Thoughts on a career: January 4, 2018

With my youthful demeanor and immature behavior, you’ll find this hard to believe, but on this day 46 years ago, I entered my profession. I had, somehow, landed a job with an urban planning consulting firm straight out of the military. Geez, I had hit the big time. Or so I thought.

The first planning commission I ever attended was in Hope, Arkansas, a fine community in Southwest Arkansas, the birthplace of President Bill Clinton. Last year, I attended a city board meeting in that very room. The furniture was arranged differently, but it was pretty much the same place. Tempus fugit and all that

Back in the day, planning commissioners all looked like me. That is to say they were all old fat white men. Lots of changes have occurred since that meeting in Hope. Along the line, African-American men and white women appeared on planning commissions, not in proportion to the local population, however. These days, African-American women and persons of Hispanic heritage are finding a place.

In one of those mental files I maintain under “interesting but I don’t know why,” I filed the fact that one saw African-American men appear first.

Those were interesting time. It was marking the end of the so-called “Great Society” era. That experience never achieved its lofty goals, to a large degree because too many important individuals and entities found that making war was either more profitable or more politically useful. I keep my thoughts about this in a file called “Tragedies.”

What the Great Society efforts did, in my observation, was to excite, like some charge applied to dormant electrons, a sense of social justice within a significant segment of the population. Leaders who staunchly declared there were no qualified minorities or women to fill upper-level jobs suddenly found some when they learned that the grant they sought required positive affirmative action.

Coupled with the monumentally heroic actions of people like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis, the governmental emphasis on elevating those who were poor in spirit and who mourned, began, albeit slowly—and against much resistance—to loosen the stranglehold of the Jim Crow era.

Looking at urban plans from that era, one is struck by a sense of optimism, naïve perhaps, that we could wage a war-like crusade against bitter poverty and despair. Moreover, some whose grandparents had been counted as three-fifths human were themselves in positions to achieve, perhaps in their lifetimes, full citizenship.

What we didn’t know was that any action can have an opposite reaction. This emphasis on redressing past inequalities raised the hopes of some and soothed the consciences of others. For some, however, such progress only pushed racial hatred belowground. Like a monster from a 1950s sci-fi movie, it rested in dark, subterranean caverns, waiting for a catalyst, perhaps of nuclear strength, to open a path to the surface.

There was no nuclear-like source, just upheavals, one on top on one another. On April 20, 1971, the United States Supreme Court upheld the use of busing to achieve racial desegregation in schools.

All hell broke loose, accompanied by a great “whooshing” sound as white parents fled cities whose school districts contained a significant black population. Racal composition became a significant element, in some cases the most significant element, in an area’s population growth.

Then a politician coined the term “silent majority,” as a code name for many who would see America return to the 1940s and 1950s, when African-American veterans, many who had been wounded in the service of their country, were denied equal access to the GI Bill. The term resonated with many who had become successful because they did receive full citizenship, but only credited their own hard work.

Next, a presidential hopeful chose to announce his candidacy in the Mississippi City in which three civil rights workers had been murdered for trying to register black voters. Seeing this as a message, the monsters began to slither upward. Recently, the Current Occupant declined to denounce the monsters' worst foot-soldiers, loosening them upon us with increased fury and confidence.

I don’t have to recount what else happened. But I’ve seen it all. My vantage point is from the courthouse square, an area often marked by vacant buildings and concrete slabs where buildings once stood. Retail business owners can’t afford political influence such as the coal industry can exert. I fear that they will disappear, in small-town America, in my lifetime.

And urban plans? They aren’t designed these days, in many cases, for optimism but for something called “branding,” whatever the hell that means. Many are simply drawings of how neighborhoods should look, a result that tells us much more about the personal tastes of the “planners,” than it does about the needs of the people who live within the city, either by choice or the restrictions placed upon them by a present emphasis on greed and selfishness.

Oh, and Hope, Arkansas? It’s managed today by a woman largely considered be one of the best city managers our state has ever produced.

I file that under “well, I’ll swan.”

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