My Redacted Life: Chapter Twelve

As the summer of 1971 passed into fall, I was traveling a lot. The company was serving as planners on contract with a number of cities. These were vibrant communities having yet to encounter the trials that were to face them in the near future. I was soaking in experience like a dry sponge.

I began to notice some minor change in the makeup of planning commissions. When I had first began attending commission meetings, the commissioners, were, without exception, middle-aged men of Caucasian background, overly represented by real estate and insurance professionals. These overlapped, as many real estate brokers in communities sold insurance as well. Sometimes they also owned banks. Power stayed close to the center in most communities.

As time passed, though, I noticed a slight change in the makeup of many planning commissions. An African-American face would appear from nowhere. It would belong to a local professional in the Black community. A local dentist proved a common choice. Whatever the background, the choice would be a safe one for the power structure. There would be no independent thinking.

In fact, there wasn’t much independent thinking evident among most planning commissions. Each boasted a “bell cow,” usually the local developer or his representative. When a vote was called, no head would turn toward the appointed leader, but the votes would signal a pre-arranged agreement.

Conflict would occur on occasion because of a local power struggle. If the community was large enough, there could be competing factions, usually from competing banks, sometimes competing real estate companies. Often, a faction represented both. It could provide entertainment unless it turned tragic, as one did when the patriarch of the losing faction went to his office one evening and took his own life.

Not all of the lessons I was learning came from textbooks.

It wasn’t that the power brokers were evil. They were just protective of their privileges. Once they had taken care of those, they would, in the fashion of the 1970s South, take care of the communities. They established water and sewer systems that served all citizens. They cleaned up environmental dangers. They built fire stations. They built parks, segregated parks, but parks. They built, or sought funding for the building of, new traffic arteries. They sought sources of new jobs.

It seemed that, deep in their hearts, they believed that a harbor served humanity best when its tides lifted all ships. The fact that the tides lifted some ships higher than others simply represented the proper and given order of things. As long as most citizens benefitted a bit, it was okay for a few to benefit a lot. The banquet table was spread for all, but the rich and powerful dined first. For the common masses, as the heroine of a popular novel would later comment, “Enough is as good as feast.”

Then there were the locally owned newspapers, usually independent in their thinking. They did a good job of protecting the powerful from any of their baser instincts.

I watched our cities grow and I watched myself grow as 1971 moved toward a close. The year, overall, had been good to me. Even adversity had, by not destroying me, made me stronger. As it drew to a close, one might have observed me and said, “He was almost always happy, I think.”

Yep.