Jim Johnson, a vicious white-supremacy attorney, rushed to the scene and,
using the tired-old “They’re coming for your women,” ploy, embroiled the
community in controversy, gaining notoriety that would push Orval Faubus into a
staunchly segregationist stance and the state, eventually, into ridicule and
disdain.
The rest is history. It proved to be one of Arkansas’s
darkest hours.
It made me think of June, 1966, when I graduated from the University
of Arkansas. Faubus had been in office for over ten years and had brought
nothing but shame to the state during that time. The state had lost any
prestige it might have once had, and was rapidly losing population.
Thus the “sucking sound” the next day following graduation,
when so many who had no binding ties left the state. It was truly a mass
exodus.
As for me, I went to San Francisco. In late 1966, there were
so many ex-patriates from Arkansas living in the Bay Area that we would have get-togethers
attended by 20 or 30 of my former classmates.
I never intended to return. As the Jack
Nicholson character said, “I was just inches away from a clean getaway.”
Then the Draft Board came for me and I was occupied for four years. During that
time a funny thing happened. Winthrop Rockefeller became governor of Arkansas
and I began to read accounts from home about how he was making a valiant
attempt to bring Arkansas out of the morass into which it had wallowed for
years, a morass that only the occasional success of its major college football
team could brighten.
He was succeeded by Dale Bumpers, another enlightened soul.
Then other funny things happened.
I was discharged and soon on my way back to California. I
stopped in Arkansas to visit and met, through a family member, some young guys
who had just started their own urban planning firm. I agreed to meet them
before I “lit out for the territories.” I was that close to the “Little Rock
Getaway” so to speak.
But, I found a job here. And I found a wife here. In short, I
found a life here. Tall buildings were rising in my new city. A series of
bright young politicians left their mark on the state: David Pryor, Bill
Clinton, John Paul Hammerschmidt, Jim Guy Tucker, and Win Rockefeller. The
state emerged from its dismal past and flourished. Women and people of color
rose to prominence and more buildings rose to the sky. Northwest Arkansas, long
a scene of poverty, began to emerge as one of the country’s leading economies.
Then a native son became President of the United States.
That’s when our progress, it seems to me, came under attack.
There were those who simply could not accept the fact that
William Jefferson Clinton would be president for eight years, even though he
presided over a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity marred, it is true,
by personal lapses.
Today, I feel the state tilting backwards into that dark
abyss once more. A state law that legalizes hatred becomes effective today,
allowed by many who chose to ignore the “better angels of their nature.” The
editorial page of the only statewide newspaper daily fans the feeling of disrespect
toward our nation's President. Far too many churches have turned from
preaching love and grace to encouraging the abhorrence of strangers. There is an
outpouring of vitriol against non-Caucasians that hasn’t been this evident
since the lynching of black people in our state at the height of the Jim Crow
era. Those whose hatred is most uncontrollable are “agged on” as my mother
would say, by those who should know better but who are deluded into believing
that their right to own firearms is endangered. This is a most terrifying
combination in my opinion. It is like a gas can resting alongside a stack of
dynamite.
We’ve sunk too many roots to make a getaway at our ages. We
might, if we don’t live past normal life-expectancy, survive since we descend
from Northern European ancestry, the one truly protected category in our country. If we live too long, the haters may get around
to the educated and progressive-minded, but we will be tired and ready to go by then.
In the meantime … my advice to a young person? “Run Dude,
run!”
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| It seems that this action is now protected by state law in Arkansas. Shame on us. |
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