New voices at the table
Milwaukee undergoing unprecedented shift in top leadership posts
Between the protest marches following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis and the disproportionate toll of the coronavirus pandemic on communities of color, this is a moment unlike any other, new Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley said.
“We have to realize that these are unprecedented times,” he said. “We are seeing unprecedented response, but now it’s time for us to come together in an unprecedented way to move this community forward.”
That means having difficult conversations about race and inequity. And the need for those conversations comes just as Milwaukee undergoes an unprecedented shift in its highest offices.
Crowley, 34, was sworn into office weeks after Milwaukee County Board Chairwoman Marcelia Nicholson, 31, and City of Milwaukee Common Council President Cavalier “Chevy” Johnson, 33, were elected by their peers. They now hold the top seats in the city and county along with Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who won a fifth term in April.
Crowley in April became the first African American and the youngest person elected to the top job in the county’s 185-year history.
Nicholson leads the 18-member Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors and is the first Latina and African American woman in the position.
Johnson is tied for second-youngest Common Council president among the nearly three-dozen whose ages the city was able to verify, also making him the youngest African American president. The other two youngest, at 29 and 33 when they were elected, served in the 1800s, according to city records.
Crowley, Johnson and Nicholson came into their positions having already built relationships with one another. Those relationships are important, Crowley said, because they ensure a level of trust and a willingness to communicate, whether or not everyone agrees on an issue.
Ald. Marina Dimitrijevic, who served on the County Board until her election to the Common Council in April, said having three people new to these positions provides an opportunity to rethink existing challenges in the community.
“When you have that shared relationship that goes back even before politics ... that interaction when you’re first working on policy together, it’s based on trust,” she said.
She said it’s time, especially for white elected officials, to step back a little bit and create space and room for them to lead.
Barrett said he has worked with Crowley, Johnson and Nicholson in the past and is looking forward to collaborating with them. Their presence, he said, ensures that voices that need to be heard, will be heard.
Drawing on ‘lived experiences’
Crowley, Nicholson and Johnson bring with them approaches informed by growing up in and around Milwaukee’s hard-pressed 53206 ZIP code, and charting paths into the top levels of government.
“We take the experiences, the lived experiences that we have, with us,” Johnson said. “We bring those with us in our hearts, on our sleeves and in our minds, and we try to create policies that would positively impact the people in the neighborhoods that we grew up with.”
And, he said, making investments that help challenged neighborhoods become safer and more stable benefits the entire city and county.
For so long, Nicholson said, decisions have been made by people who don’t have a sense of the larger implications because they aren’t living through the consequences.
“I think we have a lot of well intentioned people in leadership, but if they don’t know firsthand what it means to really live and breathe poverty, or what it means to live and breathe discrimination, they can’t make that decision to the full capacity that it deserves,” Nicholson said.
She learned that there is value in all work seeing her parents put in long hours while she stayed with her grandmother. And she observed firsthand the importance of public transportation going to the grocery store with an aunt who didn’t have a car.
Nicholson said she excelled in school because teachers allowed her to stay after the last bell rang, getting more oneon-one time while also avoiding problems on the streets.
She lost some childhood friends to gun violence, others to incarceration. “I’ve seen drug dealings, I’ve seen prostitution, I mean everything you can think of I’ve been witness to, which has its own traumas, but it also gives me an insight into what people are still dealing with today,” she said.
As a Milwaukee Public Schools teacher she reflected more deeply on the roles of race and poverty in the lives of the city’s residents, and the difference between growing up Black and white.
That, in turn, opened her eyes to policies, politics and leadership. She said she worked with the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association and the National Education Association, knowing that “having collective voices leads to power, and you can better gain those things that you need to be successful when you have that collective power.”
Taking her seat on the County Board at 27 years old, Nicholson said, she found a way to impact the community where she grew up but also learned that she had to work with other supervisors.
Today, in addition to being on the County Board, she is an officer at the Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality
Workers union, a position that she said allows her to continue hearing firsthand the needs of the Milwaukee community while also legislating.
‘All the love and pain’
When Johnson was elected president, he told fellow Common Council members he had lived at more addresses than he could count and experienced “all of the love and the pain that 53206 and other distressed ZIP codes can muster.”
That included substandard housing, family violence, gun violence, food scarcity, eviction, theft and threat of death, Johnson said.
Later, he told the Journal Sentinel he is thinking about how to put together programs that slow the tide of evictions, which would stabilize and strengthen families and neighborhoods.
He said he’s seen commercial corridors in the city that once flourished with businesses decline. When young people walk down those streets and see broken windows and shuttered businesses and no places owned by people who look like them, he said, it seeps into their psyches.
“I think that’s dangerous,” he said, “and those are things I want to change.”
Johnson said he wants to create a