Confronting the facts
If you like films that educate without preaching and keep you thinking for days, and ideally longer, tune to your local Arkansas Educational Television Network station at 7 p.m. Thursday.
Dream Land — Little Rock’s West 9th Street is an hour-long documentary that may be AETN’s best work substantively.
The film is directed and filmed by a talented young cinematographer, Gabe Mayhan, who has made Little Rock his home with his filmmaker wife, Little Rock native Kathryn Tucker.
The project began as a documentary about the architecture and rich musical heritage of Tarborian Hall, an elegant structure now home to a flag and banner company. In its storied past, the structure anchored once-active Ninth Street in Little Rock, a black town within a white city, and included the third-floor Dreamland Ballroom.
A major stop on the so-called “chitlin’ circuit” for black musical greats from the 1910s into the 1950s, the Dreamland Ballroom lured Billy Eckstine, B.B. King, Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James and other genuine black musical legends who couldn’t play the traditional white venues.
White Little Rock never knew or much cared about the Saturday-night musical magic taking place on that street where white Little Rock never ventured.
Mayhan, possessed of apparent journalistic instincts, realized almost instantly that, while the building’s architecture was spectacular and the musical heritage rich, the real story was Ninth Street itself, and what happened to it, and what happened similarly to black merchant and entertainment districts throughout urban America.
As is often the case with the artistic process, the filmmaker ended up with something quite different from what he set out to do.
The Dream Land he ended up with is an efficient clear-eyed telling of our state’s and city’s ugly past on race and an eye-opening and eye-moistening examination of under-appreciated local history.
What happened to Ninth Street happened elsewhere. It was the federal urban renewal program, which viewed black commercial districts as a blight to be removed. It was a new freeway a block away to speed motorists through and past town and to suburban retreats.
And it was a progressive, well-intended spirit of racial integration and assimilation that advanced the notion that black people would be better off—that we’d all be better off—it we didn’t do our commerce separately, but together.
We wound up living separately, anyway, with wider economic division, more neighborhood decay and, in a way, greater racial strife.
The elephant in Ron Robinson Theater on Friday evening was a variation of a question that had bedeviled me years before when I went through the community’s Our Town program to sensitize attitudes regarding race.
Might the black community be stronger today—and thus the city stronger—if the black community’s merchant and entertainment island had been preserved? Might a surviving Ninth
In the real world, there are many attributes correlated with race and sex. Jews are 3 percent of the U.S. population but 35 percent of our Nobel Prize winners. Blacks are 13 percent of our population but about 74 percent of professional basketball players and about 69 percent of professional football players. Male geniuses outnumber female geniuses 7-to-1. Women have wider peripheral vision than men. Men have better distance vision than women.
The bottom line is that people differ significantly by race and sex. Just knowing the race or sex of an individual may on occasion allow us to guess about something not readily observed.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.