‘Sea change’ on race in small-town Wisconsin
Brutality protests springing up in state’s whitest cities
WISCONSIN RAPIDS - On a Monday afternoon, temperatures shot above 90 degrees as a few dozen people stood on a roundabout at the edge of downtown Wisconsin Rapids, a city of about 18,000 people surrounded by rural landscapes. They held signs in the air while a young woman with black jeans and a pixie haircut led them in chants of “No Justice. No Peace.”
The chants of the mostly white protesters, who ranged in age from 19 to 72, occasionally broke off or grew soft when their leader took a break, and the crowd was small. Many protesters said they were new to this kind of thing, but the sheer horror of the video of George Floyd dying at the hands of Minneapolis police had nonetheless driven them to the street in a town that had seen few protests in its history.
The video, shot up close by a bystander, showed Officer Derek Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 45 seconds as Floyd repeated that he could not breathe, called for his mother, lost consciousness and died. He was later declared dead of “asphyxiation from sustained pressure.” Chauvin has been charged with seconddegree murder and the other three officers involved have been charged with aiding and abetting.
“No one should have to die like that,” Michael Collier, 40, said at the June 8
“It’s been a long time coming. To me this is about systemic racism, period — which has existed since the day I was born.” Kim Brewbaker 51-year-old protester in Wisconsin Rapids
event in Wisconsin Rapids. He stood with his wife, two daughters and a family friend on the sidewalk, having attended the first protest of his life just days before in the same town.
In small towns across Wisconsin, protests, rallies and vigils against police brutality have sprouted up following the example of protesters pouring into the streets in cities like Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Chicago. While violence marked some of the protests in larger cities — police tear-gassed and beat protesters, and looting broke out in spots — these small-town protests happened in peace, with threats of violence mostly confined to opponents on social media.
The communities where these protests happened are predominantly white, politically conservative and have little history of civil rights demonstrations. And while they are dwarfed by their urban counterparts, the events could be indicators of an unprecedented shift in America’s attitudes about racism and social justice, said University of Michigan historian Matthew Countryman, who studies African American social movements. Countryman called the appearance of protests against racial injustice a “sea change” in the region.
It’s hard to pinpoint a single reason the protests have sprung up in small, rural towns, said Pamela Oliver, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies collective action and social movements.
Like Collier, many protesters said the brutality evident in the video of Floyd’s death was the dominating factor driving them to organize or take part in local events.
Josh Armentrout, 32, an optician, organized a June 4 rally at Bond Park in Oconto, a city of around 4,500 in northeast Wisconsin.
“I had seen the video of the killing of George Floyd and was deeply disturbed by it,” Armentrout said. “It took me days to come to terms with my emotions on it. But once I started getting a little bit more of a clear head, I decided to reach out to my community to see if anyone else was talking about it or thinking about it.”
The rally in Oconto grew out of those discussions.
For some attendees and organizers, taking to the streets for a cause was a completely new experience. Others were introduced to protesting through activist networks that have sprung up since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s administration, such as the Women’s March events in 2017.
In Wisconsin Rapids, Kim Brewbaker, 51, said her first time protesting was with the Women’s March in Wausau. But she recognized that this is an issue that has existed long before.
“It’s been a long time coming,” she said. “To me this is about systemic racism, period — which has existed since the day I was born.”
Oliver said that fits with how protest movements she has studied tend to work. After every round of protests, communication networks are established among organizers and participants who help fuel the next one because people know who they can call to get more people to come out.
“One of the things that we know is that protests have to have some kind of organization, and I don’t mean that in any kind of paranoid way,” Oliver said. “Somebody has to decide when and where it’s going to happen, communicate the message and get people out.”
Eva Webber, 22, was one of the organizers of a protest in Sturgeon Bay, a Door County town of around 9,000. Although she was initially just part of social media discussions about the George Floyd video, seeing two high school friends waving signs against police brutality along the town’s steel bridge on June 1 made her think of organizing something bigger.
“Clearly someone else wanted to do something,” Webber said. So she reached out to those two friends on Facebook to see if they could commit to being there if she worked on organizing an event.
The resulting protest drew hundreds of people.
Oliver said the current civil rights protests are part of a wave of progressive protests, including the Occupy Wall Street events, and the backlash against the killing of Trayvon Martin and subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013, from which the phrase “Black Lives Matter” originated.
Oliver said the organizing work of the Black Lives Matter movement in the years since 2013 is largely responsible for the size and scale of this round of protests, but like many others she has been shocked at how far they have spread.
‘We need allies to also intervene’
Charles Hughes, a professor of history and Africana studies at Rhodes College in Tennessee, grew up in Wausau and said he too has been astonished to see the growth of protests in the region. But he noted that organizing work done by members of the Black community in Wausau through the years should be taken into account.
He pointed to the work of Kayley McColley, who was among the organizers of the protests in Wausau, one of which drew over 1,000 people. McColley also made history as Wausau West High School’s first Black prom queen in 2018.
McColley, 20, said she has often found herself having to educate her neighbors in Wausau on issues of race. The city, according the the U.S. Census Bureau, is over 80% white and has a Black population of a little over 1%.
Finding herself in that position is part of what led her to organize the protests, but she noted that it’s important that non-Black people in small, predominantly white communities are speaking up on their own.
“We have allies and we need allies to also intervene and do some of that work so the responsibility doesn’t just fall on minority people to have to continue to be educating, and not only that, but accommodating and understanding, especially when we’re being disparaged,” McColley said.
Another factor, Oliver said, is that the organization of protests in one location often sparks similar events in others. So the bigger a movement gets, the more diffuse it can become.
That was the case for Michelle LeCloux, a 54-year-old operations director who organized the Sturgeon Bay protest with Webber. LeCloux said she was deeply affected by the Floyd video and also by the footage of protests she saw on social media in other cities.
“Seeing all the protests going on,” LeCloux said, “I knew that I had to be involved and do something locally.”
LeCloux said that social media had influenced the evolution of her opinions on police. In previous years, she said she would hear about crime in big cities in the news without the context of police involvement. “It’s just what was fed to us,” she said.
Several protesters interviewed by
USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin said they could not remember a political action focused on civil rights ever taking place in their towns.
‘If they loot, shoot them in the face’
Countryman said most examples he could think of in terms of historical precedent were in the opposite direction. In the Northern states, he said, rural and suburban areas have historically excluded Black people from their towns, which is in part why there are such small Black communities in these areas.
He noted that in the midst of the civil rights movement, segregationist George Wallace won the 1964 Wisconsin Democratic primary.
Taking place, as they have been, in what are still deeply conservative areas, these small-town protests have not been without a degree of backlash.
Armentrout said that he had used Oconto-area Facebook groups to help publicize the event he organized, and in his case, that was where most of the negative responses manifested.
On the Oconto Police Department page, a number of comments still appear from residents accusing Armentrout of bringing protesters in from other cities, expressing fears of looting and even advocating violence against protesters. “If they loot, shoot them in the face,” read one comment.
Armentrout arrived alone at the park late in the afternoon and began setting up signs, his sense of anxiety growing. Over the next 15 minutes, people began to gradually arrive. Soon, about 25 people showed up, beginning to chant and raise their signs at passing drivers, many of whom honked their approval and gave the protesters the thumbs up sign.
Before the June 7 rally in Stevens Point, organizers briefly decided to cancel the event, in part because of violent threats directed at the attendees. After receiving many comments that people planned to attend anyway on the event’s Facebook page, organizers decided to hold the protest.
Webber also said she had received death threats as she began to publicize the Sturgeon Bay event. In both cases, no threats were carried out.
Despite the opposition that some protesters faced locally, Hughes said
that both as someone who grew up in the region and as a historian, he could not overemphasize the significance of these protests. He noted that while it was moving to see the crowds of 1,000 or more in places like Wausau, the smallest protests were just as remarkable.
“I think that this moment has galvanized people to take stands and to be courageous in ways that white people normally don’t and that white folks don’t normally have to — and I hope that that continues,” Hughes said.
Webber said that in a city like Sturgeon Bay, it can be easy for white people to ignore issues of racial injustice but, “we can’t just stop and go back to the way things were and pretending that things are fine. This can’t be the end,” she said.