Red Cross draws criticism

Backlash builds against a Red Cross policy on deploying volunteers.

“A slap in the face.”

“The exact wrong time to do this.” “Segregating its response to helping families in need.”

Backlash is building against the American Red Cross of Wisconsin, which recently decided not to provide on-site volunteers to fires in 10 Milwaukee ZIP codes, stretching from the city’s north side to the near south side.

In those areas, volunteers now meet with families at their office or nearby Milwaukee police district stations. On Thursday, Red Cross officials said it was part of a broader shift to use volunteers more efficiently and have volunteers and families meet in a safe and warm place.

“It just seems as if they’re leaving the most vulnerable folks in the city with the least amount of services,” Common Council President Ashanti Hamilton said Friday.

The policy comes after heated sessions at City Hall about real and perceived fears about safety, and race, in Milwaukee.

“This seems like the exact wrong time to do this,” Hamilton said.

The affected areas have large African-American and Latino populations. The parts of the city that will continue to get an on-site Red Cross response — including most of downtown, the east side, Bay View and the southwest side — are predominantly white.

“It’s unfathomable,” Ald. Khalif Rainey said in an interview. “The optics are not good. What do you want us to draw from this, Red Cross?

“It’s a slap in the face to the people that live in these areas,” he said.

In recent months, the Common Council has addressed a heavily criticized foreign documentary about murder in the city and a city subcontractor

whose white workers carried guns on a job and whose employee had a cooler with a Ku Klux Klan sticker at a worksite.

“We’re talking about the blatant display of racism and the inability to see these communities as regular neighborhoods in the city, to characterize them as some of war-torn community,” Hamilton said.

“We have to start defining these areas differently,” he said. “If we can’t have the Red Cross understand that, then we’re really lost.”

Mayor Tom Barrett said a meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday at City Hall for representatives of the Fire Department and Red Cross.

Hamilton said council members are drafting a letter to the Red Cross and want the agency to explain the policy change in public, regardless of that meeting’s outcome.

Reggie Jackson, who serves as head griot, or docent, of the America’s Black Holocaust Museum, said Milwaukee’s history of racial segregation makes the policy “even more egregious.”

“In the most segregated metropolitan area in the nation, the American Red Cross of Wisconsin is segregating its rekind sponse to helping families in need,” Jackson said in an open letter posted on the Milwaukee Independent.

“This policy continues a pattern of marginalizing people of color in Milwaukee,” he wrote. “It sends a clear message that you don’t deserve the respect other residents receive.”

Patty Flowers, regional chief executive for the Red Cross, did not respond to an interview request Friday.

In an interview Thursday, she said the Red Cross does not go out to fire scenes in rural parts of the state and offers help by phone. The 10 ZIP codes in Milwaukee were chosen because of the high volume of calls, she said.

“This is where our frequent fires are, and we do need to make sure we have enough volunteers,” Flowers said Thursday. “We may make it a statewide policy down the road.”