It had been building for a long time. The anger and frustration over the Aug. 13 police shooting of 23-year-old Sylville K. Smith in Milwaukee had been there long before that night. Some of that anger and frustration, which boiled over into protests and unrest, could be traced back 10 years ago to the police beating of Frank Jude.
Matt Nelson, the organizing director of Presente.org (a Latino, online social justice organization similar to Color of Change) and a former resident of Milwaukee, detailed the Jude case in a Facebook post on Sunday afternoon:
They sliced his thigh, beat on his groin, punched, kicked, and stomped him from head to toe, and then the leader of this police gang ordered a young cop, new to the force, to take his fountain pen and stab it into Frank's ear. When the officer hesitated, he was ordered to execute the torture, and when the rookie cop didn't do it with enough hate and force, his superior showed him how, until Frank bled from both ears. That's when Frank thought he would die. And while some of the cops involved were later prosecuted by the Feds, the damage was already done and the city was fractured as badly as the bones of Frank's face.
Just last year, one of the cops on the scene who did nothing to stop his fellow officers from beating Jude was promoted to sergeant within the Milwaukee Police Department. That move undoubtedly added to the anger and frustration of Saturday night.
According to The New York Times, much of the anger and frustration also lies in prejudice and policy decisions made decades ago, when black people started moving into Milwaukee in search of good-paying jobs.
They settled there as the city’s manufacturing economy began to dwindle, when jobs disappeared or moved to the suburbs. Many black people found themselves trapped in substandard living conditions on the north side without stable jobs to help them reach a better life.
For a time, efforts to tear down the racially discriminatory housing barriers went unheeded, if not ignored. Vel Phillips, the first black woman elected to the City Council, saw her colleagues repeatedly vote against a fair housing ordinance she proposed in the 1960s. As the Council failed to act, riots broke out in July 1967 that led to the deployment of the National Guard. That unrest left at least three dead, 100 injured and 1,740 arrested, according to the Milwaukee County Historical Society.
While historians do not point to a single inciting event for that riot, it came at a time of growing resentment over housing segregation, poor schools and the construction of highways that wiped out many black businesses and households in Bronzeville, which was the economic heart of black Milwaukee.
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Imbalances in mortgage lending continue to stifle homeownership and devalue predominantly black areas. A study released last month by National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that while black people made up 16 percent of the metro population in 2014, they received only 4 percent of the loans.
Lack of resources due to policy decisions is a common occurrence in cities with large numbers of people of color. One of the ways this plays out in Wisconsin is via neighborhood demographics: “Cities and legislative districts with mostly white populations are able to draw down extra federal resources based on their incarcerated minority populations through a sketchy practice called “prison gerrymandering.” Basically, predominantly white cities report having predominantly black neighborhoods … but those "neighborhoods" are actually jails.
More than half of the African-American neighborhoods in the state are actually jails. Not only that, but the rest of the black neighborhoods across the state are either apartment complexes, Section 8 housing, or homeless shelters—the lone exception being a working-middle class section of Milwaukee.
Sharing this info on the Young, Gifted, and Black Coalition’s blog, [Lew] Blank explains that he used the Racial Dot Map to identify where predominantly black neighborhoods—defined as “a certain area where the majority of residents are African Americans”—are located throughout the state. There are 56 of them, 31 of which are either jails or prisons. There are 15 cities where the only black neighborhood is a jail. The city of Winnebago claims it has an African-American population of more than 19 percent, but most, if not all, of that black population is located among one of four correctional facilities there. It’s perhaps no wonder that Wisconsin perennially comes up as the worst place for African Americans to live in the country.
“Wisconsin perennially comes up as the worst place for African Americans to live in the country.” And within Wisconsin, Milwaukee comes up as the worst place for African Americans to live.
Perhaps that’s why the violence of Saturday night was to be expected. Not welcomed, and not embraced. Just expected.