OPINION — Editorial

How to stop time

Found: the long missing ingredient

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." William Faulkner said it about this part of the country, where the past not only is preserved like an olive in a perfect martini but is served up like tomato aspic, ready to be tasted and appreciated here and now. Which would be the effect of adding seven nondescript yet famous houses along South Park Street in Little Rock to the national historic district that already encompasses Central High School in the state's capital. The houses were part of the backdrop for the political, social, cultural and constitutional firestorm known as the Little Rock Crisis that engulfed the state and the nation in 1957. Let's save them, for if we live only for the present, what are we, and if not now, when?

To quote Rachel Silva Patton, who's director of Preserve Arkansas, those houses "appear in many of the photographs that were taken during the desegregation crisis, and it's important to the entire neighborhood as a whole that those houses are preserved. It's also important to the national historic site as well." For those photographs were flashed not just across the nation but the whole world--both as an indictment of this country in the eyes of the world and a testament to the bravery of the Little Rock Nine who quietly, courageously exercised their constitutional rights with a little help from the 101st Airborne and their commander-in-chief, Dwight Eisenhower, who would prove a hero in war and a statesman in peace.

To quote Tom Cotton, a more contemporary soldier who's becoming a national statesman: "Ask anybody who lived through the crisis, and they'll tell you they remember it vividly. They may not have been there in person. But they remember the photos--those searing images of an angry mob, the stoic students, the bayoneted troops, all gathered in a high school of all places . . . We preserve historic battlefields like Yorktown and Gettysburg because we want our children to know what it took to gain and keep our freedom--the sacrifices made, the hardships endured. But equally important is preserving historic sites like Central High, where our citizens began the long road to freedom from oppression and intolerance."

Back in 1998, a president from Arkansas named Bill Clinton called the historic site around Central High "a hallowed place every bit as sacred as Gettysburg and Independence Hall." And this piece of living history not only deserves to be preserved but to thrive. It's the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle that finally needs to be put into place to cheers and hurrahs. Let's do it and do it right at last.

French Hill, the Arkansas congressman whose district includes Little Rock, explains that the "long-term objective is to preserve the streetscape as close as one can to the historic period." For it's a piece of living history and all but some irreconcilables and the unreconstructed can now join together to keep this piece of living, continuing history alive and well.

A city--or a state or nation--that forgets its history forgets its very self. No wonder John Lewis, a congressman who himself survived a brutal beating in Selma, has signed on as a co-sponsor of the bill to expand this national historic site's boundaries. Along with Patrick Leahy, the U.S. senator from Vermont, for the chords of memory still unite all Americans regardless of party and calls forth the better angels of our national memory.

So far, all the signs are good for all concerned about those houses and the neighborhood they're in--like the Central High Neighborhood Association and Preserve Arkansas. A state, and nation, can best remain itself through any outward changes by clinging to its character, and what better way to do that than by not only preserving the buildings and other artifacts of the past but infusing them with new life?

Editorial on 05/27/2017

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