What was going on when I was born?

Just as integration here has become respectable, the public schools are threatened with becoming racially segregated again. Years of movement by whites to the suburbs, encouraged by shrewd real estate speculators and some political leaders, ship, has left the Little Rock school district with a 4-to-1 black majority in the elementary grades. School enrollment is 70 percent black over all, even though a majority of the city's population is white, and school officials predict the public schools will be all black in a few years. ''In my view, public education in this community has reached a crisis stage,'' Federal District Judge Henry Woods wrote last April as he signed an order that he and school officials hoped would stop the resegregation. His order, a result of a lawsuit by the Little Rock school district, would merge that district with two adjoining ones where many of the city's whites have settled in recent years.

The French vice consul in Lebanon was abducted by gunmen in West Beirut today, and another French Embassy official and his daughter were reported missing and feared kidnapped. Islamic Holy War, believed to be an underground Moslem fundamentalist group, took responsibility for the abduction of the diplomat, which occurred in front of witnesses, and for the two disappearances. In two separate telephone messages to a Western news agency, callers threatened to step up the campaign against foreigners here. The 42-year-old vice consul, Marcel Fontaine, who has worked in Beirut for the last two years, was seized by three unidentified gunmen when he stopped his car on a street behind the French Embassy to buy newspapers, witnesses said. The gunmen forced him into a blue automobile and drove off, according to the witnesses.

Three new tax breaks - for one-income families, low- income homeowners and people with income from dividends and interest - were proposed by Governor Cuomo today in negotiations over the proposed state budget. The Governor echoed part of a more comprehensive package that had been announced just a few minutes earlier by a fellow Democrat, Assembly Speaker Stanley Fink. And Mr. Cuomo credited the Republican-controlled Senate with thinking up two of the proposals he offered. First Sign of Major Movement Altogether, he said, the three new items would add up to $290 million in the third year of a tax-cut program that would be phased in over the three years.

The chief objective of Israel's new aggressive military policy in southern Lebanon, military analysts here say, is to make Israel's northern border secure. In adopting what has been called an ''offensive defense,'' the analysts say, Israel has finally turned its back on the idea of improving its security by installing a more stable or sympathetic government to the north. Instead, they say, the idea now is to make Galilee secure by sending a message to the Lebanese about what life will be like in the future if there are attacks on northern Israeli settlements from southern Lebanon. Iron Fist or Velvet Glove?

The Consumer Price Index rose three- tenths of 1 percent in February, extending the trend of modest inflation that has kept price increases to 4 percent or less since 1981. The data, published by the Labor Department today, contradict an inflation gauge that on Thursday showed a sharp jump in the current quarter. Analysts said the new data confirmed that the Thursday report was substantially overstating the upward pressure on prices. ''It looks like we are drifting along at about a 3 1/2 percent inflation rate,'' commented Edward Guay, an economist at the Cigna Corporation, an insurance group. Patrick C. Jackman, a Labor Department official, said that ''it's basically the same pattern we've had for some time.''

The South African Government ordered a judicial inquiry today into the incident Thursday in which the police opened fire on a crowd of black people, killing 18. The deaths, near the southern automotive center of Uitenhage, brought an outcry from church and opposition groups in South Africa. Today, these groups accused the police either of falsifying their version of the killings or of using improper tactics to cope with a crowd of black people. Some South African commentators predicted that actions such as those in Uitenhage would speed up a campaign in the United States for a withdrawal of investments in this racially divided nation. Anniversary of Massacre ''There are all the elements of panic'' by the police, a white opposition legislator, Helen Suzman, told reporters after she had spoken with survivors of the incident. In the shooting, a police patrol opened fire with automatic rifles and shotguns on a crowd that the police said numbered up to 4,000 people. The crowd was walking to a funeral.

President Reagan and Senate Republican leaders today set up a group to try to negotiate agreement on a package of spending cuts to reduce the Federal deficit. The first meeting of the group, including four or five representatives of the Administration and a small group of Republican Senators, could be held Tuesday. The group set up today is the first significant move by the White House and the Senate Republican leadership to try to work out major differences over the military budget, sharp cuts in domestic programs proposed by the President and elimination for one year of the cost- of-living increase in Social Security benefits. 'Effort to Look at Differences' Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, said, ''I think what it begins is an effort to look at the differences in the two budgets and to try to seek some way to arrive at an accommodation and then present it to the President to see if it's any way acceptable to him.''

In terms of public exposure and public debate, the chief representative of the Communist Government of Poland is not Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski - or, for that matter, any of his Cabinet ministers or party lieutenants. The distinction is held by an elfin, 52-year-old man who has never been a member of the ruling party. Officially, Jerzy Urban is simply the spokesman for the Government. But in fact, Mr. Urban, a former protege of Deputy Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski, shapes policies and seeks to mold internal and external public opinion on all aspects of public life. By his own account, he sits in on meetings of the Council of Ministers and offers opinions but does not vote. While the party chiefs debate and skirmish in secret, Mr. Urban jousts openly, usually joyfully and often cynically, with foreign journalists and through them with political dissenters, Western governments and international organizations.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz is considering meeting with the Foreign Ministers of Egypt and Jordan to discuss the makeup of an Arab delegation to negotiate peace with Israel, Reagan Administration officials said today. Egypt supports such a meeting, but the Jordanians are resisting the idea because they say they prefer the first step be an American invitation to a Jordanian- Palestinian delegation. Jordan says Washington and the Palestine Liberation Organization need to start talking. Administration officials say Mr. Shultz has discussed the idea with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who suggested the meeting as a way to avoid the Palestinian issue, and with Foreign Minister Tahir al-Masri of Jordan, who has been in Washington this week. The officials said Richard W. Murphy Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, would pursue the question of what to do next when he goes to the Middle East in the next two weeks.

The United States has nearly finished building installations in Oman, Somalia and Kenya for use by the Rapid Deployment Force in the event of a crisis in the Persian Gulf, according to the Pentagon. Omani sites at Masira, an island off the coast in the Arabian Sea, and at Thamarit will be able to support United States tactical operations into the gulf area when completed, Maj. Gen. David Watts of the Army told a House Appropriations Committee panel on Thursday.

When Konstantin U. Chernenko died last week, the Nicaraguan Government declared three days of national mourning for the Soviet leader. To sorrowful strains of Chopin and Tchaikovsky, nightly news broadcasts praised ''Comrade Chernenko'' as a ''great statesman and untiring fighter for the cause of world peace and solidarity.'' For some Nicaraguans and many foreigners, the tributes to the Soviet leader were one more sign of the Government's eagerness to align itself with the practices and the values of the Eastern bloc. ''It was just the sort of thing you would see in Moscow,'' said a diplomat with experience in Communist capitals.

Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, said in a written statement that Mr. Kampelman will meet with Mr. Reagan on Monday morning ''to give him a private assessment of the progress of the talks'' and probably will not make it back to Geneva for Tuesday's negotiating session. Also on Monday, Mr. Speakes said, ''the President and the Ambassador will talk to members of the House of Representatives on the relationship of the MX program to progress in arms control.''