Photo credit: National Archive
This 1938 map of Milwaukee shows grades by neighborhood by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation
Segregation is not an accident. It requires a massive amount of energy focused on the purpose of pushing communities apart to achieve the great feat of separating human beings by color in the great melting pot that is the United States. In light of this, it is important to remind Wisconsinites that Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities in the nation.
According to one study, research by the Brooking Institution, 79.8% of black Milwaukeeans would need to move to different neighborhoods before the city could be considered fully integrated. In Los Angeles, which is the 10th most segregated city, that number is “only” 66.8%. In 2000, the top spot was occupied by Detroit, and Milwaukee actually became number one in the past 20 years. Since the turn of the century, Detroit reduced its black-white segregation rate by 11.9 percentage points, while Milwaukee only did so by 3.5 points.
The average white American lives in an area that is 71% white and only 7% black, with Hispanics making up most of the racial diversity that the average white American sees day-to-day. In Milwaukee, that translates into all-white neighborhoods that are entirely separate from all-black ones. The zip code 53206 has 95% black residents and is one of the zip codes with the highest incarceration rates in America.
Remember: Segregation requires political will and concerted action. As the nation has been protesting against structural racism, now might be the time to look at the problem and actually address it.
Why Does Segregation Happen?
The short of it is racism. White men hundreds of years ago saw black people as savages and inferiors, subjugated and enslaved them; that sentiment survived from generation to generation and through laws put in place for that purpose. Even after slaves were freed, they became a large population with virtually no wealth, power or resources. Unlike the white population, they had to build everything from the ground up despite being greatly disadvantaged by their starting point.
In the 1930s, the New Deal made homeownership affordable to many Americans, but that came with skin color-related conditions. Acclaimed historian Richard Rothstein, author of the book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, states that housing programs launched then were a “state-sponsored system of segregation.” While many believe that segregation is just the result of racist individuals, like mortgage lenders and real estate agents working outside of the law, Rothstein demonstrates that the government had an active and willing hand in separating black and white Americans. The Federal Housing Administration supported segregation efforts by refusing to insure mortgages in and near black neighborhoods. That was the biggest tool used by white Americans to enforce segregation across the nation: redlining.
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“Redlining is the process by which financial institutions made determinations about what neighborhoods and what potential homeowners were the safest risks. Overwhelmingly, African Americans and African American communities are deemed higher risks, and there were literally red lines drawn on maps to create boundaries and determine where your mortgage would be more expensive and where your insurance costs would be higher,” explains Robert Smith, history professor at Marquette University. “This is largely determined by the federal government. The practices of redlining get informed by federal policy.”
Another tool that was widely used was racially restrictive covenants—agreements between property owners, developers and real estate companies to not rent or sell properties to certain people, often so-called “negroes.” These covenants were often drawn up before the land was subdivided, in order to avoid “white flight” and maintain property values in new neighborhoods even before they were built.
“No persons other than the white race shall own or occupy any building on said tract, but this covenant shall not prevent occupancy of persons of a race other than the white race who are domestic servants of the owner or occupant of said buildings,” reads one such covenant from Greendale, Wis., as reported by UW-Milwaukee researcher Lois Quinn.
“In 1917, the Buchanan v. Warley Supreme Court ruling dictated that racial zoning was unconstitutional. So, after that, people replaced the racial zoning laws with racially restrictive covenants,” says Reggie Jackson, head griot of America’s Black Holocaust Museum. “The reason the covenants became really important is because the federal government, in the 1930s, started to demand that any community that wanted to receive assistance from the Federal Housing Administration and get a loan had to have covenants in place. The only way to get a green rating from the federal government was to draw up covenants.”
In theory, these practices were outlawed in 1948, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially restrictive covenants were unconstitutional in the landmark Shelley v. Kraemer ruling, as well as in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act, which makes it illegal to refuse to complete any real estate transaction “based on race, color, religion, sex, familial status or national origin.” In reality, these practices haven’t been entirely stamped out—as it is concretely impossible to determine whether a transaction was denied due to personal racist convictions or for another pretense.
“I have done testing to determine if banks or real estate entities were still practicing these kinds of efforts, even though formally they have been outlawed. And the answer is: absolutely,” Robert Smith reveals. “I’d go to the bank. I had a persona, and a white guy had essentially exactly the same persona in terms of our financial representation. Overwhelmingly— not all the time—when he and I would go into financial institutions, he would be preferred over me.”
As such, the effects of decades of systemic discrimination are still felt today. As can be seen in Milwaukee now, communities of color are often still concentrated in the same neighborhoods where segregationist practices placed them.
How Segregation Played Out in Milwaukee
“Beginning in 1940s was the period of the largest growth in Milwaukee’s black population, because that was the first time that Milwaukee really needed black labor,” Reggie Jackson retells. “Before then, Milwaukee has such a large number of white immigrants that they'd never actively recruited black workers. One of the reasons why many black people migrated to Milwaukee from other states and even Chicago is that Milwaukee had a thriving business community, and many of those businesses were owned by blacks. Milwaukee was known as the heart of the Midwest.”
“As the black population continued to grow, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, we started to see more whites leaving the city for the new suburban communities. The federal government started to give financial assistance to build up those suburban communities; they helped to build the roads, the electrical grid, the sewage systems and the national highway system which provided a way to get in and out of the suburbs. The government made it very attractive to whites; they could buy a brand new home in brand spanking new subdivisions for cheaper than in the cities themselves.”
Starting with the New Deal and through the next few decades, Americans attained great prosperity, and homeownership became the fast lane to accruing wealth. When your grandfather could buy a cheap house that is now worth 10 times the price it was bought for, then your family obtained a great deal of wealth over a few generations. But black people could not access these opportunities when the new suburbs often had racial covenants making it illegal for any black person—other than a white family’s servants—to live there. The black community was systematically excluded from the real estate gold rush. Milwaukee in particular made extensive use of racial covenants.
“As Milwaukee was growing, Milwaukee leaders decided to annex small communities close to the city. An attorney for the NAACP discovered that, of those areas that have been annexed by the city until 1940, 90% had racial covenants,” Jackson adds.
“By the 1940s, at least 16 of the 18 Milwaukee County suburbs were using racially restrictive covenants to exclude black families from residential areas. (We have not located racially restrictive covenants on subdivisions in Oak Creek or River Hills),” UWM researcher Lois Quinn wrote. “In the 1940s, Brown Deer, Franklin, Greendale, Hales Corners, St. Francis and West Allis were still using covenants to exclude blacks from newly created subdivisions. As late as 1958, 10 years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed judicial enforcement of these covenants, race restrictions were recorded for a new subdivision in Greendale.”
Wauwatosa residents might have noted that only 5% of the town’s population is black; that might be due to the fact that most of the subdivisions with restrictive covenants in Wauwatosa used to “include clauses that prohibit ownership or residence by persons not of the white race,” Lois Quinn found. The city of Wauwatosa was so proud of this fact that, until very recently, there was a sign officially calling it “Wauwatosa, City of Homes Restrictive Zoning.”
“In 1968, the Fair Housing Act was passed, and people said, ‘How can we continue to have segregated communities without breaking the law?’ They went back to the old idea of zoning, but instead of directly mentioning race, they made zoning laws that dictated that houses had to be a certain size and level of density,” Reggie Jackson explains. “As a result, property taxes escalated tremendously in the suburbs but not in the city. Early on, when they were building those suburbs and the federal government was helping white people become homeowners, those houses were very affordable. Then, when white people were settled there, they made it much more expensive for black people living and working in Milwaukee to move out.” White Americans burned that bridge after crossing it but before black Americans could come through.
“One of the unfortunate things for blacks in Milwaukee is that we came because of the manufacturing jobs, but we've lost more than 90,000 manufacturing jobs since the mid-1960s. The black community depended on those jobs more so than anybody else,” Jackson deplores. “The best way to see what segregation looks like in Milwaukee is to drive down North Avenue, a straight shot to Brookfield. You will see a shift in neighborhoods and the level of investment in those neighborhoods, and you’ll see a shift in the types of businesses there. That shift is the clearest way to see segregation.”
“Milwaukee can be a bit of a bellwether in terms of how we think about these cultural clashes. But you can go to any number of cities, any number of states and find the same kinds of comparable issues and problems,” says Robert Smith. Milwaukee is very segregated, but it is not that much of an outlier in the U.S. Although research shows that segregation is slowly declining across the board, “most [metro] areas exhibit segregation levels greater than 50,” the Brooking Institution notes. The entire black American population had to deal with the fallout of these practices.
The Consequences of Segregation
If black and white people lived in the same areas, it would be impossible to disentangle policies affecting black and white communities, therefore it would be necessary to treat both similarly. This is currently not the case.
Nowadays, what we call the “inner city” is well-known to receive less investment from authorities; it often falls prey to urban decay, as is regularly documented by projects like photographer Tom Jenz’s work on Milwaukee’s black neighborhoods. They are areas where there are fewer jobs and opportunities, and where schools receive less funding, on average.
“[In the suburbs,] we have environments where home values appreciate over the decades. When you live there, the funding that goes to your schools appreciates over time as well,” Robert Smith explains. “It's not that black people don't care about education; the system is structured in such a way that, if you're not able to accrue wealth, then your school gets underfunded, as we fund our schools based on property tax. The funding mechanism is a policy decision engineered at the state level. It maintains a system of educational apartheid in our country.”
Reggie Jackson supports that point by drawing from information shared in the Black Holocaust Museum: “36% of the population of Milwaukee is white, but they hold 71% of the jobs. There are almost 70,000 white people driving daily to Milwaukee to work, who then drive back at the end of the day to their comfortable white suburban communities. They’re making money in Milwaukee, but they’re spending their money, paying property taxes and funding schools in Waukesha County, Ozaukee County, Washington County, etc. The money they make in the city is not benefitting the city.”
For a black person born and raised in a black neighborhood, moving out is no simple matter. They are far more likely to have little to no inherited wealth, to be educated through a more poorly funded school system and receive a diploma that is less valued by employers than one from a wealthier, majority white school’s diploma, only to be less likely to be employed near their place of residence. That is not to say that black people don’t stand a chance; Reggie Jackson points out that Milwaukee has an uncommonly high number of black people making more than $100,000 a year living in black neighborhoods, yet they choose not to move out. “Many of us have heard stories of black people moving into the suburbs and being treated horribly by their neighbors. Many blacks have been reluctant to move out to those communities because they know that it's not going to be a welcoming space for them,” he says.
“When we think about segregation, we think about residential segregation, but it's much more than just people living in different neighborhoods,” Jackson adds. “It's about the mindset that is developed when you are living in a segregated community. You don't necessarily want to live in that community, but you can't get out. It creates a sense of inferiority. People who live outside of those areas look down on those areas and think that, somehow, because their neighborhood is better, they are better people, too.”
“These are issues that can be addressed if we had state political leaders who did not help to advance the racial inequity that we see today. This can be fixed,” Robert Smith says. “But first, we have to stop talking about this as if it was a set of processes that materialized randomly. What we're talking about, whether it's housing, education or policing, these developments occurred because of very clear, willful, intentional decisions by individuals who then shape the institutions. These things don't happen miraculously or randomly.” Segregation is not an accident and solving it won’t happen until there is an equal political will opposing the political will that created segregation in the first place. This is every voter’s responsibility.
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