HOST: As America gears up to celebrate 250 years, there is also a growing number of protests against the current administration and calls for the country to reckon with its troubled past. Little Rock Public Radio’s Kia Pennington has more.
REPORTER KIA PENNINGTON: The American Dream can mean many things to many people. Land ownership. Prosperity. Freedom. And for some…it can mean nothing.
COURTNEY MAXWELL: I don’t believe in the American Dream.
PENNINGTON: That’s Courtney Maxwell speaking at a March for Democracy Demonstration, sponsored by The People’s Protests of Arkansas.
MAXWELL: I think that we are raised to believe that you can come here as an immigrant and you can go about it the right way and doing all of this, I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how you do it. They still don’t like immigrants. The rich run and own everything.
PENNINGTON: The demonstration, held March 3rd at the Arkansas State Capitol, saw many Arkansans join in. DeNina Louallen was another marcher who says she protests as a way of exercising her rights.
DENINA LOUALLEN: I think if you don’t [protest], you’re saying you agree with it. I think this is our way of saying we disagree and I think if enough of us do it, we get seen”.
PENNINGTON: The American Dream is a concept first mentioned by author James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book The Epic of America. He said the American Dream represents “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”
UA Little Rock History Professor Barclay Key says The American Dream has changed from that original meaning.
BARCLAY KEY: It sort of represents a culmination of ideas about what it means to be an American encapsulated in this phrase that would later be used by companies in their ads who want to sell stuff. The American Dream means being a consumer of stuff.
PENNINGTON: The popularity of the phrase would take off in the midst of the Cold War. Key says this Dream includes notions of freedom for one’s self and family. And as long as one has that, everything is going to be okay. And, above all, if one just works hard enough, they can make it, whatever that looks like for them. But historically, this just wasn’t a dream afforded to all. In the 1857 case of Dred Scott vs. Sandford, the Supreme Court upheld the ruling that Black Americans were more property than people.
Just over a decade later, the 14th amendment upheld that anyone born in the U-S was a citizen. Before, groups like enslaved African Americans were still barred from citizenship, even after slavery was abolished in 1865.
Despite new political, social, and economic opportunities for minorities, Professor Key says this doesn't automatically erase centuries of prejudice. Black Americans may have been freed citizens, but were still subject to harsh segregation laws. And these laws also extended to other racial minorities like Chinese immigrants. In the 1927 case of Gong Lum vs. Rice, the Supreme Court upheld the ruling that Chinese Americans in Mississippi were not allowed to attend white schools.
KEY: So, I say all that to say as with most things, if not all things, the opportunities that are present for citizens of the United States have varied tremendously, based on a person’s location and color of their skin.
PENNINGTON: Arkansas’ legacy is blemished, too. The state has as much land as it does, in part, due to the forced removal of some sixty thousand Native Americans through the Trail of Tears. The Elaine Massacre of 1919 is considered Arkansas’s deadliest racial conflict after an estimated 25 to 200 Black residents lost their lives when a mob of 500 to 1,000 white residents stormed the town. The Negro Boys Industrial school’s lack of proper attention would lead to a fire just outside of Wrightsville in 1959 that left 21 boys dead.
In 2026, some see the Trump administration’s militant use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a stark reminder of the past, and another way to cut off minorities from the American Dream.
George Ferguson started protesting the Trump administration back in 2016. Now he spends his time protesting Little Rock’s ICE Detention Center near the airport. Most weekday afternoons, he stands outside the unmarked building with signs to demonstrate his disapproval of agents holding immigrants for further transportation. While he says he has stood out in the rain alone to protest, he more often is joined by at least five other people and sometimes more, depending on the day.
GEORGE FERGUSON: Every day they bring out people they’ve picked up the day before from this building in shackles and they put them in huge vans with no windows and take them to the Louisiana ICE Detention Center. We’re out here to wait for those vans to arrive and then we protest the actual bringing out of people in shackles.
PENNINGTON: A February 2026 PBS News/NPR/Marist Poll found that 62% of Americans feel the actions of ICE make America less safe. Ferguson says protesting keeps his hope alive.
FERGUSON: Do I think in the moment it stops anything? No. Accumulatively, I think it has an effect. Because there are also all the people who are driving past who, if nothing else, have to think about what they just read. They may reject it, but they can’t not see it.
PENNINGTON: At a March for Democracy Demonstration in early spring, protester DeNina Louallen said she’s suffered familial and social consequences for protesting.
LOUALLEN: Our political views have cost us pretty much all of our family and most of our friends. We’ve made new friends.”
PENNINGTON: And these marches are just one form of protest. Artist Jose Hernandez, in collaboration with Arkansas Peace Week, has turned the 7th street underpass in Little Rock into a thriving hub for creativity and social commentary. The 7th Street Mural features artwork like an American flag with the caption “The United Voices of America”. And in a red, white, and blue thought bubble, “An Attack Against One, Is An Attack On All”. Hernandez says the project started in 2020, as a response to the murder of George Floyd.
HERNANDEZ: We went out there and painted as a protest. I’m a painter. I do murals. That’s my platform and that’s how I know how to express myself as an artist.
PENNINGTON: Hernandez came to the U-S in the late 2000’s, and says he came searching for the American Dream, but now no longer knows what it means. He now worries about the impacts of increased ICE presence in the country.
HERNANDEZ: It totally affects me. Travel. Not knowing if I’m gonna be able to travel anywhere in the states. Not knowing if I’m gonna be subject to ICE. Or my family members are gonna be subject to Ice. I can’t go out of the country. I don’t know if I'm gonna be able to come back because of my beliefs and what I’ve supported in the past. There’s so much fear installed now to try and control what we do and what we don’t do.
PENNINGTON: It was this same feeling of powerlessness, Hernandez recalls, that led to the George Floyd mural. He wanted to create something that would spark critical thought and unity.
HERNANDEZ: And then that snowballed into having the whole city behind us during the protests. The protesters went down there and celebrated together. So it unified and gave us a way to bring the city together.
PENNINGTON: Across these movements, protestors shared a common theme: they see their work as an act of patriotism, despite a divided political climate.
Here’s Maxwell, Louallen, and Ferguson again.
MAXWELL: I think that it would be unpatriotic to not be out here. I think it would be unpatriotic to not stand up for all people in the US. What we’re marching for is democracy and if you’re not going to march for democracy, that’s unpatriotic to me.
LOUALLEN: There’s the American flag right there. We’re proud of who we are. We just want it to be better.
FERGUSON: If we fight now to prevent it from being destroyed, they can join in with one another from all races, from all social economic classes, from all gender identities to maintain the hope and dreams for the country that has really been the biggest example of that in the world’s history.
PENNINGTON: And much like Ferguson, Hernandez acknowledges that not everyone is going to agree with what they were doing, but that’s why it's worth doing.
HERNANDEZ: Anytime they had some kind of Alternative Right thing down at the Capitol, there was vandalism done to the Murals. It was swastikas or white wash the messages. Literally white paint over faces and messages. But people message us and say ‘hey someone hit up 7th Street’ so we’re there the next day painting and fixing it. We’re adding new murals because our messages are gonna be bigger and stronger every time they come out there.
PENNINGTON: When James Truslow Adams coined the phrase The American Dream, he described a life of equality in work, life, and all other aspects. You were meant to be judged not by what you have, but by who you are as a person. Historically, the American Reality for a lot of minority groups has not been this. Equality has been fought for.
If you ask these protesters how they see themselves, they are campaigners in hope of a better future for their families. So, The American Dream, however disillusioned by it they may be, is still a central ideal in their protests. Perhaps The American Dream and The American Reality aren’t so far removed from each other. A flicker of The American Dream can still exist in the grimmest moments of The American Reality. Perhaps they are…two sides of the same 250-year-old coin.
Kia Pennington, Little Rock Public Radio.
