Milwaukee Marched for Justice

Anyone living in Milwaukee in the '60s and old enough to be aware will recall a time of sharp tension. A riot erupted in the inner city during the summer of 1967, a year of unrest around the nation, and a white Roman Catholic priest organized black youth to march against the segregation that confined African Americans to Milwaukee's poorest, most run-down quarter. Whites responded with violence. And the police were not amused by challenges to the status quo.

The story is recounted with lucid scholarship in The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee. Published by Harvard University Press and written by University of Nebraska history professor Patrick D. Jones, the book's title is taken from parallels between the historic civil rights march in Selma, Ala., and its Milwaukee counterpart. Protesters in both places crossed bridges in the face of violent opposition. In Milwaukee, Father James Groppi and marchers crossed the 16th Street Viaduct, which local wags called the world's longest bridge for connecting Africa with Poland-the African-American North Side with the Polish-American South Side.

Although many black leaders rose from the movement and eventually helped change the political landscape, the struggle's best-remembered figure is Father Groppi, an Italian American from Bay View keenly opposed to racism and drawing a confrontational, "not-violent" strategy from Catholic social teachings. Groppi gained national notoriety and became active in many causes before leaving the priesthood and driving a bus for Milwaukee County.

In the short term, Groppi and his colleagues forced the Common Council to pass an "open-housing" ordinance. But Jones has reason to wonder about the long-term legacy in a city where black poverty is-if anything-more endemic now than then.

Jones discusses The Selma of the North at Boswell Book Co., 2559 N. Downer Ave., 7 p.m., May 14.