UNEQUAL VIOLENCE
Segregation and murder in Milwaukee
Brenda Hines carries three small stones in her purse. ❚ One for hope. ❚ One for healing. ❚ And one for justice. ❚ She reaches for the clear, smooth stones every day, sometimes tumbling them in her hand for more than an hour, other times gripping them tightly for a few seconds. ❚ She holds the stones as an act of prayer. They might disappear into her purse, but she can still feel their weight.
Devoted to God and her family, Brenda’s life has been guided by forces she cannot always see.
At 13, she boarded a Greyhound bus to Milwaukee to take care of her greataunt. At 21, she became a mother and raised four sons in the deeply segregated city, which some experts call one of the worst places in the nation to raise a black family.
She thought her family had defied the odds through faith, hard work and love.
Then, on a cold November night, someone fired a dozen shots into a car.
The driver, Brenda’s 23-year-old son Donovan, was hit by multiple bullets.
He crashed into a nearby house and died.
Unequal cities, unequal violence
Violent crime in Milwaukee is unequal, victimizing African American residents more often than their white counterparts.
Criminologists and other academics have long focused on individual choices and risk factors, such as illegally carrying a gun or selling drugs, when it came to explaining who gets shot and why — but a growing body of research is showing systemic factors may matter more.
When public health experts wanted to figure out how violent crime is linked with structural racism, they looked at decades-old housing maps. Their results were published last year in the journal Social Science and Medicine.
The maps, created by the federal government in the 1930s, explicitly used race to determine creditworthiness and investment risk within neighborhoods. Areas deemed “unworthy of economic investment by virtue of the races, ethnicities, and religions of their residents” were shaded red, the study said.
The researchers examined Philadelphia and found those redlined areas today are more likely to be the places where violence is most common.
In Milwaukee, the same pattern appears.
Present-day census tracts don’t match up perfectly with the historic redlined neighborhoods.
But of the tracts that fall mostly within the old red boundary, 36% of residents’ incomes are below the poverty line — 9 percentage points worse than the citywide poverty rate of 27%.
From 2014 to 2018, the homicide rate in these neighborhoods was 13% worse than the number for the city as a whole, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis found. The nonfatal shooting rate was 28% worse than the citywide average.
The researchers in Philadelphia carefully noted their work did not prove the “insidious confluence” of structural racism and concentrated violence.
But, they said, it gave “historical dimension” to earlier studies that found racial disparities are “as much an issue of place as they are of people.”
The maps reinforced and deepened segregation that persists today. That segregation is connected with poverty and crime. And it leads to unequal victimization.
Last year, a black resident in Milwaukee was eight times as likely as a white resident to be shot and killed, according to the Journal Sentinel analysis.
‘People stayed in certain areas’
As a child in Chicago, Brenda Hines saw segregation, though she didn’t use the word to describe it back then.
“People stayed in certain areas,” she said.
Born to a teenage mother with a drug addiction, Brenda was brought up by her great-aunt, Louise Solomon, who had no children of her own but raised three generations.
Brenda never met her father and only knew his name from her birth certificate.
Her great-aunt and great-uncle owned their house on Chicago’s south side. Brenda saw diversity at home with what she describes as her “rainbow family” — her uncles married women of different races. She also traveled the city in a nondenominational church choir that performed for a variety of faith traditions.
Brenda had a chaotic home life, though she says it was more stable than if she had been with her mother. One of her cousins had schizophrenia, was prone to violent outbursts and got in trouble with the law. Then, her greatuncle died. He had taken care of running the household and looking after the family throughout his 40-year marriage to Louise.
“She didn’t know how to function once he left,” Brenda said of her aunt. “Because she couldn’t drive, she sold the car. Because she didn’t know about the finances, we lost the home.”
The family moved a half-dozen times, shifting between upstairs and downstairs rental units in three houses on the same block. The last house was the one the Solomon family had once owned, only this time they were renters. Brenda hated the constant change. “I vowed I would not have my kids move like that,” she said.
In the early 1980s, her great-aunt was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She moved north, taking Brenda’s troubled cousin to Milwaukee where his father lived. Brenda, then 13, stayed behind with another relative but took the bus to Milwaukee every Friday to care for her great-aunt.
The trips became too much for the teenager. Louise’s prognosis worsened. When the school year ended, Brenda moved to Milwaukee, a city just as segregated as the one she left.
How did Milwaukee get so segregated?
Milwaukee is considered one of the most racially segregated metropolitan areas in the country, along with other Rust Belt cities.
Segregation is typically measured using a black-white dissimilarity index, which represents the percentage of black residents who would need to relocate to be fully integrated with whites.
In Milwaukee, at least three in four black residents would need to relocate in order to live in fully integrated neighborhoods, wrote William H. Frey, author of a Brookings Institution study released late last year.
Full integration would mean every neighborhood has the same racial breakdown as the city as a whole.
Historically, much of Milwaukee’s black community was concentrated in the Bronzeville neighborhood, between Third and 12th streets and Juneau and North avenues. The area north of downtown had the city’s oldest housing stock.
“They were able to make the best of it, for the most part, and create a thriving business and entertainment district within that little box,” said Reggie Jackson, head griot, or curator, at America’s Black Holocaust Museum.
Still, it was difficult for black residents to get loans to buy homes in the area.
Since the federal government had deemed it a risky investment through redlining, banks refused to lend in predominantly black neighborhoods. Meanwhile, white borrowers received loans to buy homes even if they had lower incomes.
“As a result, blacks weren’t able to get mortgages to buy homes and build equity and build generational wealth,” Jackson said.
The continuing racial segregation in the area has many causes in addition to redlining: racially restrictive housing covenants and local zoning laws, real estate agents who steered potential home buyers to specific neighborhoods and government investments in highways and other suburban development, which hastened white flight.
Today, many of those redlined neighborhoods also lack quality food, health care and employment options — all of the things necessary to build healthy families and communities, said Jamaal Smith, racial justice community engagement manager at the YWCA Southeast Wisconsin.
“What do you expect to happen when the resources that people need in order for their families to thrive and for neighborhoods to thrive are not there?” he said.
‘There’s a lot of hunkering down in Milwaukee’
“What do you expect to happen when the resources that people need in order for their families to thrive and for neighborhoods to thrive are not there?” Jamaal Smith Racial justice community engagement manager at the YWCA Southeast Wisconsin
The city’s deep segregation influences all parts of people’s lives, including their travel patterns to get to work, school and entertainment.
In Milwaukee, not only are neighborhoods racially segregated, they are also
less connected to one another than in other cities, said Robert J. Sampson, a Harvard University sociologist and author of “Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect.”
Sampson and his colleagues analyzed 650 million geotagged tweets — online posts that include the user’s location data — to estimate how evenly residents of each neighborhood in the 50 largest American cities visited all other neighborhoods.
Milwaukee ranked low compared to other places — 75% of the other cities had higher equitable mobility, meaning their residents visited neighborhoods more equally, he said.
Why does that matter? Research suggests the more integrated a city, the less correlation between income and race, the healthier the city and the lower the violence.
Of the top 10 U.S. cities with the highest violent crime rate, seven — including Milwaukee — are among America’s most segregated, a Journal Sentinel analysis found.
“There’s a lot of hunkering down in Milwaukee and that, I think, tends to lead to greater social divisions, which then leads to the kind of social problems that we talk about, which then are highly predictive of violence,” Sampson said.
Milwaukee’s most integrated neighborhoods have lower rates of poverty, shootings and homicides, a Journal Sentinel analysis found.
The 10 most integrated census tracts have a poverty rate of 20% — 7 percentage points lower than the citywide figure.
Over the past five years, the shooting rate in those areas was 56% lower than the citywide rate and the homicide rate was 26% lower.
“Not knowing how many times your child was shot, or knowing who done it or why, that just eats you up on the inside. Every day, I have to live with this.” Brenda Hines
Buying a home
In 1998, Brenda moved into a redand-white Cape Cod on North 37th Street.
She didn’t know it was built on a historic dividing line.
On the 1930s federal maps, the east side of the street was yellow, coded as “definitely declining.” To the west, it was blue, meaning “still desirable.”
Brenda bought it as part of a city “walk to work” initiative. At the time, she worked for St. Joseph Hospital as a medical secretary. She improved her credit with help from a local nonprofit and put $100 down on the house, borrowing the last $20 from an uncle. Her monthly mortgage was $495.
“My Little Red Riding House,” she called it.
Recent data shows 60% of white households own their homes in the Milwaukee metro area compared to 28% of black households. Local experts have said the disparity is a reflection of the area’s segregation.
With her purchase, Brenda was poised to defy the odds.
Brenda had four sons with the same partner, but once their youngest was born, the couple split up. The children’s father was “involved in the street life” and had relationships with other women, she said. Through phone calls and in-person visits, he continued to play a role throughout their children’s lives, even when he was incarcerated, she added.
Brenda wanted her boys to grow up in a house “with no one over them” threatening eviction or telling the boys where they could play. She loved her neighborhood on North 37th Street. Other homeowners had lived there for decades, investing in the area because it was so close to the A.O. Smith factory where many worked.
By the time Brenda moved there, the factory had been sold, part of an industrial decline already underway in the city.
That decline resulted in a 12% drop in household income from 1979 to 2010 when adjusted for inflation, a 2013 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study found. The effect for the black households was even more dramatic, with incomes plummeting nearly 29%.
“Then the housing market boom and bust happened, people lost homes and more renters came in, drug dealers came in,” Brenda said.
At the same time she saw the neighborhood declining, Brenda lost her job at the hospital. She began working for half the pay at a Walmart photo studio in Franklin. She eventually found a position at Aurora Sinai, but still made less than her previous hospital salary. Then came the funerals. Brenda’s uncle died after an illness and she paid for the burial services in cash from her tax refund. She was the only person in her family who could afford it. Two years later, she did the same
for another uncle. Neither had life insurance.
She couldn’t keep up with her mortgage. The house went into foreclosure.
After 13 years, she and her sons said goodbye to their house.
Brenda moved into a rental unit on the city’s northwest side, near Timmerman Airport.
‘God was on our side’
Four years ago, Brenda made a bargain with God:
If I get out in the streets and do your work, you’re going to be obligated to take care of me and my family.
That’s when she joined the Salvation Army Chaplaincy Program, which responds to tragedies like infant deaths, suicides, shootings and car crashes.
Her second oldest, Donovan, often went with her to crime scenes or community events. One of Brenda’s favorite photos shows Donovan standing with her, a half-dozen other red-vested chaplains and then-Police Chief Edward Flynn.
The photo was taken at Sherman Park during an event promoting peace after a fatal police shooting in 2016.
Segregation was cited as one of the many root causes of the ensuing unrest, with one local minister saying segregation is “not just about boundaries . ... It’s about access to all of the abundance of life that many white people in this city have that many black people do not.”
As her sons grew up, Brenda did what she could to protect them, keeping them in school and involved with sports.
“We had plenty of talks and they knew, especially Donovan, to be careful out there, come home to mama, be safe, don’t do the wrong things,” she said. “You’re a black man living in this world, you’re going to have some police encounters.”
Donovan and one of his brothers had been arrested before but never spent time in prison. Brenda urged her sons to avoid the old neighborhood where crime had risen. But one morning nearly three years ago, a dispute from that neighborhood came to her doorstep.
Two young men showed up and demanded $50, money they claimed Donovan owed them related to a car. Brenda feared they were going to rob her.
She had known these young men since they were children. Brenda, Donovan and his oldest brother, Raymon, went out to talk to them.
The men reached for their waistbands.
Y’all going to pull a gun on us? she said in disbelief.
Talk your bad shit now, they said over and over again, pointing their weapons at them.
Brenda stepped between the guns and her sons, her arms outstretched. She begged them not to shoot as she stepped back again.
And again.
And again.
Finally, she and her sons reached the door and ducked inside.
“God was on our side,” she said.
Segregation as a risk factor for homicide
A black person living in Wisconsin is 22 times more likely than a white person to be fatally shot.
In New Mexico, a black person is only twice as likely to be fatally shot as a white person.
A recent study out of Boston University tried to figure out why the disparities vary so much among states.
Researchers used 25 years of data and controlled for unemployment, incarceration, education levels, poverty, homeownership and single-parent households.
They found one variable that seems to explain the statistics. Segregation.
“In other words, racial segregation is a risk factor for firearm homicide,” said Michael Siegel, a physician and public health researcher at Boston University.
For every 10 point increase in the segregation index, the gap between the black-white firearm homicide rate increased by nearly 40%, the study found.
In examining available data in 42 states, Siegel and a team of researchers found Wisconsin had the widest gap in racial disparities. Milwaukee County, home to nearly 70% of the state’s African American population, drives the statewide ranking, he said.
People are used to hearing about homicide rates on a city level, measured by dividing the number of homicides by the population. But that misses crucial context for understanding and addressing violence.
“You get a number. It’s completely accurate. And it’s deeply unrepresentative of what’s going on,” said David Kennedy, director of the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Last year, Milwaukee’s homicide rate was about 17 killings per 100,000 people. The rate for the city’s black population was about 35 killings per 100,000.
“Many American cities are the product of a long, long historical reality of white supremacy and racial violence and disproportionate action by the criminal justice system,” Kennedy said.
When Milwaukee’s Office of Violence Prevention released its Blueprint for Peace two years ago, the report was blunt about the impact of segregation: “Cities with the greatest geographical segregation from opportunity tend to have the highest rates of violence.”
The night everything changed
When Brenda went to bed on Nov. 12, 2017, she thought Donovan was in the house, talking to his girlfriend in the living room.
She drifted into a restless sleep and woke after midnight to hear the girlfriend pacing. Her son wasn’t home.
Little girl, what’s wrong? Where’s Donovan? she asked.
The young woman stammered: He’s been shot. The police told me not to tell you, to just let you sleep.
Brenda called the police, using the number on the girlfriend’s phone. A detective came to her door and confirmed her worst fear: her son had been shot and killed.
Maybe Donovan was doing something wrong, the detective said.
She told them what she knew, about the young men who came to her house and pointed the guns years earlier and about how Donovan smoked marijuana to curb his anxiety and gave people rides to get the cash for it.
She later learned Donovan had advertised his driving services on Facebook the night he was killed, like an informal version of Uber or Lyft. Then, he drove to a gas station, called his girlfriend and asked if he could come pick her up. She told him no.
Brenda thinks he wanted an excuse to come home, fearful or on edge about something.
Less than an hour later, Donovan was dead.
No one has been held accountable in court for Donovan’s death. That was the case in 232 additional homicides over the past five years, according to a Journal Sentinel investigation.
In that period, a suspect was arrested and charged, or deceased, in 58% of homicides of black victims, compared to 67% for Hispanics and 74% for white victims.
In the months after her son’s death, Brenda wondered: God, how could you allow this to happen when I was doing everything you wanted me to do? If you wanted me to do more, I would have done more.
She stopped praying.
From her work as a chaplain, Brenda knows more than the average person about how police officers and detectives do their jobs. She has witnessed the relief of family members when police arrest a suspected killer.
But even an arrest does not guarantee justice. Less than half of all homicides in Milwaukee end with someone convicted of a crime, the Journal Sentinel investigation found.
“Not knowing how many times your child was shot, or knowing who done it or why, that just eats you up on the inside,” Brenda said. “Every day, I have to live with this.”
‘The community has to heal itself’
Brenda stood in a crowd of hundreds at Mitchell Park on a sunny Friday this spring.
A pastor prayed in Spanish, his voice booming through a microphone. A woman translated each line: “Lord Jesus, I pray, in your name, Lord, that crime be gone in this place! That the city of Milwaukee will be a secure place, a place where we praise your name!”
A group of different ages and races marched to the middle of the North 27th Street bridge, significant because it spans the city’s near north and south sides, linking the segregated city.
They prayed for Milwaukee, then returned to the park for worship.
Brenda was not there as a chaplain. She was there as herself, as a black woman who has navigated an unequal world. As a mother who lost a child to gun violence. As a woman whose faith had been tested.
Several months after her son’s killing, Brenda reluctantly pulled out her Bible. She turned to the Last Supper, when Jesus prepared his followers for his own death.
“But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail,” Jesus said, according to the Gospel of Luke. “And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.”
Brenda felt God speaking to her. She started to pray again. She fed her faith. She connected with other mothers who had lost children to homicide. She saw how violence cut across every part of the city, claiming black and white, old and young, rich and poor.
“You can have your segregation if you want to, it’s not going to stop it,” she said. “You can’t put a bandage on here and think it’s not going to affect all the other areas. It’s going to affect black, white, any color.”
At the prayer event, Brenda marveled at the crowd’s size and diversity.
“I’m learning the only way this community can heal is the community has to heal itself,” she said.
As another pastor took the microphone and prayed, Brenda closed her eyes and stretched out her hand.