“Tripper! Tripper! Come quick! Says on the news Glen Jackson just beat a white boy to death with a baseball bat down at brick city!” said my little buddy Bobby while watching channel 5. And sure enough, there stood Glen, a black kid in the same grade as me, cuffed and bloody, being hauled down to the county jail for murder. Years later I ran into Glen at Tucker prison farm. He got 30 years for killing Jerry Frick on the basketball court in the Fort Smith projects known as brick city. Never did care too much for Glen Jackson. Not in school and not in prison. I’d known him since Kimmons and as far back as I can remember he always hated white people. Didn’t surprise me at all when I found out he bashed poor Jerry’s head in with that Louisville Slugger. Nope, not at all. That’s just the kind of thing Glen Jackson and other black kids from the projects were capable of.

On the other hand, Jerry Frick had no business being in brick city in the first place. Nor anywhere near Martin Luther King Park for that matter either. All white kids knew not to go near that part of town. It was the no fun zone for real! I’d learned my lesson about three years before when walking down north “S” one night after missing my ride home from the Arkansas/Oklahoma State Fair. As quickly and quietly as I could, I tried to make my way through brick city with­out bringing any unwanted attention to myself. Even when wearing a hooded jacket, the three black kids shooting hoops on the court that night knew I was a white boy and knew I was out of pocket. “Hey honkey!” I heard the biggest one yell. “What choo doin’ in nigga town boy? Don’t you know crackers ain’t welcome ’round here?” That’s when I broke out in a dead run only to be tackled and beaten to within an inch of my life.

My cousin Harold had once been assaulted in brick city too. Unfortunately, he took a worse ass beatin’ that I did, ending up in the hospital with a con­cussion and several stitches to the cranium. To try and make it between brick city and Earl’s Diamond Inn Lounge was true insanity on the party of any young Fort Smith white boy. Yet, many boys tried. If you were coming from anywhere west of Midland and needed to get to let’s say … Sunnymede or Sutton Estates? You pretty much had to make a beeline through brick city. It was okay if you were in a car or riding a fast motorcycle. You’d just best not be walking. Blacks sat on every doorstep and inside every beat up old Cadillac smoking weed and drinking malt liquor just waiting for a white boy to come walking through their ‘hood. My friend Benny Smith was one of those boys. Only thing different, after he got his ass beat, he got even in the end.

After being jumped near the swimming pool in Martin Luther King Park, Benny went home and got his shotgun, some WWII grenades and three of his roadies. It was Saturday night around the first of the month when all the blacks got their welfare checks and things were hoppin’ at the Diamond Inn - the parking lot filled with Lincolns and Caddys. Curb feelers and leopard skin seat covers were the style of the evening. We, er’a, I mean they, the three boys and Benny, cruised the parking lot incognito doing recon before launching their attack. When the time was right, masked Benny ran to the front door of the club, pulled the pins on two smoke grenades and one tear gas bomb, tossing them inside. Punning full speed back to the van, Benny and his crew watched as dozens upon dozens of black bar patrons came stumbling out coughing and hacking looking for fresh air. Smoke rolled out of the bar, men cursed and women cried.

“Fire a few rounds in the air,” said Mike when pulling out of the lot. “Let’s give these assholes a scare!” Flames shot from the barrel of Benny’s .12 guage Remington blowing the hubcaps off a new El Dorado as they burned rubber down south Greenwood. “Damn it Ronnie! I said ‘in the air’, not in the side of some dude’s new ride!” The next day it was all over the news that the Ku Klux Klan had raided the Diamond Inn in retaliation for the beating of a white boy in the park. Of course it wasn’t the KKK. Just four young north siders tired of taking ass whippings from the black guys in brick city and the surrounding area. A lot more shit went down at brick city over the next couple of years. None of which I had anything to do with of course. Like I said, I got sent to the pen. For unrelated reasons of course. Just sold a little bit of weed to the wrong dude - an undercover Arkansas State Trooper no less. Then again, that’s another story.

Brick city was finally condemned some time in the 80’s. The old red brick buildings stood abandoned for several years afterward and were eventually torn down. Don’t have any idea what might be standing on that piece of land today. MLK Park is still there though. So is the swimming pool where blacks only go to swim. And although I haven’t been around Fort Smith in over 8 long years, I imagine the Diamond Inn probably isn’t there anymore either and the owner, old Earl himself, is probably in the grave. Thinking back … in my mind, I can still see brick city. And, I still remember the night I got my ass kicked coming home bleeding telling my mom I’d been jumped by a bunch of black guys just because I was white. Rest in peace brick city and all those poor souls forced to live there over the years as well as all the white kids who fell prey to the blacks that assaulted them. I don’t think it was so much a skin color as it was how much money they did not have. White or black, there were rough neighborhoods. This just happened to be part of my past, a neighborhood that made an impact in my life. That place and those times will be imbedded in my memory forever. I am Tripper –a former resident of Fort Smith, Arkansas. Better Days!