On a Thursday evening in downtown Little Rock, twelve students circle a pair of turntables in a converted warehouse on Main Street. A 16-year-old named Jada is learning to scratch a break from a 1972 James Brown record. In the next room, a group of middle schoolers is workshopping verses about gentrification and school funding. Down the hall, a former graffiti writer from Memphis is teaching color theory through spray-can techniques on canvas.
This is Groove Central, a nonprofit education center that has spent the last four years arguing that hip hop is not just entertainment but a legitimate pedagogical framework—and that Arkansas is exactly the right place to prove it.
From Warehouse to Classroom
Groove Central opened in 2020, founded by Marcus Webb, a former Little Rock School District music teacher who left the classroom after budget cuts eliminated arts programming at his high school. Webb, 38, had been using hip hop production software to teach composition and noticed that students who struggled with traditional notation excelled when they could build beats by ear.
"I wasn't trying to be revolutionary," Webb says. "I was trying to reach kids who were already making music on their phones but were being told that music didn't count unless it came with a sheet of paper."
The center's curriculum is built around what Webb and his staff call the "four pedagogical elements" of hip hop culture: emceeing (lyricism and spoken word), DJing (music history and audio engineering), breaking (movement and physical discipline), and graffiti writing/visual art (design, typography, and community aesthetics). Each course ties technical skill to historical context—students learn not only how to mix records but how DJ Kool Herc's 1973 parties in the Bronx created a new approach to rhythm; not only how to write a 16-bar verse but how the form emerged from Black oral traditions and the specific pressures of urban life in the 1970s.
Classes are small, capped at fifteen, and mixed-age. There are no prerequisites and no auditions. The center runs on a sliding-scale tuition model, with roughly 60 percent of students attending on full scholarship.
Concrete Changes in a Specific Place
Groove Central's impact is most visible in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding its Main Street location. The building sits at the edge of the Dunbar Historic District, a historically Black neighborhood that has faced decades of disinvestment, vacant commercial properties, and youth violence that spiked during the pandemic.
In 2021, Webb partnered with the Dunbar Neighborhood Association and the Little Rock Police Department's community policing unit to convert an abandoned lot next to the center into an outdoor performance space called the Cypher Yard. The space now hosts weekly open mics from April through October. According to data from the Little Rock Police Department, juvenile incident reports in the surrounding six-block radius dropped 23 percent between 2021 and 2023—a decline the department's community liaison, Officer Denise Hartley, partially attributes to the increased programming.
"It's not just that kids have somewhere to go," Hartley says. "It's that they have something they're building. I've watched kids who were getting into fights out here start running sound for events, mentoring younger students. That's a different kind of investment."
The center has also developed formal partnerships with three Little Rock public schools—Central High, Hall High, and the Metropolitan Career-Technical Center—where Groove Central instructors co-teach elective courses and after-school programs. In 2023, the organization launched a pilot program in Pine Bluff, training two local educators to replicate the curriculum at the city's Arts & Science Center.
What the Students Say
For students, the appeal is often practical at first and personal later.
"I came because I wanted to learn how to make beats for my SoundCloud," says Devon Harris, 17, a senior at Hall High who has been at Groove Central for two years. "Now I'm applying to colleges for audio engineering, and I'm writing my personal statement about how sampling taught me to think about history as something you can remix, not just memorize."
Aaliyah Norman, 14, started in the visual arts track and now helps design promotional materials for the center's events. "They don't treat graffiti like it's just vandalism," she says. "They teach you about the artists in New York who were painting because galleries wouldn't let them in. That changes how you think about whose art gets to be 'real.'"
The Broader Stakes
Hip hop education is not new—programs in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago have been documented since the 1990s, and the field has produced a growing body of scholarly research, including the HipHopEd movement led by Columbia University professor Christopher Emdin. But Arkansas has lagged behind. The state ranks 47th in per-pupil arts funding, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and rural districts often lack
