Frederick McKindra

4 weeks ago | arktimes.com | Frederick McKindra

Now six years since her passing, I think I can say I’m at peace with my mother’s absence. In 2017, when I moved back to Little Rock to help care for her during her fight with pancreatic cancer, I had no idea that what I might have been doing was returning home to finally have the difficult conversations with her I’d moved 19 hours away to avoid. I hadn’t wanted to talk to her about what happened at Howard University and why I’d run even farther away.

2 months ago | arktimes.com | Frederick McKindra

Killed at age 44 by a gunshot fired by his fiancee’s brother, Arkansas painter Dewitt Jordan left a complicated legacy. There’s something not quite cartoonish but also not quite real about the rounded eyes of the men and women he painted in the middle decades of the 20th century. Whether those doe eyes are an exercise in realism or a message to his audience about the subjects’ personalities is unclear.

2 months ago | arktimes.com | Frederick McKindra

Garland Elementary on West 25th Street in Little Rock drew its predominantly Black student population from the surrounding neighborhood, and therefore many of the students’ lives intertwined beyond the two-story brick building and surrounding schoolyard.

Oct 10, 2024 | arktimes.com | Frederick McKindra

Editor’s note: Sunset Tigers Coach Ed Johnson, a mainstay of South End Little Rock for more than 50 years, retired from the sidelines in August. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who grew up in the neighborhood south of Roosevelt and north of the railroad tracks, west of Interstate 30 and east of the State Fairgrounds, who didn’t play on Johnson’s teams, or cheer for them from the sidelines.

Jul 10, 2024 | arktimes.com | Frederick McKindra

Last August, as the 2023-24 school year began, the Arkansas Department of Education announced that a pilot AP African American Studies course would no longer count toward state graduation requirements. The reason? The state said the course potentially violated a new law, championed by Gov. Sarah Sanders, that banned “indoctrination” and the teaching of “critical race theory” in the classroom.