My Redacted Life: Chapter Three (Cont_5)

 Jim Vines picked me up about 8:30 next morning and we headed for my first day of field work in my new job as urban planner. He filled the car with talk. I was happy for that, as I didn’t have to risk sounding stupid.

We turned west on what is now Interstate-30 and headed out of Little Rock. There wasn’t much to see, just some large industrial buildings and a lot of vacant land. We passed a large office tower that Jim said was where the Arkansas Highway Department had located itself. It seemed a bit detached from civilization to me, isolated and unconnected to the complexities of urban transportation, but I was just a novice.

We passed a small village that had been formed around a sawmill, and then a blue-collar “union” town that had grown to serve a large Bauxite mining operation. Then we crossed the Saline River, not far from the site of the Battle of Jenkins Ferry where an African-American regiment from Kansas had helped fight off a frantic attack by Confederate forces that included my great-grandfather’s unit. I knew nothing about this at the time.

From there, the land grew vacant and rolling, peaceful to the eye and comforting. Jim filled the silence with all sorts of information, including a brief autobiography. He had graduated from high school the same year as I, after a strange year away during the so-called “Central High Crisis” in Little Rock. He then headed for Fayetteville, where, by his own admission, he promptly began matriculating in fun and frivolity.

After a semester of such fun, Marvin yanked him home and he completed his bachelor’s work at a small commuter college in Little Rock, now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock where, years later, I was to earn a Master’s Degree.

Along the way, he met his future wife Linda, one of the finest people our state has ever produced. I’ll have more on her later. They headed to Norman, Oklahoma following their marriage, where Jim would receive a Master’s Degree in Urban and Regional planning from the U of O. He landed a job afterwards with the state of Missouri in “Jeff-City” as he called it.

The rest, of course, is history that involved me. Tom Hodges lured him into returning to Arkansas with his wife and young child, and there we were, headed to the tiny mill town of Dierks, Arkansas to practice urban planning on a mini-scale.

Ahead of us on I-30 were three cities that I still call “The Triplets.” These three are of the same size and population, and share many of the same urban characteristics. Fine cities with fine folks. On that day, they were vibrant and thriving, having been fortunate enough to border the newly emerging interstate highway system, in this case, one connecting Little Rock to Dallas/Fort Worth.

Had I been able to look into the future, I would have seen looming the Supreme Court case, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971). It would hold that busing was an appropriate remedy for the problem of racial imbalance in schools, even when the imbalance resulted from the selection of students based on geographic proximity to the school.

Perhaps America would feel the earth tremble on the day of the judgement. No matter what one feels about the decision, there is no argument that it would change urban America forever. Vibrant cities such as the Triplets would sense the rush of an exodus of white families.

Hitherto undistinguished and unheard-of communities with all-white school districts would hear a stampede approaching. The concept of urban neighborhoods based around neighborhood schools, the basis of Jim and Tom’s graduate education in urban planning, would begin to fade into history.

That was in the future, though. Today, we just drifted along, very happy with the present.

What would the future hold?