to do that safely, is a dereliction of duty by state leaders, he said.

“At the end of the day, an adequate and equitable education is in our [state] constitution,” Kopsky said. “It is the state’s responsibility. It’s not the local school districts’ job; it’s the state’s job. For the state to issue this delegating authority down to local districts that don’t have the resources to meet the needs and don’t have the expertise in public health to meet the needs, it’s an abdication of [the state’s] legal, and I would argue, moral responsibility.”

The Public Policy Panel has called for Arkansas to delay the start of school this year until every district can meet the recommendations from the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics and the state can ensure that every student has access to “a quality virtual learning opportunity.”

“School is essential,” Kopsky said. “You pay a heavy cost in not having school. The fact that we can’t have school in a safe way is devastating. It falls squarely at the feet of the governor and the federal government.”

Carol Fleming, president of the Arkansas Education Association, said teachers across the state

are worried about safety and feel like their voices are being ignored.

“The main concern we’re hearing [from teachers] is that there’s no specific guidance from the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education on baseline safety requirements,” Fleming said.

“Because of that we have a patchwork of local decisions that are not including the perspectives of teachers and parents.

“Our position on that is that when schools reopen that should be dependent on advice from medical experts, but how we reopen should be based on the advice of educators. There has to be a statewide vision for basic health and safety for students and educators.”

The Little Rock Education Association, the largest local affiliate of the AEA, has called for school to begin online-only until cases begin to decline.

Beyond safety, teachers are also worried about the potential impact of blanket waivers to state education law and rules approved by the State Board of Education in June. The waivers cover instructional duty and requirements that schools share proposed policy changes with personnel policy committees, made up of teachers and other staff. Fleming said teachers are especially concerned that, because of the waivers, they’ll be the ones charged with cleaning and disinfecting their rooms regularly.

‘SCHOOL IS ESSENTIAL. YOU PAY A HEAVY COST IN NOT HAVING side from the most basic question of whether SCHOOL. A returning to school at all is safe, teachers and parents long lists of additional questions.

THE FACT THAT How willhaveschools deal with suspected or confirmed cases of COVID-19, for example? Many of WE CAN’T HAVE the specifics have been left up to the health department to deal with as situations develop, but SCHOOL IN A the basic response will be similar to how the department deals with occupational outbreaks: In the event of a positive case, all those who SAFE WAY IS have had close contact, defined by the health deas being within 6 feet from an infected DEVASTATING.’ partment person for 15 cumulative minutes in a day, will be required to quarantine for 14 days. But health officials have declined to engage in specific hypotheticals about what circumstances would require a school to be closed, though they have suggested that a single COVID-19 positive won’t necessarily lead to a school being shuttered.

The education department, in coordination with the health department, released a stoplight, color-coded framework for responding to outbreaks, ranging from a green “limited response” to “minimal spread,” which would require only limited or no closure of a school building, to a red-colored “critical response” to “substantial spread,” which would require buildings or districts to shut and move all students to remote, online learning. The state hasn’t quantified what “minimal” and “substantial” mean.

The Department of Health has said it will manage contact tracing in schools with assistance from a point of contact in a school, typically a school nurse. But the health department has been chronically behind on contact tracing through the summer, and a backlog at commercial labs has led to delays in providing test results, which makes contact tracing less useful. This worries Wheeler.

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“Speaking as an Academy of American Pediatricians member, I’m concerned about whether the health department has the capacity to absorb the counsel and questions and other things that are going to be demanded of it [by schools.]”

How will schools keep children separated? For on-site instruction, schools across the state are approaching a return to campuses in a variety of ways. Little Rock eSTEM public charter schools, the largest charter system in the state, and Fayetteville Public Schools each plan to offer in-person instruction only two days a week to allow for sufficient social distancing within classrooms (eSTEM will provide a third day of on-site instruction to half of its students each nine weeks).

Hutchinson was critical of the two-day-a-week move in Fayetteville, saying July 16 that the district had “gotten off track” of what he expected of schools.

Most other districts plan to hold school every weekday, but how or if they’ll manage to keep children spaced safely remains a work in progress.

The LRSD began surveying parents in June on whether they planned to send their kids back to school or stick with remote learning. As of July 15, Superintendent Poore said the parents of about 11,000 of the 24,000 students in the district had responded to the survey. The parents of 55 percent of students have said they want their children to return to school; the parents of the other 45 percent want them to study remotely. The LRSD is allowing parents to alter their decision and is hoping to get responses from the families of another 9,000 students by Aug. 1.

Poore said he anticipated that Little Rock schools will rearrange classrooms and adapt underutilized space, but to what extent will depend on how many kids return to each school building. Poore conceded that the district likely won’t be able to achieve “perfect spacing all the time.”

He said that was part of the reason the LRSD decided to require that everyone in every school building wear a mask.

Will educators have sufficient personal protective equipment? Money should not be an obstacle. The state education department received $128.75 million through the federal CARES Act for the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund and then allocated those dollars to school districts based on how much Title I federal funding they receive. Title I dollars go to schools with high percentages of children in low-income families. Fleming, the president of the Arkansas Education Association, said she’d heard from educators who had been asked by schools to pick up supplies when they see them in stores because of supply chain delays.

The LRSD will have sufficient supply, Poore said. The district received an ESSER allotment of $6.6 million, the largest in the state (federal rules require districts to make a portion of that money available to private schools; as of July 14, Little Rock private schools had taken $732,000).

The LRSD has purchased 3 million three-ply face masks, 3,400 face shields and thousands of bottles and refills of hand sanitizer.

The state is requiring schools to develop a “blended learning” plan, which mixes online education with in-person instruction, so dis30 AUGUST 2020

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THE SPRINGDALE SCHOOL DISTRICT, THE STATE’S LARGEST, REPORTED TO THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OVER THE SUMMER THAT 40 PERCENT OF ITS STUDENTS HAVE NO ACCESS TO INTERNET. tricts are prepared to pivot to remote learning if needed. Schools don’t have to offer students an online-only tract, but most districts will. Using CARES Act funds, the education department awarded a $2.4 million grant to the Arkansas Public School Resource Center, a nonprofit group funded heavily by the Walton family that advocates on behalf of charter schools and rural school districts. With the grant funding, APSRC in turn contracted with Lincoln Learning Solutions, a Pennsylvania-based online learning provider, and is making it available to Arkansas school districts at no cost. The package includes a learning management system, a web application that functions like a digital classroom. The app lets teachers communicate with students, upload lessons and take attendance. Lincoln Learning also provides curriculum, including text, videos and games. In a survey conducted by the state education department, 133 districts out of the total of 263 indicated they planned to use the Lincoln Learning content.

The education department also provides $3.8 million in annual grant funding to Virtual Arkansas, a state virtual school that provides courses to students, especially in rural districts, that aren’t offered in their schools. A total of 217 school districts and nine charter schools use Virtual Arkansas annually, education department spokeswoman Kimberly Mundell said. In the education department survey, 176 districts said they plan to

use it for digital learning this year (districts can use multiple providers).

When Isaac Brown begins school remotely in the Jonesboro Public School Virtual Academy, he’ll receive instruction from teachers employed by the Jonesboro district or a Jonesboro “partner.” The Jonesboro district is using Lincoln Learning along with other providers. In the LRSD, all online instruction will come from Little Rock teachers through the Schoology learning management system. Poore has promised that, unlike the learning management systems the district used in the spring, itslearning and Edmentum, Schoology will allow teachers more flexibility in how they deliver instruction.

The Arkansas Public Policy’s Kopsky said he has “giant questions about the quality of online learning platforms. They didn’t perform well in the spring. They’ve frankly never performed well. All indicators are that they widen out equity gaps, and they’re even less effective for kids who have other barriers to learning, whether they be poverty, internet access or other factors.”

Barriers to internet access remain a problem in Arkansas. After the lack of infrastructure was laid bare in the spring when schools were shut down, state leaders pledged to address the problem this fall. But it’s hard to develop infrastructure in a matter of months. The Springdale School District, the state’s largest, reported to the education department over the summer that 40 percent of its students have no access to internet.

Another 30 percent only have internet speeds ranging from 2-10 Megabits per second. The FCC says students need between 5-25 Mbps — and notes that broadband needs to increase the more devices in use at a time.

Rich Huddleston, executive director of the nonprofit Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, said his group is paying close attention to how the state and local districts spend the millions in federal aid they have received. Priority should be given to programs that help low-income students and students of color, Huddleston said. The state has long struggled to close the achievement gap, he said, and hasn’t sufficiently invested in quality pre-K education, special education, summer or afterschool programs.

As if the immediate future weren’t bleak enough, Huddleston worries that, amid the pandemic, not enough attention is going to the education adequacy study, commissioned by the state legislature, underway this year. It’s the first of its kind in more than a decade, and will help determine how K-12 education is funded for years to come. Another worry, according to Huddleston and other advocates, is the potential for groups in the state to use the pandemic as an opening to further undermine traditional public education.

But in crisis, there’s also the potential for positive change, Kopsky said.

“The upside of this is there’s an opportunity to reimagine what you want from a school,” he said. “If we find the equity gaps we think we’re going to find, we can get creative about fixing them. The COVID crisis has brought equity into focus more than it has been for a while. Maybe we can use this as a pivot point for truly addressing equity rather than skirting around the issues.”

WELCOMES

NEXT MONTH! SAVVYkids is the Central Arkansas magazine for parents and families focused on education, health and parenting.

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AUGUST 2020

GET YOUR SHOP ON AT FABULOUS FINDS! It’s customer appreciation month in August, which means storewide 25 percent off all month (on items over $20). Hurry in now for the best selection. With over 30 dealers, the selection is excellent but get there early for the best!!!

CUPIDS LINGERIE IS NOW OPEN DOWNTOWN ON E. MARKHAM & SCOTT! ARGENTA’S RISTORANTE CAPEO IS NOW OPEN FOR BUSINESS!

FADED ROSE Our patio is now open at 50% capacity.

We’re still holding off on dine-in service, but come see us on the patio... or call in your takeout/curbside order every day from 11a-9p.

GET DOWN TO SOMA! You can now grab food AND drink and sit under the tents.

FOUR QUARTER BAR Reopening soon!! Look for our new outdoor dining and drinking options. Check us out on Facebook and Fourquarterbar.com

KEMURI SUSHI, SEAFOOD, ROBATA

You can now order online!

EXPLORE PINE BLUFF

MIDTOWN BILLIARDS is OPEN current hours Thurs - Sun 6PM to 3AM

WORDSWORTH BOOKS

COME JOIN THE PARTY! INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE DAY AUGUST 29

We’ll be featuring virtual author events, new books, literary games, activities for kids and special sales available both in-store and online.

Visit our website and follow us on Facebook or Instagram to learn more.

With the uncertainty of traveling during the COVID-19 pandemic, Explore Pine Bluff has developed several innovative ways to continue to share Pine Bluff’s rich cultural heritage with visitors. These online experiences include the WA&P Radio Show, which is a collection of 26 videos relating to famous artists and musicians with Pine Bluff roots; the Delta Civil Rights Legacy Trail, which is a digital brochure with 22 videos pertaining to Pine Bluff’s history with the civil rights movement; and a collection of videos sharing Pine Bluff’s contribution to cinema and theater. Coming soon to the ExplorePineBluff. com website will be the addition of podcast episodes, music playlist, virtual museum and a docu-series — all relating to Pine Bluff and the Delta. Explore Pine Bluff is governed by the Pine Bluff Advertising and Promotion Commission.

SHERI STORIE Director, Explore Pine Bluff

CANCELLED EVENTS/UPDATES HILLCREST HARVESTFEST: It was originally set for Oct. 24, but festival organizers are committed to bringing HarvestFest back in 2021.

LITTLE ROCKTOBERFEST: Save the NEW date to enjoy a few cold ones on Sept. 25, 2021, at War Memorial Stadium.

MAIN STREET FOOD TRUCK FESTIVAL: Rescheduled for September 2021.

ACANSA ARTS FESTIVAL: The Acansa A(r)T HOME series will continue, featuring videos and other digital content in partnership with artists and organizations throughout central Arkansas and around the world.

The 2020 edition of the WORLD’S SHORTEST ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARADE, which had been rescheduled from March 17 to October 17, was canceled today because of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

SPA-CON V CANCELED The multi-genre comics and pop culture convention that had been scheduled for this September 18 – 20, was canceled today due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Spa-Con 2021 will be held September 23 – 26 of next year.

Special Advertising Section

Zoo Starts With You...

We would like to thank everyone for your continued support during this difficult time. The assistance we have received from our Zoo members and community keeps your Zoo thriving. We still have a long road to recovery and hope you will consider making a special gift to the Little Rock Zoo Recovery Fund, through the Arkansas Zoological Foundation. Your tax deductible donation will help us continue the important job of caring for your Zoo animals and protecting animals for the future.

THANK YOU!

CULTURE

BLACK HISTORY, PRESENT TENSE JUSTIN TYLER BRYANT TALKS BLACK FUGITIVITY, ‘FUTURE HISTORY’ AND HIS EFFORTS TO ARCHIVE A HISTORICALLY BLACK SCHOOL IN ARKANSAS COUNTY.

BY TARA STICKLEY

ON THE STEPS AT THE STUDIO: Artist Justin Tyler Bryant.

PHOTOGRAPHY BRIAN CHILSON ARKANSASTIMES.COM

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DRAWING ON HISTORICAL IMAGES: Bryant’s research for the project at Holman High has included finding historical figures in documents at the Museum of the Grand Prairie.

It Costs No More to Go FIrst Class ...

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t’s a rare gift nowadays to talk for hours, faceto-face, with someone outside of the family bubble. On a June morning, with the humid sky low-slung and heavy, Justin Tyler Bryant and I took off for his studio at historic Holman High School in Stuttgart to share a winding conversation about the insufficiencies of the dominant American historical narrative, the absence of extant firsthand accounts from Black people within that narrative, and Bryant’s artistic practice of filling in the gaps of the historical archive.

“The thing that makes Black archives different is that they’re never legitimized,” Bryant said.

“They’re usually not kept in the same way that other archives are. … Essentially what’s happening is that’s another form of suppression.”

Most recently, Bryant’s art has led him home to Stuttgart where, through a fellowship from Mid-America Arts Alliance’s Interchange program, he is creating a “living archive” at Holman, an historically Black institution. Bryant attended Holman as a child and now has a studio in the building. There, he’s been compiling interviews with alumni, leading workshops and making drawings of past teachers surrounded by complex, layered starscapes. As we drove through the rain, past the rice fields along U.S. Highway 165, Bryant recounted his research into Black radical archives and the discernment required to integrate them in a way that intervenes with the presiding narrative of American history.

The last time we discussed your art, you were telling me about forms of Black cultural resilience such as code-switching, the practice of alternating between two languages or dialects depending on the cultural context. Today, we’ve been discussing this

idea of suppression and resilience in terms of revising the historical archive to be more inclusive of marginalized voices. How does this connect to your current work?

In reference to Stuttgart, I’m from there so I already have a lot of information to start from.

There’s a book on Arkansas County, and because I love history so much, I was so excited about that book. … It has all these pictures of Stuttgart in it, and the first thing when I open the book — which is to be expected — is it’s about ducks and rice. … The next thing is: This is almost all white people in here. Where are the Black people? Oh, OK, here is a section with some Black people in it, and it was three pages, and it was about Holman. And I thought to myself, “This is great that they at least have something with Holman in it … but this doesn’t even scratch the surface of what’s there.” And I knew that immediately. To be very honest, I was pissed off about it. And it kind of started me down this road.

Then, right before the pandemic, I contacted the Museum of the Grand Prairie because someone told me they had information [about] and pictures of Holman and the Black community.

I’d been to that museum plenty of times as a kid. It’s mostly tractors, and to their credit it’s all donated stuff. It’s not like they have all of this money. It’s really great because you can see the old church and schoolhouse. But they had an entire folder that is not on display. It is full of images and things about Holman, and there’s no example of it in any of the displays.

So I asked them if they could copy it for me, and they were so happy that I was interested. But it’s stuff like that. I kind of want to be proven wrong a lot of times, but usually I’m not. I had a hunch

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that there was going to be something there, and it was going to involve Black people, and it was not going to be displayed. But I’m not only interested in what the images are, but why they haven’t been out. Someone should be asking for it to be seen. Maybe that’s my job, too. … So it does make Black archives special in a sense because you really have to think about it in a way that you understand the history and the marginalization of Black people, too, and even understand how those archives are not seen or are kept differently.

What life does the building have now?

It’s a community center … The auditorium, people can rent it out. You can also use these [class]rooms here. … It’s owned by the alumni.

They do Sunday dinners, and sometimes people will do their baby showers here.

Your impetus for this project — was it finding that book on Stuttgart and seeing very limited information about the Black community, then going to the museum and discovering a whole file that wasn’t on display?

Well, I’m always interested in Black history in general, and I’ve always had an interest in Holman. Growing up, I didn’t know that Holman was an [historically] Black school; I just thought it was school. I didn’t know the history of it.

With the Stuttgart book … you can’t help seeing that there’s something missing, especially if you come from here. … I think sometimes people think “he’s looking for something.” I mean, I am. I’m interested in how I got here and what happened, but I can’t find it. So, I can’t help but research it and think about it. I don’t know what I’m going to find or what I’m going to look for.

I’m just guided by [the fact] that I don’t know and that there’s no information.

Is that what you mean when you say your work is about “Black fugitivity”?

FROM THE FILES: Bryant is working to make Black history visible, not tucked away in museum storage.

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I think that is a part of it — that it [Black identity] is always going to be moving and changing. … So coming from [the conceptual background of] Afrofuturism, which is the thing that started me down this path … My idea about Afrofuturism is that it’s a multiplicity. It wants you to think about Blackness in a multitude of ways and not be pinned down. … It wants you to think about the possibilities and have imagination and go beyond our notion of what Blackness is.

When Afrofuturism takes off, it’s looking to be understood in a multitude of ways and be very multifaceted. Some of the problems have been once pop culture gets a hold of it, it actually kind of makes it smaller. … With Black fugitivity, it’s about wanting to be understood in a very complex and multifaceted way. Even when [the idea of Black identity] is understood,

WE’RE OPEN FOR CARRY-OUT AND THE PATIO IS OPEN FOR TABLE SERVICE! it needs to be continuously changed. [Scholar] Brent Hayes Edwards says that it’s understood in the translation, in the practice, in the act of doing something. On some level, I think that’s Black fugitivity, too. It’s not just about the past or the future. It’s about living it and doing it — being that thing.

I was just thinking of the word “aliveness.”

There’s a living quality to what you’re describing in terms of understanding identity.

Which can be traced to African ancestry — when you think about music, in particular how jazz music works, the idea of improvisation is very interesting when it comes to diasporic people. The music will be understood while it’s being made. That’s when you’re going to understand it the most — when we’re doing that thing.

Also, with archives, there’s the idea that when something is written about or recorded it has more importance. … I also think they have more importance when you think of it as an active thing. That’s why the project is called “Holman: A Living Archive,” because people need to understand it as something that’s still happening, that’s still going. … When I was working in a more Afrofuturist [vein], I was looking at plantations and knowing that it was a back-and-forth between the enslaved people and the landowners. They collaborated on structures and used West African techniques in building these plantations. They used West African understanding for mapping out the whole thing. … The architecture was influenced by that. So that means they had some agency. … These were the artists; these were the creatives.

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You mentioned agency, and you talked about how, in the infrastructure of the plantations, you can really see the ancestral knowledge of the enslaved people. It made me think of the history of scrapbooking you informed me about — the 19th century practice of African Americans taking whiteowned newspapers, cutting out pieces, and reorganizing the text in order to form a new narrative that was about Black agency. They were highlighting through that practice their active role in American history, contrary to the dominant narrative. … To know that Frederick Douglass said to African Americans to keep a scrapbook — start making your own records. He has some understanding of how the visual language works. …

He’s the most photographed person in the 19th century, and that’s because he knew that was a way of reaching certain people. At least that’s my interpretation of it. He knew if he got a photograph of this dignified Black person, people would understand Black people to be this way.

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HISTORY IS ALWAYS HAPPENING.

A BLACK POLICE OFFICER: Bryant found a photograph from the 1940s or ’50s of a Black police officer, taken at his retirement. Here, he draws that officer in silverpoint.

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FREE PEST CONTROL ESTIMATE Call Today! (501)753-2727 • www.arkansaspest.com So I think there’s a certain visual language there that’s not always about history. … He understood the power of doing something like that.

To me, it’s art.

Inciting that desire to interact with our history is an important part of your artistic practice.

With this project, too, “The Living Archive,” that’s the thing we need to think about: our place in it. It’s happening. It’s always here.

That’s kind of the danger of saying “Black history,” [like it’s over]. History is always happening.

We’re doing it. American history — you’re doing it now. [The artist] Carrie Mae Weems says that, too: She’ll talk about “present history,” “past history,” “future history.” That is an interesting way to think about it — as history being present. … As an African Diasporic artist, I think it’s really important to place our work in art history.

One of the things that really annoys me about [the common interpretation of] Kerry James Marshall is that people don’t do that. They think that they are placing his work in art history. But the thing I think is most important about Marshall’s work is that he does everything at the same time. He’s talking about present and past history, abstraction, illustration, representation — he’s doing all of it at the same time. He does that on purpose. He wants the conversation to be very multifaceted. But when you hear people talk about his work … it’s talked about in its political nature but it’s not placed next to Rembrandt. … I think something that happens to Black artists is that it seems so political, people forget that it’s still a part of art and that it can still be referencing other artists in history. … Going back to the art: teaching people how to look in a way that’s not so superficial, but how to have an active engagement in something, is really important. I think that’s when the real change happens: When someone leaves your work and thinks, “I’ve got to look this person up,” or “I’m going to find this out.” … I’m trying to encourage people to do the work and meet me halfway. I would keep that energy going. The time when everyone’s doing it — it’s great, but you should have those conversations [about race in America even] when no one else is. Talking about it whenever you want to talk about it? That’s still a form of privilege.

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FOOD & DRINK THE AUTHOR: Waiting tables these days is someone ordering a Corona as a joke.

BRIAN CHILSON

B

OH, GOOD, WAITING TABLES IS WORSE THAN IT USED TO BE ON SERVING PIZZA DURING A PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS.

BY RHETT BRINKLEY

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ack in March, in the days just after COVID-19 had been declared a pandemic, waiting tables was sheer anxiety and fear.

Crowds of people filling the restaurant to capacity, chairs at adjacent tables just a few feet apart, waiters squeezing between the gaps as they move from table to table. A full, crowded restaurant had seemed so normal before. Stressful, sure, but that was the job. Now it was a different kind of stress. We held our breath a lot.

Every innocent cough was a sudden bang. And my restaurant’s dining room is small — 10 tables and a bar. A patron could reach over and touch someone at the next table or snatch a piece of pizza off their plate.

That first Friday after COVID-19 had been declared a pandemic [March 13], business started off kind of slow. Those of us on the staff had discussions about how this might be normal for a while, how we might not make any money. Why would people go out to eat when restaurants in other parts of the country are already shutting down, right? The virus was here.

Then, around 6 p.m., everyone showed up at once, and our little restaurant filled up. I snapped a photo of the full dining room because there was something quite literally wrong with the picture. It looked irresponsible. It looked foolish. It looked like an epidemiological nightmare. I’ve always been aware that the job is a germ fest, but it never scared me until now. We lean in between people to set things down on the tables. We clear dirty dishes, forks and cups that mouths touch. We talk to so many people at close range throughout the night. Bar customers are a foot away, face to face. I can smell the alcohol seeping out of their pores.

Waiting tables, pre-pandemic, was already brimming with eyeroll-worthy moments. Waiting tables during a pandemic has taken those obnoxious moments and made them feel darker, and more dangerous.

Waiting tables these days is someone ordering a Corona as a joke.

Waiting tables these days is hearing someone say, “They better not take baseball away.”

Waiting tables these days is a little girl poised to blow her straw wrapper at me and her father quickly stopping her because he realizes that

she’s about to blow concentrated air particles directly into my face.

It’s a woman we know — a regular — coughing toward us on her way out as a joke to make light of the news.

Waiting tables these days is me literally running from the air.

It’s a widely known fact that waiting tables sucks. It’s a stressful, high-anxiety job. Many waiters, myself included, have had the nightmare where you’re waiting tables in a crowded restaurant, every table needs something and you can’t get to any of them because there’s nowhere to start.

The job of a waiter exists because people want to be served. We’re there because life’s fast, and it’s busy, and it’s hard, and people need a break. They want to get out of the house, sit down somewhere and have someone else take care of all the cooking, the drinks, the cleaning, the pesky dishes — all the cumbersome dining needs. And if you’re like some families, you might want a break from the kids as well, so you’re welcome to seat them at a different table on the other side of the restaurant and pay little to no attention to them while the waiter gets one of the kids a new drink because his is now filled with salt, pepper, Sweet’N Low, honey and whatever else they could scrounge together for an obnoxious cocktail of “Here, waiter person, you deal with this.”

No one aspires to be a waiter when they grow up. It just happens. The shifts are relatively short, and although you work your ass off, you see the tangible results of your hard work and leave with a pocketful of cash. It’s a good job for college students, artists, aspiring actors, musicians in between tours, writers working on their novels or screenplays. It’s a second job for single parents trying to make ends meet. It’s work for college graduates schlepping through the job market with no success. There’s a myriad of extremely talented, intelligent waiters serving dinner to people who have no idea how extremely talented their waiter might be, and couldn’t care less. Servers weave in and out of your dining experience and then you move on and they move on.

Waiting tables is a customer telling you they need a fork to eat their salad when you’re literally trying to hand that customer a fork. “Oh, look! He’s got it right there!” It’s insulting and almost hurtful to us that some people think that we’re not savvy enough to have figured out that

people don’t generally want to slop salad up with their hands.

Waiting tables is high-intensity multitasking.

It’s table 17 telling me that they need two Bud Lights, a Boulevard Wheat and a side of house dressing. Then table 21 says that they’re ready for their separate checks — all five of them. And table 11 needs a box and a lid for their ranch.

The keg of Bud Light blows on me, so I figure I’ll ring up table 21. As I’m doing this, Roger, a bar regular who doesn’t have a cell phone or a TV at home, asks me if there’s any women’s track and field on TV. I actually stop what I’m doing, grab the remote and start searching the channels for women’s track and field. As I’m doing this, I realize that I might be the biggest doofus on the strip. Roger can watch whatever sport is on. Sorry, Roger.

Waiting tables is comedy.

It’s hearing a Southern woman say to her friends at the table, “And then they started talking about ancestry.com and I said, ‘Not in my house, not on my computer!’”

It’s having a passive smile on my face as I walk through the dining room when suddenly a bar regular rips a loud unpalatable fart directly on my two-top and hearing the wife at the table tell her husband, “He just farted on us!”

Waiting tables is a 20-something man sitting alone drinking water and playing Pokemon Go on three different iPhones all at once, who leaves without ordering.

Waiting tables is a woman asking for a “Diet with a splash of real.”

Waiting tables is listening to the kitchen crew’s intense discussion about which video games are best to do drugs to.

Waiting tables is a little girl telling her younger brother not to use a straw. “They’re bad for the environment,” she says as she takes a sip from a styrofoam cup.

Waiting tables is real.

It’s seeing an elderly woman choking and her shocked husband looking mortified and helpless when an off-duty nurse runs up and performs a series of backslaps, effectively clearing the woman’s airway.

It’s delicately approaching couples that are in the middle of a serious fight to say, “Here’s your Caesar salads.”

It’s a talented local chef teaching his children how to behave at the table and making them clean up after themselves and help organize their dirty dishes for the busser.

It’s an adorable husband and wife who I’ve

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waited on for years — the husband telling me his wife has Alzheimer’s because he saw the concerned look on my face when she wouldn’t respond to me.

It’s men behaving badly — and I’m a male waiter, so I don’t know the half of it.

Waiting tables is getting to know people and making friends. Customers have been known to bring us Christmas presents, vegetables from their garden, art they’ve made. They’ll buy us a beer when they see us out somewhere. One customer even suggested that I be the executor of her and her husband’s will because they don’t have children. These gestures mean something to us. They tell us that we exist to you outside of your dining experience. But, you know, if we don’t exist to you, that’s cool. Just leave at least 20 percent.

Actually, that’s not true anymore. Leave 20 percent or more, yes, but, that “existing to you outside of your dining experience” part? That does matter now.

After three nights of waiting tables in a dining room full of human bodies, I had to behave as if I were infected. This weighed heavily on me. I figured that aside from work, I had to self-quarantine. And I worried about how long I would

sations a night with people sitting in cars about how weird life has become.

Waiting tables these days is wearing uncomfortable cloth masks that feel like they’re permanently bending my ears until I find the kind that works for me.

Waiting tables these days is watching the governor’s daily news conference and anxiously wondering which day he’s going to decide to open everything back up and put us all at risk, despite the rising number of cases.

Waiting tables is people dropping anywhere from $40 to $100 tips to show their appreciation for us being there.

Waiting tables is an old man honking at me and cussing about how long his pizza was taking. When I take it to him (on time), he says, “Y’all are rude and mean, and I’ve spent a lot of money here, but no more.”

“OK, take care, sir.”

Waiting tables these days is watching customer after customer stroll in the door unmasked.

One of our servers wasn’t having it. He’d say things like, “You hear about this pandemic going on? Where’s your mask then?”

“You immune to viruses? Oh yeah, then where’s your mask?”

IF YOU CHOOSE TO DINE OUT OR PARTY AT THE BAR, PLEASE BE CAREFUL. MASK UP. have to live like that. Would I ever be able to safely be around my family? The efficacy of masks had been downplayed in the early days of the pandemic, so no one wore them. Our only protection was solitude or hand-washing. And every working waiter you know, or who has ever waited on you, was legitimately freaking out.

In a text thread with my general manager and all the other employees, I said all my shifts were up for grabs. So did one of our other servers. The following week, the governor announced that all dining-in was suspended.

The waiters at my restaurant were now carhops. Our hourly wage was bumped up, but we were all worried about money. We figured maybe we’d make enough to get by. But, because we work in a pizza place, the curbside business boomed. A Friday night would generate the same amount of money as it would have pre-pandemic — but without bar sales.

Waiting tables these days is having 17 conver-

Waiting tables is a man waiting on a to-go order who says to us, “Asa [Governor Hutchinson] needs to grow a pair and open everything up.

This is bullshit!”

Waiting tables is a really nice guy standing at the bar who licks his index finger three times to separate his cash. If this pandemic doesn’t stop finger-licking-cash-separating methods, will anything ever?

Waiting tables is a customer pointing at other customers who have already been served and saying, “But they’re not wearing masks. What about them? Do I have to poke a hole in the mask to take a drink?”

Waiting tables is one of our servers flipping out on some customers who were arguing with her about masks and my anxiety peaking as I go to ask them what they want to drink because I want to say to them: “Hey, it’s a difficult time for us right now trying to do our jobs during this pandemic and having to follow these directives

from the health department. It’s not easy. And what makes it even harder for us is people being difficult. If you don’t have a mask, you should really leave.� But I don’t say that. I say, “What can I get for you?� with my heart rate beating faster and faster.

Waiting tables is all of our combined waiter anxiety mixing together and fucking up the collective restaurant conscience so badly that it doesn’t feel like the same job anymore.

Waiting tables is thinking about quitting waiting tables.

Waiting tables is resenting people who don’t care.

Waiting tables is serving people food and drinks when what you want to be doing is going out to protest and support the Black Lives Matter movement.

Waiting tables is a surly old man on the patio saying to my manager, “Ma’am, do I have to wear a mask if I go inside to use the bathroom?� “Yes sir, we require masks inside,� my manager tells him. “I’ll just pee out here in the corner then.� “Please don’t,� she says to him.

Waiting tables is a middle-aged, well-off white man entering the restaurant five days after George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis. He looks at the TV, which is tuned in to the protests on the news. George Floyd’s name is displayed at the bottom of the screen.

He looks at me and says, “Who’s George Floyd?�

Waiting tables in Phase I didn’t change. Operating at one-third capacity isn’t worth it for any restaurant, so we kept doing what we were doing. There seemed to be three schools of thought from waiters regarding restaurants opening up again: “Good. I’m ready to get back to work.� “Bad! The cases are rising and worse than they’ve ever been!� “No way in hell. I’m getting an additional $600 a week on top of my unemployment. Y’all have fun.�

All the servers in my restaurant were in the “bad idea� category, but it wasn’t up to us.

Going out to eat is a risk. Going to drink at the bar is an even greater risk. If you choose to dine out or party at the bar, please be careful. Mask up. Wearing a mask says, “You exist to me.� Stay 6 feet away from people. Think about your parents and grandparents. Think about all of the adorable old people you’ve met in your life and all the things they’ve lived through and the fact that they could die because of your indifference.

Put a mask on. If other people aren’t your concern because you’re young and in great health and want to live your life, think of the sports you’ll miss this fall if the virus keeps spreading around from people not using caution.

If you happen to catch the coronavirus at a restaurant or bar, I hope it was worth it. I hope I didn’t give it to you or get it from you. I hope you were respectful and tipped well. And I hope that you and your loved ones are all going to be OK. When you feel better or when you’ve done your 14-day quarantine, we’ll be there. Masked and gloved and ready to serve.   Â

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HISTORY

THE HEALING HELL OF HOT SPRINGS

ITS CONFEDERATE MONUMENT HONORS PURE MYTH.

BY GUY LANCASTER

For he built again the high places which Hezekiah his father had broken down, and he reared up altars for Baalim, and made groves, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them.

— 2 Chronicles 33:3

T

he Confederate monument in Hot Springs spent much of its existence without becoming the source of public controversy, but that changed in 2015. Following the June 17 massacre that year of nine Black churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., some Southern lawmakers, at both the state and local levels, began debating the appropriateness of displaying the Confederate battle flag and Confederate markers in public, and several flags and monuments across the South were soon removed. However, the Hot Springs monument site is privately owned by the local United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), the plot having been donated by the city to the UDC in 1953, which meant that the local government had no direct influence in the management of the site. Amid the controversy, Margie Hill, then president of the local UDC chapter, spoke about the Confederate flag in 2015, telling a reporter: “We don’t have the opinion that it has any animosity toward anybody, North or South, and no matter what race.

It’s just a symbol of unity of Southern states that had to go to war in the War between the States.”

The problem is that the “unity of Southern states” was a lie developed long after the Civil War, and organizations like the UDC have been the chief proponents of this lie. First, how can one speak of a “unity of Southern states” when those states held a significant segment of their population in slavery? Many Black men and women fled their enslavers to Union lines whenever they got the chance, and men who could were often happy to take up arms against their former masters — indeed, official Union sources credit Black troops with participation at

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29 military engagements across Arkansas. But even among white residents of the state, loyalties were often divided, especially in the area around Hot Springs. Some local men flocked to both Hot Springs and Rockport (Hot Spring County) to enlist in the Confederate cause, and local citizens made material and financial contributions to the war effort, with Hiram Abiff Whittington pledging $100. In 1862, Gov. Henry Massie Rector briefly relocated state government to Hot Springs amid fears of a federal advance upon Little Rock, but the city served as the Confederate “capital” only from May 6 to July 14, 1862.

However, as historian Tom DeBlack has written, “Northern and western Arkansas would continue to be Unionist strongholds throughout the course of the war. Despite having the third-smallest white population, Arkansas would provide more troops for the Federal army than any other Confederate state except Tennessee.” One noteworthy band of Unionist sympathizers and Confederate deserters operating in the Ouachita Mountains was led by an Arkadelphia Unionist named Andy Brown. On Feb. 15, 1863, a Confederate Homeguard tracked these men to McGraw’s (or McGrew’s) Mill, on the Walnut Fork of the Ouachita River about halfway between Hot Springs and Mount Ida. After heavy skirmishing, Brown’s men retreated, and 27 of their number made their way to Union-controlled Fayetteville in northwestern Arkansas three weeks later, where some joined the First Arkansas Infantry, a Union regiment.

During a November 1863 expedition from Benton to Mount Ida, Lt. Henry C. Caldwell of the Third Iowa Cavalry and his men stayed briefly

in Hot Springs before proceeding to Caddo Gap and then hurrying on toward Mount Ida. Along the way, his forces recruited “nearly 300 loyal men, who had come from the surrounding mountains to join the Federal Army.”

But there is a reason many Arkansans have never heard this history. The 1890s witnessed the emergence of a narrative of the Civil War since dubbed the “Lost Cause Myth,” which promoted a heavily revised understanding of the war. Gone was any reference to the defense of slavery as the cause of the conflict — now, vaguely defined “states’ rights” were the reasons Southerners took up arms in defiance of the North. In that revision, the Confederacy constituted a noble and higher civilization, and its loss was not due to its own character; or as Donald G. Mathews has written: “The Confederacy became not a government so much as an ideal for which a sacred host had died just as Christ Jesus had sacrificed himself to redeem fallen humanity. The South may have been overwhelmed by the forces of evil on its own Golgotha, but like Christ it was rising from the crypt of defeat to spread the Good News associated with its highest aspirations.” In the Lost Cause narrative, Appomattox was transformed into the Cavalry where Jesus was crucified, after which the South, like Christ, would rise again — though it may take three decades rather than three days.

The UDC and related organizations embraced the Lost Cause Myth not to look back to a glorious past but to shape the glorious future they saw ahead of themselves, to provide the “proper values” for those coming of age in the New South. As the historian David Blight has writ-

BRIAN CHILSON

COMO SQUARE: The site of the Confederate monument in downtown Hot Springs has a violent history.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

AUGUST 2020 45

BRIAN CHILSON

ten, “cultures and groups use, construct, or try served as the execution spot in lynchings.”

The city’s solid waste department placed to own the past in order to win power or place in There is no indication that the local UDC chap- dumpsters around the Confederate monument the present.” Among the UDC efforts to instill its ter deliberately chose the site of two lynchings to act as a barrier. In addition, city leaders apvalues into the population at large was the con- for their Confederate monument, but neither is proached the UDC in advance of the rally about trol of textbooks used in public schools across it believable that the crowd at the 1934 unveiling the possibility of lowering the monument site’s the state. According to historian Carl H. Mon- was entirely ignorant of this connection.

Confederate flag, worried that it might become eyhon, in 1917 the UDC “successfully forced the In the 21st century, downtown Hot Springs a flashpoint during the gathering. The flag was publisher of Henry Bourne and Elbert Benton’s has attracted the occasional demonstration by lowered, although UDC chapter president Mar‘History of the United States’ to send page proofs neo-Confederates, self-described patriots and gie Hill told the local newspaper, “It’s a tempoof their proposed book to the UDC for approval, others who have a propensity to wave the Con- rary measure at this point.” and the state textbook commisThe rally, which started sion withheld the contract for at Arlington Lawn on Nathe book until the publisher tional Park property, drew made desired corrections.” But some 50 people, protected perhaps an even better way to by local police and National ensure the transmission of the Park Service personnel beUDC’s values was to mark the hind barricades before they landscape with reminders of marched to the Confederate the nobility of the Confederate monument in the afternoon. past. In 1926, the UDC chapBrock and his associates inter in Hot Springs began plans sisted that their demonstrato purchase a mass-produced tion was not affiliated with marble statue from the McNeel white supremacy, but inMarble Company of Marietta, stead aimed “to preserve our Ga. The McNeel company was history, preserve our monua rather notorious exploiter of ment, stand up and say that patriotic fervor, dispatching we do not want to see our agents throughout the counhistory destroyed.” Howtry, offering organizations like ever, the more numerous the UDC guidance on fundraiscounter-protestors insisted ing, and even bestowing prizes on a much more comprehenupon those groups that held the sive view of local history. Arbest unveiling ceremonies. The kansas Times photographer Hot Springs chapter struggled Brian Chilson captured an to raise funds for several years, image of an African-Ameribut finally, on June 2, 1934, their can woman marching down Confederate monument was unhistoric Central Avenue with veiled to the public at what was a sign reading: “TWO BLACK then known as Como Square MEN WERE LYNCHED (though in 1977 the name of the WHERE YOUR CONFEDERsite would be changed to ConATE MONUMENT STANDS.” federate Plaza).

Enthusiasts of ConfederThe place called Como ate history regularly exagSquare already had a notorigerate the unity of the Conous history in Hot Springs. On federacy in defending what June 19, 1913, the young man they like to call “Southern Will Norman was strung up and heritage.” But as has been shot at that spot for allegedrecounted here, the South ly murdering the daughter of was much more varied than a local lawyer, although one they dare imagine. We are early newspaper report of the not condemned to honor crime acknowledged that there the slavers and lynchers of was no evidence of his particiour past — we have an array COUNTERING THE NEO-CONFEDERATES: Marchers had a message for the postpation. The mob then burned Charlottesville protesters. of ancestors from which to his body to ashes, and the next choose. And few places in morning, souvenir hunters Arkansas exhibit that fact could be seen sifting through better than Hot Springs. the ashes for bits of bone. Then, on Aug. 1, federate and Gadsden flags. One on Aug. 19, From the earliest days of white settlement in 1922, Gilbert Harris was lynched at that same 2017, took place only a week after white suprem- Hot Springs, locals liked to tell the story that spot. He had been accused of murdering a lo- acists murderously marched upon Charlottes- various native tribes used to come to these thercal businessman and was already in custody, ville, Va., and tensions were higher than usual. mal waters, where they set aside the tomahawk with authorities promising a speedy trial, when In fact, popular response to what happened at and embraced each other in peace. This was, at a mob of 500 broke him out of jail and hanged Charlottesville motivated Hot Springs resident best, an exaggeration, if not an outright fabrihim at the same spot where Will Norman met James Brock to apply for the permit to demon- cation, an effort to create a mystical (but profithis death. The Hot Springs New Era reported af- strate: “After being in Charlottesville (Va.) and able) aura surrounding this place by employing ter the lynching: “Some person with a grim hu- seeing the backlash and tidal wave of monu- romanticized depictions of Native Americans. mor painted two black ‘service’ stripes around ments being destroyed and took [sic] down, I’m Such a legend also constitutes an example of the base of the whiteway pole in the center of more determined now to have my rallies than “golden age” thinking, or the belief that some the Como triangle, signifying that it has twice ever.” social and cultural ideal lies exclusively in the 46 AUGUST 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

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past — that our era of history constitutes, at best, an attenuated diversion from the glories of yesteryear. But the Confederate monument in Hot Springs is a more insidious symbol of “golden age” thinking, idolizing neither the healing powers of nature nor the potential for peace beyond the bounds of tribe, but, instead, the martial powers of a government explicitly founded upon slavery and white supremacy. The Confederate “golden age” celebrated by some was hell on earth for others.

Hiram Abiff Whittington once told the story of Chickasaw visitors to Hot Springs who, encountering the thermal waters there, concluded that hell lay at the source of that heat and fled with alacrity. And, indeed, the hells of our collective past regularly bubble up into our present, revived by various groups for purposes of economic exploitation or psychological satisfaction. But we can extend this metaphor somewhat further. After all, Hot Springs, since at least the early 19th century, was renowned as a place of healing, and people from all parts of the country, from all walks of life, from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, came to these thermal waters seeking relief from all manner of ailments. Sure, there was a great deal of profiteering and quackery in the medical industry here, but also plenty of charity and sincerity, including an acceptance of those excluded from other places. As historians concerned for the future of our country, herein lies a lesson — the waters of hell can be therapeutic. Despite the discomfort and the dangers of scalding, regular immersion into the violent reality of our shared history, in a shared setting, can be healing. If the water is hot, if our history is accurate and true, then we may yet leave our sickness behind us.

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AUGUST 2020 47

CANNABIZ

GREEN ACRES M NEW STRAINS, LOWER PRICES ON CANNABIS RX FORECAST

BY GRIFFIN COOP

48 AUGUST 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

arijuana products from new cultivation facilities — including new strains of cannabis — in the state could hit shelves next year thanks to the three new licenses issued in June by the state’s Medical Marijuana Commission.

The commission issued the licenses to River Valley Relief in Fort Smith, New Day Cultivation in Garland County and Carpenter Farms Medical Group in Grady. Representatives for River Valley Relief and New Day Cultivation said they hope to bring product to the state’s dispensaries as early as 2021. (Carpenter Farms Medical Group could not be reached for comment.)

“I think that based on what we’ve seen with the other cultivators, I think that’s a very fair expectation,” commission spokesman Scott Hardin said of the cultivators’ timeline for their operations.

River Valley Relief owner Storm Nolan is interested in bringing new strains of cannabis to Arkansas, noting that different strains are better for treating different ailments. Some strains may be better for pain, while others may be better for treating such things as post-traumatic stress disorder, Nolan said.

“Right before we start with our first seeds, we’re going to see what strains are underrepresented (in the Arkansas market) that have taken off in other markets,” Nolan said. “This is all about medical. We really want to bring in some strains that are nonpsychoactive cannabinoids, strains that don’t just focus on the THC content.”

The commission issued a license to Carpenter Farms to settle a lawsuit the company brought over the scoring of its application, bringing the number of cultivators to six. Because state law allows the commission to license up to eight facilities, and seeing a supply need because of the increase in the number of medical marijuana prescription cardholders, the commission also issued licenses to River Valley Relief and New Day. Initial estimates were that Arkansas would have about 35,000 cardholders in a mature market, but more than 60,000 cards have been issued and more than 17,000 pounds of marijuana have been sold since the state’s first dispensary opened in May 2019. The number of cardholders could exceed 115,000 by the end of the year, Nolan said.

“Just to serve those new patients, Arkansas needs new growers and more capacity,” Nolan said.

The license for River Valley Relief is the culmination of a personal journey for Nolan, whose mother died as the result of an addiction to opioids after experiencing jaw pain. Nolan described her as a great mother who worked as a corporate lawyer and didn’t fit the stereotype of a person addicted to drugs.

Nolan believes his mother might still be alive today if medical marijuana had been available to her rather than only traditional prescription pain medications.

“Now that we’ve been blessed with a cultivation facility license, we have the ability now to make a difference in the lives of Arkansans,” Nolan said.

Nolan is adapting an existing warehouse in Fort Smith for an indoor grow operation, and hopes to begin growing this fall. Harvest would follow in four to five months. Nolan also hopes to have a full line of products that includes tinctures, oils, gummies and vape cartridges.

“We really want to give a wide variety to the patients so they can take it in the form that they are most comfortable with,” Nolan said. “We think that for older customers who aren’t comfortable with smoking it, a tincture or a pill or gummy will appeal.”

Nolan also hopes to make medical marijuana more affordable in Arkansas. Dispensaries have been selling marijuana for $300-$400 per ounce, according to Hardin. If a patient buys the maximum 2.5 ounces every 14 days, he or she is paying a total of $750-$1,000 every two weeks.

“A lot of these are people on low income or disability,” Nolan said of the buyers.

Nolan said the people who visit the state’s 26 operating dispensaries may not fit the image that

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RIVER VALLEY RELIEF: Partners Kane Whitt (left) and Storm Nolan. some people have of medical marijuana users.

“It’s not the young people that you would associate with wanting to get high,” Nolan said.

“It’s actually a lot of older folks [and] people that are using this as a legitimate way” to treat the 17 eligible ailments set forth in state statutes.

Nolan, whose family real estate business includes hotels in Fort Smith, Little Rock and Texas, hopes to hire 40-50 people for the marijuana operation as soon as this fall and ramp up to 100 employees in the next year or two.

New Day Cultivation is building a new facility in Garland County outside the city of Hot Springs. After construction, growing and processing, New Day could have product on the market in the next 12-18 months, according to spokesman Bailey Moll.

“It is a construction project. Those things can go everything in your favor or everything against you,” Moll said of the timeline for the operation.

New Day plans to hire 40-50 employees initially with the possibility of increasing to 100, but the company does not yet have firm dates for hiring.

The company plans to produce a wide variety of products, including tinctures, oils and flower.

New Day’s owners have a wealth of business experience, as well as experience in the cannabis industry. Majority owner Carla McCord owns several businesses in Hot Springs, including Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant, Kahuna Bay boat rental service and Salty Dog Boating Center on Lake Hamilton. Other owners include Hot Springs pharmacist Nick Landers, Little Rock 50 AUGUST 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

lawyer Charles Singleton and Little Rock businessman Sherman Tate, who is a member of the Arkansas Business Hall of Fame. Singleton and Tate are Vietnam veterans and Singleton is a former director of the state Alcoholic Beverage Control agency.

McCord and Landers also own New Age Hemp, which makes a variety of hemp-based products in Hot Springs.

“They’ve been doing this since it was basically allowed by law,” Moll said of the owners’ experience working with hemp, a cannabis plant without the psychoactive ingredient THC. Like River Valley Relief, New Day’s ownership group was motivated by the opioid crisis and the relief medical marijuana can have for those struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“You see some of the opioid crisis and some of the benefits that medical marijuana can have,” Moll said. “Two owners are decorated Vietnam veterans and PTSD is a big issue. A regulated market with a lot of regulated oversight is very appealing where you can help people, but in a safe way.”

Moll also said increased cultivation presents an opportunity to drive down prices in the marketplace.

“In a lot of ways, the price is too high,” Moll said. “You look at what some of these costs are and you wonder what folks [do] who are sick or can’t work like they used to do. They can’t afford these prices. There are people who are priced out of this market. The goal is to help lower prices if at all possible.”

Located in Grady, Carpenter Farms is no stranger to agriculture in Arkansas. The Carpenters were named Arkansas Farm Family of

the Year by the Arkansas Farm Bureau in 1988 and were inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 2011. Abraham Carpenter Sr. was inducted into the Arkansas Agriculture Hall of Fame in 2011.

Abraham Carpenter Jr. is the majority owner of Carpenter Farms Medical Group. Carpenter Jr. also serves on the Arkansas Parole Board.

South Street Medical Holdings, led by attorney William H. Murphy Jr., holds a 35 percent stake in the company.

The new licenses have been challenged by the five cultivation facilities licensed by the commission in 2018.

Owners of Osage Creek Cultivation, Delta Medical Cannabis Co., Bold Team, Natural State Medicinals and Natural State Wellness filed suit July 15 in Carroll County Circuit Court, arguing that the commission made no formal determination that existing permits weren’t sufficient to supply the state and that rules required a new application process, rather than considering those who applied more than 24 months ago, as did the three newly licensed cultivators. Defendants are the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration; Arkansas Alcoholic Beverage Control Division; Arkansas Medical Marijuana Commission; and the three new licensees.

Business at the state’s medical marijuana dispensaries has been vigorous, with sales of more than $100 million since May 2019. Dispensaries in Clarksville and Morrilton are expected to open “very soon,” according to Hardin, bringing the total operating dispensaries to 28. (The commission has issued 37 of the maximum 40 dispensary licenses allowed by state law.) Hardin expects dispensary sales to exceed $200 million this year.

The high price of medical marijuana in Arkansas was the subject of a hearing by the State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee of the legislature June 23, before licenses were awarded to River Valley Farms and New Day. Legislators, including state Reps. Vivian Flowers (D-Pine Bluff) and Alan Clark (R-Hot Springs), said the argument to license more cultivators to bring down prices was compelling.

While the state doesn’t require any certain amount of production from the cultivation facilities, the increased capacity of three new facilities could help lower prices, Hardin said. “The winner in this scenario with three additional cultivation licenses is the patient,” he said. “I think we’ll see an expanded amount of product around the state, more edibles, more innovation, so overall the winner is the patient.”

THE GREEN PAGES

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AUGUST 2020 51

Arkansas Times presents

THE GREEN PAGES This month, we bring you The Green Pages: A special section to educate you on your local dispensaries, CBD and healthcare providers. You’ll also find the steps you need to take to apply for your medical marijuana card.

OUACHITA FARMS

Go visit these providers. Ask questions.

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THE SOURCE The Source is a full-service medical cannabis dispensary focused on variety, fair pricing and customer experience. Patients can choose from a vast array of products including cannabis flower, edibles, concentrates and more. Online pre-ordering is accessible through our website or our free app, “The Source – Dispensary” available for iOS and Android.

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OUACHITA FARMS Located in the Ouachita Mountains, Ouachita Farms grows hemp for cannabinoid production. All of our products are made in Arkansas, are all natural with no additives, and made with 100% USA Grown Hemp.

Ouachita Farm products are small-batch made with verified lab results from Steep Hill Labs.

That is the way we see it. Our name, Plant Family Therapeutics, refers to the way we relate to our members. Our community is our family. We get to know you on a one-to-one basis. In our humble opinion, the better we know you, the better we can serve you.”

870-709-0800 5172 US-62 E. Mountain Home plant-family.com NATIVE GREEN WELLNES We are an Arkansas-based company that cares about our patients and their needs. We work here; we live here; we raise our families here.

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Representations regarding the efficacy and safety of Ouachita Farms CBD based products have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA only evaluates foods and drugs, not supplements like these products. These products are not intended to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any disease.

501-993-0617 26225 Hwy 167 Hensley NativeGreenWellness.com Special Advertising Section 52 AUGUST 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

Ouachita Farms is a state licensed cannabis farm (H25), processor (H26) and seed distributor located 20 minutes from downtown Hot Springs National Park. We are all about solventless extraction methods. Our main extraction process uses heat and pressure only to create a pure full spectrum rosin with the terpenes preserved. We also create hash using the old school method of ice-water extraction.

Our core team of founders is made up of four brothers, David, Jeff, Marc and Mitchell Owen, all entrepreneurs born in Hot Springs, and Cesar Mendoza, who brings with him over a decade of experience as an engineer at Tesla and General Motors. We have a dedicated team of 20 local employees that is growing not only in number but also in experience within the cannabis industry.

The goal was to grow 5 acres in year one and with the heavy spring rains of 2019, we ended up with around 3. Just like other farms in the state, we encountered hurdles like poor genetics, arcane bureaucracy concerning regulation and caterpillars/flying pests once our crop reached the flowering stage. We also made plenty of mistakes along the way!

For the 2020 season at the farm, we are cultivating mainly CBG genetics. Cannabigerol, or CBG, is considered the “stem cell” of cannabis because it is the precursor from which all other cannabinoids are synthesized.

The potential for medicinal and health breakthroughs from cannabis is 100 percent what motivates our team.

We create a wide range of products that are high in CBD, CBG, THC, CBC, CBN and will continue to stay on the forefront of cannabis research within the state of Arkansas. You can find the Ouachita Farms brand online, at our farm stand retail location near Hot Springs Village, and at over 400 stores across the United States.

3958 Hwy 7 North Hot Springs | 479-668-2341 ouachitafarms.com

REDEFINING THE REDEFINING THE THE REDEFINING CANNABIS EXPERIENCE CANNABIS EXPERIENCE EXPERIENCE CANNABIS IN ARKANSAS IN ARKANSAS IN ARKANSAS Serving Serving Patients Patients ServingOurPatients wellness consultants are

Our wellness consultants are some of the most Our wellness consultants are some of the most knowledgeable and some of the most knowledgeable and approachable in the industry, knowledgeable and approachable in the industry, and we love to serve. approachable the industry, and we love toinserve.

Exploring the benefits of and we love tobenefits serve. of Exploring the cannabis for the first time can Exploring benefits of can cannabis the for the first time be an intimidating experience. cannabis for the first time can be an intimidating experience.

We understand the hesitation and are here to an intimidating We understand the be hesitation and areexperience. here to answer any questions. Whether you are familiar We understand the hesitation and areare here to answer any questions.

Whether you familiar with the cannabis industry or a new patient we are answer questions.

Whether you are familiar with theany cannabis industry or a new patient we are here to help. We have a pharmacist on-call at all with cannabis industry or a new patient are herethe to help.

We have a pharmacist on-call we at all hours of operation to ensure that we answer any here toof help.

We have pharmacist on-call at all hours operation to aensure that we answer any questions with a remedy you can trust and develop hours of operation to ensure answer any questions with a remedy youthat can we trust and develop a regimen that is tailored to your individual needs. questions can trust and develop a regimenwith thataisremedy tailoredyou to your individual needs. a regimen that is tailored to your individual needs.

Quality Quality and and Quality and Selection Selection Selection

We work closely with Arkansas' We work closely with Arkansas' cultivators to make sure we We work closely withsure Arkansas' cultivators to make we have a vast selection of cultivators make sure have a vasttoselection of we products that are sure to help have a vastthat selection of to help products are sure in effectivley treating any of products thattreating are sureany to help in effectivley of the qualifying conditions you inthe effectivley treating any of qualifying conditions you might have. Native Green also the qualifying conditions might have. Native Greenyou also cultivates a proprietary selection of cannabis that is might have. Native Greenthat alsois cultivates a proprietary selection of cannabis carefully harvested and trimmed to ensure quality cultivates a proprietary that is carefully harvested andselection trimmedof tocannabis ensure quality control. We package everything by hand with carefully harvested and trimmedby to hand ensure quality control. We package everything with extreme care and attention just like you would control. package everything hand extremeWe care and attention justby like you with would expect from your pharmacy. There is no need to extreme care your and attention like is you expect from pharmacy.just There nowould need to worry about someone touching or smelling your expect from your pharmacy.

There no need to worry about someone touching or is smelling your medicine prior to your purchase at Native Green. worry about someone your medicine prior to yourtouching purchaseoratsmelling Native Green.

You can trust that every sanitary measure has been medicine priorthat to your purchase Native Green.

You can trust every sanitaryat measure has been put into place.

You that every sanitary measure has been put can intotrust place. put into place.

Our Our Why Why Our WhyWe are an Arkansas-based

We are an Arkansas-based company that cares about We are an that Arkansas-based company cares about our patients and their needs. company thatand cares about our patients their needs.

We work here; we live here; our andwe their We patients work here; liveneeds. here; we raise our families here.

We we live here. here; we work raise here; our families Our roots run deep, and we we raise our families Our roots run deep, here. and we love our patients.

Our run deep, and we loveroots our patients.

Our why is you and when Native Green we loveyou ourvisit patients.

Our why is you and when you visit Native Green we can promise a consistent, respectful, and positive Our is youa and when you visit Native we can why promise consistent, respectful, andGreen positive experience every time. We are here because we can promiseevery a consistent, and positive experience time. Werespectful, are here because we believe in what we do. We look forward to getting experience everywe time. because we believe in what do. We are lookhere forward to getting to know you and helping you on this new journey believe what wehelping do. Weyou lookon forward to journey getting to knowinyou and this new as we aim to inspire health through nature. to youtoand helping youthrough on this nature. new journey asknow we aim inspire health as we aim to inspire health through nature.

BECOMING THE BECOMING THE NAME YOU YOU TRUST TRUST NAME

We We understand understand that that each each of of our our patients patients has has different different needs, needs, which which is why our focus is on education and patient experience.

We understand that each of our patients has different needs, which is why our focus is on education and patient experience. We We are are dedicated to you that is why our focus is on education and patientinformation experience.so We areyou dedicated to providing providing you with with necessary necessary information so that you may make an informed decision which allows you to experience the dedicated to providing you with necessary information so that you may make an informed decision which allows you to experience the full benefits and medicinal properties of cannabis.

We offer quality may make an informed decision which allows you to experience the full benefits and medicinal properties of cannabis. We offer quality and alternative services that full benefitscare and and medicinal properties of cannabis.standards We offer quality alternative care and services that set set community community standards and exceed patients’ expectations all the while being provided in standards and alternative care and services that set community exceed patients’ expectations all the while being provided in aa caring, caring, convenient and manner.

It’s what do our exceed patients’ expectations all the while provided in With a caring, and cost-effective cost-effective manner.

It’s being what we we do best. best.

With our convenient core values embodying a culture of integrity, caring, safety, convenient cost-effective manner.

It’s what we dosafety, best. With our core valuesand embodying a culture of integrity, caring, education, innovation, we the of core values and embodying a culture oftransform integrity, caring, safety, education, and innovation, we will will transform the seed seed of misinformed perceptions into a flowering truth that cannabis is education, andperceptions innovation,into we will transform thethat seedcannabis of misinformed a flowering truth is medicine. misinformed medicine. perceptions into a flowering truth that cannabis is medicine.

Location Location Location

We are located just 15 minutes We are located just 15 minutes We are located just 15 minutes from downtown Little Rock from downtown downtown Little Little Rock Rock from 26225 Hwy 167 26225 Hwy Hwy 167 167 26225 Hensley, AR 72065 Hensley, AR AR 72065 72065 Hensley, More More Info Info More Info

Visit us on the web Visit us on on the the web web Visit us www.NativeGreenWellness.com www.NativeGreenWellness.com www.NativeGreenWellness.com 501-993-0617 501-993-0617 501-993-0617 @NativeGreenWellness @NativeGreenWellness @NativeGreenWellness

Marijuana is for use by qualified patients only. Keep out of reach of children. Marijuana use

Marijuana is for useby by qualified patients only. Keep out of reach children.

Marijuana use Marijuana for use qualified patients only.

Keep outof of reach of children. during is pregnancy or breastfeeding poses potential harm.

Marijuana is not approved by the during pregnancy poses potential is not approved byuse the Marijuana is for useorbybreastfeeding qualified patients only.

Keep harm. out of Marijuana reach of children.

Marijuana Marijuana pregnancy or breastfeeding potential FDA to use treat, during cure, or prevent any disease.

Do not operate aposes vehicle or machineryharm. under the FDA topregnancy treat, cure,ororbreastfeeding prevent any disease.

Do not operate a vehicleisornot machinery under the during poses potential harm. Marijuana approved by the influence of marijuana.

Marijuana is not approved by the FDA of tonot treat, cure, or prevent any disease. influenceDo marijuana.

FDA to treat, cure, or prevent any disease. operate a vehicle or machinery under the Do not operate a vehicle or machinery the influence of marijuana. influence ofunder marijuana.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

AUGUST 2020 53

THE SOURCE We are your source for a grassroots approach to wellness. The Source is a full-service medical cannabis dispensary focused on variety, fair pricing and customer experience. With one of the largest selections of cannabis products in the state, The Source provides patients with the option to choose from strains with different terpene profiles, usages and effects. In addition to a diverse rotating selection of edibles, concentrates, topicals and tinctures, The Source offers a wide variety of traditional cannabis flower.

We believe medical cannabis is a customized experience. Whether a patient is new to cannabis or well versed, our staff of knowledgeable budtenders are on hand to guide patients to the right product to suit their needs.

Health and safety are our top priority. In accordance with state and local mandates, masks are required for all patients and staff. The Source features two online pickup windows as well as a newly expanded retail space to accommodate safe distancing. Patients are encouraged to pre-order online through our website or our free customized app, “The Source – Dispensary,” available for both iOS and Android.

The Source is a cash-only business. An ATM is located in the store lobby for patients’ convenience. The Source accepts valid in-state medical marijuana cards. Guests visiting from out-of-state may purchase product from The Source with a valid temporary medical marijuana card as issued by the Arkansas Department of Health. Minors under the age of 18 must be accompanied by an adult to enter the dispensary. The Source’s operation hours are 10 a.m.-6 p.m. daily. For the most up to date information, visit our website and follow us on Instagram @thesourcenwa or on Facebook at The Source AR. Medical marijuana is for use by qualified patients only. Keep out of reach of children.

Marijuana is for use by qualified patients only. Keep out of reach of children. Marijuana use during pregnancy or breastfeeding poses potential harms. Marijuana is not approved by the FDA to treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of marijuana.

406 Razorback Drive, Bentonville 72712 479-330-9333 | thesource-ar.com

54 AUGUST 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

Special Advertising Section

PLANT FAMILY THERAPEUTICS There is no better place in the world to be than with your friends. That is the way we see it. Our name, Plant Family Therapeutics, refers to the way we relate to our members. Our community is our family. We get to know you on a one-to-one basis. In our humble opinion, the better we know you, the better we can serve you.

Who we are. We are a medical cannabis company that is passionate about being a pioneer in our home state of Arkansas to an industry that is growing rapidly and breaking down healthcare barriers nationwide. Whether you are coming in to chat with your favorite patient care representative or simply picking up an express order, we look forward to seeing you. Our community inspires us to provide the best medical cannabis experience possible.

When it comes to your cannabis, whatever strain or form you choose quality is key. PFT has taken quality to a whole new level. We do not define quality in the same terms as most other dispensaries. In fact, we have given “quality” a whole new definition that we hold as values.

Health: We want to inspire health on a holistic (mind, body, spirit) level in our members.

Happiness: We provide a happy workplace, inspire happiness in others, and enjoy our service to our members.

Education: This is the basis for change and freedom. We believe knowledge is power and therefore work to continually empower our staff, our community, our industry and our members.

Industry Leaders: We model professionalism, compassion and integrity for our industry as a leader.

PFT was founded on the belief that medical cannabis customers deserve the best cannabis information available to have a safe and positive experience with this ancient healing plant.

PFT offers professional medical cannabis consultations at no extra charge.

Consultations include in-depth information on cannabinoid properties and the use of products, administration techniques, cannabis ratios on dosage, and what you can do to get the most out of your cannabis safely.

PFT has put together a team of talented, driven, fun and committed cannabis professionals that all share one common goal: building a winning spirit of partnership with every single one of our patients.

Taking medical cannabis to the next level. PFT is now growing and manufacturing cannabis products in house. Health and Wellness Education Classes set to start soon: Cannabis 101, Terpenes, the Entourage Effect, micro-dosing and more.

PFT strives to bring compassionate cannabis care at fair prices to the Arkansas Medical Marijuana community.

Stop by, say hi, and become part of the family.

“An amazing dispensary and staff!!!

The experience and product alone are worth the drive!! PFT knows what they are doing! 110 percent the best!!!”

Marijuana is for use by qualified patients only. Keep out of reach of children. Marijuana use during pregnancy or breastfeeding poses potential harms.

Marijuana is not approved by the FDA to treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of marijuana.

5172 US-62 E, Mountain Home, 72653 | 870-709-0800 | plant-family.com Special Advertising Section

ANIMAL CROSSINGS

BY BYRON AND HARRISON WALDEN EDITED BY WILL SHORTZ Byron Walden is a math and computer science professor at Santa Clara University. Harrison is his 8-year-old son, who, with occasional assistance, has been doing crosswords for more than a year. The jokes in this puzzle’s theme are a collaboration between the two. Byron spearheaded the fill — although the top right and lower left corners are completely Harrison’s.

The two wrote the clues together. — W.S.

ACR OS S 1 Fancy water pitcher 7 Cranks (out) 13 Iranian president Rouhani 19 National park near Bar Harbor 20 Shoulder-supported launcher 22 Go against 23 Put in another light 24 What do you get when you cross

1

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26 30

9

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45 54 58

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68 72 82 86

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12 21

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37 41

8

27

26-Across 62 with a 5-Down?

26 A group of them may be called a memory 28 Bestow 69 70 29 Not down so much?

30 Item that can be blown or thrown 81 31 Coastal-environment simulator at an aquarium 85 34 Onesie protector 36 Some Instagram-feed posts 89 37 Pool unit 38 Tokyo-to-Iwo Jima dir.

39 Iraqi currency 99 100 41 Symbols of watchfulness 46 Krispy ____ 110 49 Musical tone below A 53 Rock climber’s tool 116 54 Neighbors of Saudis 121 56 ‘‘Cheese’’ products?

57 What do you get when you cross 63-Across 124 with a 45-Down?

61 Jungian feminine side 62 Not natural, say 112 Got to work 63 Coop group 114 ‘‘____ in the Garden’’ (Robert Frost poem) 64 Dazed and confused 66 Went (against) 116 What do you get when you cross 114-Across with 68 Caper a 93-Down?

69 London theater district 72 Flatbread often 120 ____ 101, world’s garnished with rosemary tallest building before the Burj Khalifa 77 Creatures that can have two sets of jaws and teeth 121 Sporty Chevy 81 Kind of squash 122 Picked (up) 82 What do you get when 123 Shaping wood using a you cross 77-Across with a curved blade 40-Down?

124 Get short with 85 Begin dozing 125 Coldly determined 87 Dandelion look-alike 126 Direct 88 Congregate to rest 89 Fill with love

DO WN 90 ____ Malfoy, Harry 1 Wasn’t indifferent Potter antagonist 2 D.C.-to-Boston transport 91 Logs on to, say 3 Nonvenomous, fastmoving snake 94 Criticizes harshly 96 Tirana’s country: Abbr.

4 Get accustomed (to) 98 Cabinet inits. since 5 School group 1980 6 Erode 99 Abe Lincoln’s youngest 7 ‘‘CSI’’ broadcaster son 8 Spots on ships for anchor cables 102 ____ de los Muertos 103 Napoleonic symbol 9 Weapon used by the Terminator 106 ‘‘If all ____ fails . . . ’’ 110 Confess 10 CD-____ 56 AUGUST 2020

3

103 112

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Aurelius, for Lucius Aurelius Commodus 12 Burrowing lizard 13 Spicy appetizer 14 When National Beer Day is celebrated: Abbr.

15 Tater 16 Gandhi of contemporary Indian politics 17 Queried 18 They might take a few swallows 21Along with 25 Geographical locale whose name means ‘‘waterless place’’ 27 Back of the neck 32 ‘‘For shame!’’

33 Make bubbly 35 Rice variety 37 Lex Luthor’s sister 39 Classroom assignment 40 What’s known for its poker face?

41 Take in the newspaper 42 ____ Stix 43 Suffix with launder 44 Department stores since 1901 45 Ika, at a sushi bar 47 Ireland, poetically 11

Some lapel attachments First letter of the Arabic alphabet 51 Do, ____, fa . . .

52 Exam for collegebound H.S. students 55 ‘‘Mad Men’’ channel 58 Pest-control brand founded by Lee Ratner (!) in the 1950s 59 ____ Island 60 Sega mascot 65 Home to Natural Bridges National Monument 67 1,000% 68 Ghana’s capital 69 Lessen in power 70 Business class, for short 71 Pop 72 ‘‘Never ____!’’

73 Prefix with -gon 74 M.R.I. alternative 75 Cactus bump 76 Org. with a classified budget 78 Many stars have big ones 79 ____-majesté 80 Concordes et al.

83 Some HDTVs 48 50

Father of the Amazons, in Greek myth 86 ‘‘Sorry, Charlie’’ 92 ‘‘Moonstruck’’ Oscar winner 93 Smallest of the big cats 95 Home to the Hana Highway 97 Touchingly?

99 Soothing powders 100 Flighty?

101 Strongly held beliefs 103 Weather-forecast figures 104 Inception 105 Hen 106 ‘‘My Fair Lady’’ protagonist 107 Fatty acid, e.g.

108 ‘‘____ evil’’ 109 Endorse online 111 Striking sound 113 Big name in vitamins 115 Lessen in power 117 Singing syllable 118 16th letter 119 Palindromic preposition 84

MARKETPLACE FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHER-TURKISH

(Little Rock, AR): Teach Turkish Lang. courses to sec. school students.

Bachelor in Turkish Lang or rltd fld + 1 yr exp as Turkish Lang teacher at mid or high sch. Mail res.: LISA Academy, 10825 Financial Centre Pkwy Ste 360, AR 72211, Attn: HR Dept., Refer to Ad#OE.

CALENDARIO COMUNITARIO DE EVENTOS. Pág. 11 GRATIS LA VOZ DE NUESTRA COMUNIDAD www.ellatinoarkansas.com

30 DE MAYO 2019 • VOLUMEN 18 • EDICIÓN 52

¡Bienvenidos A Arkansas Central!

Summer special.

Two nights for the price of one!

Restored, new bulbs.

Call Searchlight Dave Today!

501-765-5511

Guía e información para los residentes del “Estado Natural”

PÁG. 4 VIAJES GRATIS EN TRANVÍAS EL AÑO 2019 PÁG. 7

COPA ORO 2019: 15 DE JUNIO AL 7 DE JULIO EN COSTA RICA, JAMAICA Y ESTADOS UNIDOS PÁG. 12 www.ellatinoarkansas.com • 30 DE MAYO 2019 1

WE SPEAK SPANISH. DO YOU NEED HELP? TO ADVERTISE IN THIS SECTION, CALL LUIS at 501.492.3974 OR EMAIL LUIS@ARKTIMES.COM

Our sister paper El Latino is Arkansas’s only weekly – audited Spanish language newspaper.

Arkansas has the second fastest growing Latino population in the country and smart businesses are targeting this market as they develop business relationships with these new consumers.

El Latino is a free publication available at 185 pickup locations in Central Arkansas. www.ellatinoarkansas.com Facebook.com/ellatinoarkansas Contact Luis Garcia today for more information!

201 E. Markham, Suite 200 Little Rock AR 501-374-0853 luis@arktimes.com

Group Leader, Customer Completions Administrator wanted by aircraft services company in Little Rock, AR. Prep weekly Executive Summaries & briefing of production status for Dassault Aviation (DA) & Dassault Falcon Jet Corporation (DFJC); Represent DA/DFJC Sales, Contracts, Mktg, World Wide Spec & Dsgn teams w/in the Little Rock Completion Center; Collaborate w/ Little Rock Sr. Leadership Team & Production to ensure the best exp for the customer during the Completion of the aircraft; serve as single point of contact during customer visits; manage all aspects of aircraft deliveries.

Reqs: Associates deg in Business Admin & at least 8 yrs of exp in Aviation Project Mgmt, Commercial Contracts, Completions Specs, Drawings & Engg Definition. Send resumes to: Dassault Falcon Jet Corp., Attn: Randall Lui, Teterboro Airport, 200 Riser Rd, Little Ferry, NJ 07643.

arktimes.com ARKANSASTIMES.COM

AUGUST 2020 57

THE OBSERVER

PARK IT, LITTLE ROCK

T

he Observer is a Little Rock Long-Hauler who has been around this city many a moon. So allow us to tell you what’s going to happen with this Topgolf bullshit Mayor Frank Scott Jr. is exploring for 18 acres of the former War Memorial Golf Course. No crystal ball required. Just a long-term knowledge of this city and what it will abide. Ready? Here goes: TOPGOLF! A glitzy, neon-lit monstrosity where overwhelmingly white, golf-loving brodudes can hang out and drink beer and talk about their golf clubs and their new F-150s and laugh at the poors. But the wings are only soso, and the burgers are $10 to start, and once you’ve done The Topgolf Experience, you’ve kinda done it. Seriously, now: Can you imagine someone who doesn’t work at Topgolf going there to eat and drink once a week, or even once a month, for years?

So, after doing great business for two years, so-so business for a few years, and absolutely abysmal business for a few more, Topgolf — having built in this town in an economy that is as unpredictable as mahjongg — will decide it can’t keep pumping money into a burg like Little Rock and they will pull up stakes. Could be five years. Could be 10. But it will happen.

And at that point, Little Rock has got a giant, 18-acre, wings-and-burgers-smelling eyesore — with attendant parking lots, loading docks, streetlights, curbs and everything else it takes to 58 AUGUST 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

make a place like that go — smack in the middle of what could have been Little Rock’s Central Park if we had just a little bit more vision and just a little bit less short-term greed. Drive out to I-30/I-430 and look at Bass Pro, with black asphalt parking lots and landscaping for days.

Imagine that, abandoned, dropped down like a vast refrigerator box, in the middle of what could have been our city’s showplace park. And once it is developed, it will never be undeveloped again. Development is, in so many ways, forever.

That is absolutely what will happen if Topgolf is allowed to grease its way into War Memorial Park. The Observer has seen it a dozen times in this city. Stuff like that doesn’t work in Little Rock long term, because we are a fickle people and we are an overwhelmingly poor people.

Ask Playtime Pizza how business is going selling bad pizza around a Go-Kart track in their for-lease shell of a building. Go downtown and stroll through the Metrocentre Mall. Ask our city’s many former cupcake and flavored-popcorn tycoons how it goes. Little Rock: the city that seems big enough to sustain the things Memphis and Dallas have, but which is actually so small it can’t. The Observer has been saying that for years. Might sound cynical, but leave the dreams to the dreamers. This kid is a realist.

You know what works here? Not golf-specific ripoffs of Dave and Busters. Not grilled-cheese-

only restaurants or axe-throwing places. What works here are spaces for people to enjoy the outdoors (and we’re not talking about XTREME! Golf and overpriced burgers). What works here is the way Little Rock’s urban areas mesh seamlessly with the natural world. Go down to the Big Dam Bridge on a Friday night in the summer when the world isn’t falling apart and see the throngs of people gathered there, the true, diverse face of our city. Go out to Pinnacle Mountain on a warm Saturday in the spring. THAT is what works here. That’s what people here want.

And even better, that kind of thing is the sort of amenity that brings young, interesting, educated, outdoorsy people to our city, so it can grow and eventually be able to support Topgolfs and grilled-cheese-only restaurants and axe-throwing places. But if you rush that, you just wind up with a big, embarrassing failure in the middle of what could have been your crown jewel of a park. What you get, for all that investment of our community’s treasure and land, is another lost opportunity for Little Rock to have a public space that can be a place of healing and togetherness for this city, a place where no one claims ownership because everyone knows it is owned by us all, like the Big Dam Bridge. What you get is just another paved wasteland to see from the window of a car speeding along the crosstown freeway that was literally built to divide us one from another.

Right now, for one time only, Little Rock has the opportunity to turn what is pretty much the largest piece of contiguous public land left in Little Rock — common ground, at the heart of our city — into a space that will attract the people we need to make our city into the kind of place we want it to be, and that will keep attracting them for the next 75 years. No matter how crazy you are about the idea of Topgolf Little Rock, do you really think Topgolf will keep contributing to the growth of our city, and our communities, and the health of our people, for 75 years?

Given that, how about instead of pissing this chance away on some neon-lit eyesore that’s gonna be home to a nail salon before the kids in second grade now are out of high school, we instead build a green foundation for tomorrow?

How about we Save War Memorial Park for future generations of Little Rock residents? Is that too much to ask? That just once, this city tells the wealthy no and our children yes?

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800.456.3000 | afcu.org/early 1. Membership is required. Must be enrolled in direct deposit and earlier availability of funds are subject to your employer/payer, or benefit provider’s funding. Actual payment dates may vary. Federally insured by NCUA. 60 AUGUST 2020

ARKANSAS TIMES

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