(LA Times, Registration required) The Old South, Up North: The jeers and taunts, the hate hit them as they reached the bridge. Bricks flew. They kept walking, crossing "the line between Africa and Poland," marching though the white neighborhoods on the other side of the Menomonee River. The black men and women of Milwaukee marched again the next evening, and the next, vowing that they would not remain cooped up in the "Negro district." They marched for 200 days before the city and its suburbs finally passed laws granting blacks the right to live where they wanted.
Thirty-five years later, the region remains divided, the races separate and the housing the most segregated in America.
The furor over GOP Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott's praise for a former segregationist candidate for president has focused attention on the long history of racial division in the South. These days, however, the gulf between white and black is widest in the North. In Milwaukee, where 37% of the city's 600,000 residents are African American, the disparities between the races are among the greatest in the nation. The inequities are glaring in nearly every social index: income, child poverty, education, even access to home mortgage loans. [...] The latest statistic comes from a new Census Bureau report that names the Milwaukee metropolitan region the most segregated in the nation, based on an analysis of where blacks and whites live and how isolated each race is from the other. [...] This city on the glittering shore of Lake Michigan ranks high in every measure of housing segregation, at or near the top of lists dominated by Northern cities: Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Newark, N.J.
Well .... on the one hand, people in Chicago and Detroit are scratching their heads and saying, "Milwaukee?" On the other hand, both cities are also saying, "Hey! We're NOT number one!"
Not that it means much when you've only slid to second and sixth. And in both cities, the segregation persists across income levels -- that is, middle and upper class blacks tend to live with and around each other, and not so much in mixed neighborhoods. That said, there are relatively well off neighborhoods in this city, at least, that are relentlessly mixed (although it may not pay to examine the Census Bureau's neighborhood boundaries too closely).
Posted by iain at December 30, 2002 06:04 PMComments
