Editor’s note: About this effort.
Where we live often links us to an epic longing carried in the hearts of our ancestors.
So many of us share a similar story. Our mothers and fathers, grandparents and greatgrandparents left hard and hostile places to seek a better life for their children. They yearned for progress from generation to generation; prayed their children would take the next step up toward God’s outstretched hands. Epic journeys are long and arduous. In “What Happened To Us?,” a series launched in March, James Causey described how his parents moved to Milwaukee from Mississippi with a simple desire: “To find work, buy a house and provide their children a better, safer future than they could ever hope to find under the suffocating racial caste system of the Jim Crow South.” I’ve worked alongside James since he was a teenage apprentice at the Milwaukee Sentinel. He lives in the house he grew up in but the neighborhood has changed. When his parents bought their first home, near the massive A.O. Smith plant that welded most American car frames, Milwaukee was the best city in America for black families, according to economic statistics.
Then the manufacturing jobs that supported thousands of families vanished; jobless rates in the city soared to nearly twice the highest rate of the Great Depression. When James and his classmates were in third grade at Samuel Clemens School in 1978, “the jobs were already leaving our part of town. In the shadows, at the hard edges of our neighborhood, the shoots of an illegal economy were sprouting up to replace them.”
Wherever opportunities to make an honest living fade, hopes and spirits sink, as John Schmid described in his February series “A Time To Heal”: “As jobs disappeared, so did many of the dreams that came with them. And just as during the Great Depression, people and their families began to break. A half-century later, analysis of previously unmined data reveals that many have never healed.”
When children grow up in dangerous places, the wounds can spread, like sparks of a fire, from house to house, neighborhood to neighborhood, through good economic times and bad. You can see this and measure it — in crime and poverty statistics, and in childhood trauma surveys. That’s true wherever it happens, “in the families of those who survived the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Vietnam War and Cambodian genocide.”
Yet, as both Causey and Schmid reported, there are ways to stop and reverse downward cycles, to learn from the most resilient among us, to help the injured overcome.
Both their reports rose from investigations into why murders have soared once more in Milwaukee. We’ve found that while much of America has recovered from the Great Recession of 2008-'09, Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods have not.
After publication of “What Happened To Us?” the Greater Milwaukee Foundation hosted a forum at Washington Park that began to explore new ways to move forward. Could we try approaches that are boosting opportunities in other cities, such as a Cleveland program in which hospitals and deeply rooted institutions outsource laundry and food services to a cooperative that trains and nurtures the long unemployed?
That evening we met a group of young adults who are organizing 200 Nights of Freedom events around the city, starting Aug. 28. They aim to recognize the accomplishments of civil rights leaders from the 1960s while reigniting a spirit of hope.
Fifty years have passed since Father James Groppi worked alongside members of Milwaukee’s NAACP Youth Council to organize 200 nights of civil rights marches that gained national attention.
Anniversaries are a natural marking point for progress. We aim to offer a cleareyed assessment of where we are and how we might make things better. Our plan includes more in-depth reporting, more events, more opportunities for members of our community to weigh in and to act. We'll use all the tools available and build a home for them at jsonline.com/50years.
“Some things are better,” says Prentice McKinney, who walked at the front of those marches 50 years ago. “We have freedom. We do not wake up in the morning as slaves.”
Those marches helped bring about fair housing laws. Yet in many measurable ways, the people of Milwaukee have made nowhere near the progress anticipated by the dreams that came North with the parents of Causey, McKinney and their neighbors.
That longing remains, that ache for the opportunity to build a better future. We don’t want our children and grandchildren to be asking the same questions and facing the same challenges 50 years from now.
It is time to heal.