Camp Best

by Lynette Hanson
Sept. 4, 2003

Seated in his corner office at 3318 North State Street, Camp Best beams his excitement about that eclectic part of the city known as Fondren. He calls the area’s artistic renaissance the "Fondren glow," explaining, "It causes this light to shine on a community; it causes a feeling amongst people of community, and it starts to heal things.”

Sure, as executive director of the Fondren Renaissance Foundation, Best is paid to feel that way. But the 51-year-old Jackson native truly believes in the “glow” because he experiences it every day. Best, who also paints, believes deep down in his creative soul that what's happening in Fondren—like the monthly Art Mix starting Sept. 4—is just what Jackson needs today.

Evidently in 1925 someone else thought Fondren, Jackson's first suburb, was just what Jackson needed—the city annexed the thriving community. The street car line from downtown used to end at the top of the hill where today North State and Old Canton split. After the Civil War, Fondren had gotten its start at that same fork in what was then known as Tougaloo Plantation Road. The land, at the area's highest point and near the Mississippi Lunatic Asylum, was owned by a black man, Isham Cade, and was called 'Sylum Heights.

In 1894, residents who felt 'Sylum Heights wasn't an appropriate name petitioned the federal government to call the new post office Fondren. Five years ago, foundation representatives petitioned the government to keep the current Fondren post office, in the old Shakey's Pizza Parlor, ironically less than a block from the original.

"People go to the post office, they go to the grocery store, they go to the drug store, they go to the hardware store, " Best tells me enthusiastically. Best's master's degree in urban planning from Ole Miss is certainly being used at the foundation. He feels this is a critical time in Jackson because of what he sees as the flight of the economically advantaged to today’s suburbs—not any different than what is going on in other Southern cities—leaving “the core of the city depleted.” What is different in Jackson is that neighborhoods like Fondren, Belhaven and Midtown have decided to work to counter that flight.

Some might say that as a city, Jackson is ill, but Best says: "We have a cure. The cure is the daily devotion of the citizens who remain to make the commitment to revitalizing, recreating the communities … taking a holistic approach makes the community healthy."

I looked up “holistic”—emphasizing the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts. Jackson is the whole; its neighborhoods made up of individuals and the private sector are its parts. "I think one day we will be able to look back and say to our children and our grandchildren, we’re the ones that stayed there and hung on. Twenty-five years from now when Jackson is this fabulous, exciting city again we can say it is because we hung on and we devoted ourselves to that,” Best says.

 
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