Crossroads:
Riot, housing marches changed city 50 years ago
Remembering 1967, a summer of transformation for Milwaukee. John Gurda column.
It was a three-ring circus of a summer. In 1967, a juggernaut of forces — youthful white idealism, growing black militancy and blind inner-city rage — combined to roil the waters of the republic as they had rarely been roiled before. Everywhere, the old order seemed under attack, and gauzy visions of a new one competed with cries for violent revolution. Fifty years later, it’s hard to believe that the “summer of love,” the high tide of the local civil rights movement and the worst urban unrest of the 20th century occurred in the same three-month span.
I was 19 when the summer began, and at the end of my sophomore year at Boston College. Faithful to the spirit of the times — at least as that spirit appeared to middle-class white kids — I took the long way home, hitchhiking down the East Coast to New York, Washington and Miami, then thumbing back through St. Petersburg and Biloxi to New Orleans before heading home. I had no set itinerary on my monthlong journey, and nothing resembling a daily routine. College friends put me up most of the time, but I also slept in my share of fleabag motels and spent one night in the backseat of an old Buick on a used-car lot in Pascagoula.
I had some memorable experiences in 1967, including a couple of days spent with a ragtag band of hippies around Jackson Square in New Orleans, but one of my sharpest memories is musical. I was perusing the records in a Georgetown head shop when “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club” came on the stereo. The album was just a few days old, and I sat transfixed as “Fixing a Hole” wafted out through the open doors onto Wisconsin Ave. Listening to “Sgt. Pepper’s” was a revelation, and I don’t use that word lightly. After years of the pop pap that dominated the nation’s Top 40, here was music that made everything before it seem obsolete.
“Sgt. Pepper’s” wasn’t just a really good album. The Beatles seemed to have created a self-sufficient world, one that echoed with themes and glowed with colors we’d never seen before. There were answers in their songs, or so I thought at the time — answers to questions our parents had never taught us to ask. “Sgt. Pepper’s” earned a permanent place in the era’s soundtrack, and every verse of every song is still imprinted in the memories of millions of aging baby boomers.
I came home in early July to a construction job on one of the freeways that were transforming the landscape of Milwaukee County. I was still humming Beatles tunes, but it soon became apparent that other soundtracks were playing in my hometown. The NAACP Youth Council had demonstrated against the Eagles Club’s whites-only membership policy the summer before. Now the council’s focus had shifted to open housing, and its members were picketing the homes of aldermen who opposed the ordinance. “We Shall Overcome” and “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around” were heard on the line of march every night — a far cry from “A Day in the Life” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
The Youth Council’s most visible leader was Father James Groppi, a product of Bay View’s Italian community who had been radicalized during a 1965 trip to the civil rights movement’s front lines in Selma, Alabama. Struck by the hypocrisy of
white liberals who protested conditions in the South but overlooked the injustices in their own backyards, the priest threw himself into the local movement. He became, in the process, a figure of national prominence and easily the most controversial clergyman in the history of the Milwaukee archdiocese.
I had marched with Groppi during the Eagles Club protests the year before, but I didn’t join the 1967 demonstrations, for reasons that remain obscure to me. The counterculture was fast developing two equal and somewhat complementary dimensions: an inward side focused on questions of personal meaning and an outward side galvanized in opposition to the Vietnam War, racial prejudice and a generic bogeyman called The Establishment. I was already taking the inward path.
All the navel-gazing came to a temporary halt on the evening of July 30 —
50 years ago last Sunday. I was driving home from a date with a girl who lived on Lake Drive, of all places. Traveling across the north side to a freeway entrance that led home to Hales Corners, I passed within a mile of 3rd St. and North Ave., where, I learned the next morning, a riot had been in full swing. Although it had escaped my notice, the inner city was a tinder box in the summer of 1967. Newark had gone up in flames on July 12, and Detroit followed on July 23 — the worst of 164 separate disturbances that shattered the nation’s peace that year. Milwaukee could hardly have escaped a spontaneous combustion of its own. The final toll: three dead, nearly 100 injured, 1,740 arrested and more than 700,000 traumatized.
The trauma was a result of the city’s official response. When I tried to go to work on that Monday I was turned away before I reached the job site. Mayor Henry Maier and his suburban counterparts had put the entire metro area on lockdown; roads were closed, businesses were shuttered and the north side was essentially occupied territory. Like nearly every other local resident, I was left to sit at home and wonder what might come next. What came next was fear and more fear. With all normal activities suspended indefinitely, imaginations ran riot, and staid suburbanites prepared for an onslaught from the inner core that never came. Without in the least downplaying the gravity of the riot, the city’s response was, in hindsight, a case of overkill whose psychological
impact lingers to this day.
One month later, against the advice of the usual authorities, Groppi and the Youth Council resumed their open-housing marches, this time targeting individual neighborhoods. The group drew an especially hostile response on the south side, my home turf. The demonstrations continued for 200 consecutive nights, through the long winter months and well into March. I was back in Boston when they started, trying to muddle my way through the rest of my college career. Even before Woodstock, I was feeling the fatigue that would later overtake many in my generation.
A half-century has passed since Flower Power and Black Power — the odd couple of American social movements — shared the national spotlight. Does the summer of 1967 have any relevance to the America of 2017? Not much, as it turned out. The Sixties, in my opinion, remain a decade that’s still largely undigested and perhaps even unforgiven. The revolution never came — neither the peaceful new world of the counterculture nor the righteous new order of the civil rights movement.
Progress was made — open housing is the law of the land, and attitudes have changed perceptibly — but too much remains the same. Although the hippiesvs.-hardhats dichotomy of 1967 seems antique today, American society is perhaps even more polarized now than it was then. Millions of countercultural types bowed to destiny after graduation, taking establishment jobs from which they are now retiring in droves — and too often with their 401(k)s in better shape than the world around them. And conditions in the inner city are even more dire than they were in 1967, a fact brought home by the unrest in Sherman Park one year ago.
What gives me hope on the last score is a rising awareness of the problems, especially on the local level. Issues of income inequality, employment readiness and racial justice are receiving more attention today than they have since the 1970s. The energy is evident in a wide range of public initiatives, private programs and old-fashioned discussion groups. Instead of “What’s wrong with them?,” more people are asking, “What can I do?” All that rhetorical smoke will, I hope, finally lead to fire, and this time to flames that temper and refine rather than destroy.