A promise not kept

[POA]

A promise not kept

In 1954, the US supreme court outlawed segregated schools in a landmark case that gave rise to the civil rights movement. Fifty years on, Gary Younge visits Milwaukee, the most divided city in the US, to examine its legacy

Saturday May 15, 2004
The Guardian

Linda Brown Smith, photographed in 1964 in front of the Summer School in Topeka, Kansas. The school's refusal to admit her in 1951 because she is black led to the Supreme Court ruling outlawing enforced segregation in US schools. Photograph: AP

Where Martin Luther King Drive meets Brown Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, things suddenly get dark. Not dark as in bleak, but dark as in skin. Heading north, past one of the city's three black newspapers and the country's only Black Holocaust museum, the only white faces you see for miles are the handful who stop to fill up their cars. And then, as quickly as they vanished, they will reappear as you approach deepest suburbia, a place called River Hills.

"It's like a foreign country to most whites," says Dennis Conta, 64, a public policy consultant and former state legislator, who is white, referring to the city's north side. "Most whites have never been in those neighbourhoods. They don't need to. With the freeways, they can just drive right past. You could spend three hours walking the streets before you saw any white people there, if you saw any at all."

Turn your car around, heading south towards the city centre and the huge sign for Usinger's sausages, and things lighten up. Not light as in mood, but light as in skin. At Walnut, a few streets down from Brown, Martin Luther King Drive disappears, changing its name to Old World Street. "White people weren't at all ashamed or embarrassed to say, 'We don't want this part of the street to be named after Martin Luther King,'" says Carla Allison, who runs People's Choice, a black bookshop on the street. White people visit the shop occasionally, she says. "Usually, it's a student who's required to read a book for class or a white person who's got a black friend."

Fifty years after the US supreme court passed the landmark decision of Brown v Board of Education, which concluded that the policy of separate schools for white and black children was unequal and unconstitutional, thus outlawing segregation, Milwaukee is the most segregated city for blacks and whites in the country, according to the US census bureau. The November 2002 report measured residential segregation in the nation's larger cities using five indices, calculating clustering, concentration, centralisation, isolation and dissimilarity in the living patterns of different racial groups. The most widely used was the dissimilarity index, which determined what proportion of a minority population would have to be dispersed within a given city for each neighbourhood to have a representative racial make-up. In Milwaukee, 82% of the black population would have to move for each area to reflect the city's racial diversity.

Milwaukee narrowly beat Detroit to finish top of the nation's segregation league. Most black people shrugged at the news. "Not much has changed here in the last 40 years, so it didn't surprise me," says Allison.

Meanwhile, the white establishment went into denial. When the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee produced another report using different methodology a few months later, suggesting that the city's degree of segregation was about average, it was seized upon as evidence that the census bureau had deliberately maligned Milwaukee's good name. "How did the census bureau get into the business of doing totally subjective research comparing cities?" asked Milwaukee's former mayor John O Norquist, as if the demographers had stuck a pin in a map. "There's no justification for them squandering resources on flawed studies like this. The census bureau should just do the basic inventory and leave the interpretation to others." The local congressman declared he would call for legislation to provide greater scrutiny of the census bureau. "We don't want a federal agency coming out with skewed data," he said.

John Gurda, a local historian, does not share that indignation, but questions a survey that places Milwaukee so far ahead of other cities he knows with strong levels of segregation, such as Boston (17th) and Washington DC (23rd). "It depends how you skin the cat," he says, referring to data selection. "But there's an American racial problem, and it's obvious here. To some degree, perception drives reality."

If the differing perceptions of April's mayoral elections are anything to go by, it is difficult to see how the city could be any more racially divided. The two candidates in the run-off were Marvin Pratt, an African-American who was already acting mayor, and Tom Barrett, a former US congressman who is white. Eight days before the election, Pratt was charged with five civil counts of breaking campaign finance rules, primarily, it seemed, due to sloppy accounting.

Both the local paper and his opponent seized on the charges, which Pratt described as "mistakes not misdeeds"; he was fined $2,500. Most African-Americans regarded these attacks as racially motivated; most whites saw them as justified. On polling day, the vote split almost entirely along racial lines, with whites voting for Barrett and blacks and Hispanics for Pratt. Milwaukee has a population of around 600,000 - 45% are white, 38% are black and 12% are Hispanic. Pratt lost the election, 46% to 54%. His campaign slogan had been, "It's Time."

"Racism is alive and well in Milwaukee," Pratt's wife, Dianne, told the New York Times a week later. "It's alive and well and thriving. This is redneck America - citified. The vote showed it."

Most African-Americans agreed. "It was a race about race," said Keith Murphy, the anchor on the city's leading black radio show, WMCS. "It was about money and resources. I didn't see Milwaukee ready to hand over that amount of power to a leader from the African-American community. It really showed the upper south mentality of the city."

Ask whites in Milwaukee about the election and you could be talking about an entirely different contest. "There was reason to be encouraged about this race and to be very discouraged," says Dennis Conta. "Whites in this city were prepared to elect a black mayor. I don't think Marvin would have been treated any differently if he was white. But [after the election] it was clear that there was a real lack of trust in the black community. We really haven't made much progress in that area at all. The question is, what are you going to do with that perception?"

"Who hears the clock tick or the surf murmur or the trains pass? Not those who live by the clock or the sea or the track," wrote James Jackson Kilpatrick, the editor of the News Leader in Richmond, Virginia, in response to the supreme court's Brown decision in 1954. "In the south, the acceptance of racial separation begins in the cradle. What rational man imagines this concept can be shattered overnight?"

It would be more accurate to say that acceptance of racial inferiority and superiority started in the southern cradle. For in the south, where white children were often breastfed and raised by black nannies and white men routinely had sex with black women - usually by force - the races were never really separate. In 1948, when Strom Thurmond stood for presidency on a segregationist ticket, he said, "On the question of social intermingling of the races, our people draw the line." Last year, it transpired that at the time he had a black teenage daughter by his family's black maid.

"The issue for black people was never integration or segregation but white supremacy," says Charles Payne, an African-American studies professor at Duke University, North Carolina. "The paradigm of integration and segregation was a white concern. That was how they posed the issue of civil rights, given their own interests, and that was how the entire issue then became understood. But the central concerns of black people were not whether they should integrate with white people or not, but how to challenge white people's hold on the power structure."

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[POA]

What was true of the south then is now true of almost every major US city. Racial segregation, and the inequalities that come with it, have become a banal fact of American life. Every city has at least one rundown area where white people rarely venture, and another where few black people could afford to live. Often, they sit right next to each other, separated by invisible boundaries that quickly yield to visible differences. Before you see the change in hue, you see the change in housing, shops and advertisements. Ask people how it got like that, and they will tell you it has always been this way. Everything from proms in Georgia to prison cells in California may still be segregated on racial lines.

A few years ago, Eric Funk, bar manager at Club New York near Times Square, explained how alcohol reps identify tastes not just by region but by race. "I only need stock about five or six different drinks," he says, "depending on which ethnic group I've got in here. In the rest of the city, everybody's after Veuve Clicquot. That's the big thing among white people here right now. But you can't sell that to black people. Don't ask me why. They want Cristal, Dom Perignon or maybe Moët."

The nation is similarly segregated when it comes to television. A report last year showed that there is only one programme - CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - that features in the top 10 for both black and white viewers. "White" hits such as Seinfeld or Will & Grace have scarcely figured on African-Americans' radar. Meanwhile, most white people have never even heard of popular black shows such as Girlfriends and Bernie Mac. Friends was the sixth most watched show among white US viewers; among black viewers, it came 65th.

"Hardly any black people watched the finale of Seinfeld, which was a huge thing for whites," says Robin Coleman, professor of communication at the University of Pittsburgh. "They might as well be living in different countries."

Until 50 years ago, this was not just the way things were, but the way things were legally supposed to be. In 1896, the supreme court ruled that "separate but equal" facilities for different races was all that was required under the constitution. From then on, a form of apartheid was not just governed by custom but protected by law. In the southern states, its enforcement was explicit; in the north and west, it was usually implicit, with places where African-Americans would simply not be served, accommodated or made welcome. In Texas, interracial boxing matches were banned. In Arkansas, black and white voters could not enter a polling station in each other's company. In seven states, tuberculosis patients were separated by race.

In response, African-Americans had to create cultural, economic and political institutions of their own. Treated like unwanted foreigners in a home they never chose to come to, they developed their own national anthem (Lift Ev'ry Voice And Sing), flag, universities, newspapers, baseball leagues, fraternities, sororities, masons, churches. Every profession and trade, from teachers and lawyers to firefighters and journalists, formed a black association. In 1938, a national black mother-and-children group called Jack & Jill, which caters primarily for the middle classes, was formed.

And while the races were separate, they were also clearly unequal in terms of wealth, power and status. By the 1950s, African-Americans were less than a century out of slavery, starved of a decent education, excluded from positions of authority, and in the south deprived of the right to vote. Nowhere was this clearer than in education. In 1930, in South Carolina, school boards spent 10 times as much on educating white children as they did on blacks; in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama, it was five times as much.

By the late 1940s, civil rights lawyers felt it was time to challenge the validity of the entire "separate but equal" doctrine, and scoured the land in search of cases that would prove that separate meant unequal. In Topeka, Kansas, they found Oliver Brown, whose seven-year-old daughter Linda had to cross railroad tracks to get to a black school on the other side of town, even though there was a white school much closer to home. Brown took the Topeka board of education to court to petition for Linda's right to attend her local school. The request was denied and appealed eventually to the supreme court, along with four similar cases from around the country. The case bore Linda Brown's name, as she was the first complainant alphabetically.


On May 17 1954, the supreme court delivered a rare unanimous verdict. "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate education facilities are inherently unequal." But, even more unusually, the court did not order the states to enforce the judgment immediately. Conscious of the resistance to desegregation among southern whites, they ruled that integration should take place "with all deliberate speed".

The ruling provided the political impetus and legal framework for the civil rights movement. Within 18 months, Martin Luther King would lead a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, after a black seamstress, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat to a white man. But it also allowed white authorities to stall substantive change, dragging the conflict out long after the verdict - Milwaukee did not order the desegregation of its schools for another 22 years, until 1976. President Dwight Eisenhower fumed at the Brown ruling. "[Southern whites] are not bad people," he told chief justice Earl Warren at a dinner shortly afterwards. "All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big, overgrown negroes. It is difficult through law and through force to change a man's heart."

"If Eisenhower had fought the war like he fought segregation, we'd probably be speaking German right now," said Oliver Hill, 97, a lawyer in the Brown case. "As white folks interpreted it, 'deliberate speed' meant as long as hell, if any time at all."

The result, writes Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree in his book All Deliberate Speed, was progress in principle and stasis in practice. "African-Americans would, in theory, have the burden of segregation in public education removed from their shoulders, but the relief would come slowly, deliberately, and at the pace determined by those who resisted the change."

"America is God's Crucible," declared Israel Zangwill in his hit 1908 play Melting Pot. "The great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming." This has been the dominant myth of the last American century, that it is a nation of the new world comprised of different nationalities from the old. But it is a self-image based on those who came to the US voluntarily, not those who came in chains or those who were already there.

Milwaukee was no exception. Once the Native Americans were all but wiped out, the city was settled primarily by Germans and Irish during the mid-18th century, followed by Poles and east European Jews. Initially segregated in their own ethnic enclaves, they eventually came together to build their own hybrid version of America on the banks of Lake Michigan. "With the exception of the Poles, there is no longer any specific appreciable European ethnicity here," says historian Dennis Gurda. "It is not long gone, but it has gone all the same."

But, unlike other northern cities such as Chicago and Detroit, African-Americans did not make it to Milwaukee until much later. The mechanisation of cotton, lure of industrial work and extreme racial bigotry prompted the great migration of African-Americans from the south to the north from the 1930s onwards, but few made it to Wisconsin. Of the nation's 15 largest cities, Milwaukee vied with San Francisco for last in its percentage of African-Americans until 1970. The city had a fairly smug self-image - its leaders bragged about its "freedom from intolerance and bigotry", while a study in 1950 named it the third most livable city in America.

As blacks started arriving in large numbers after the war to work in the huge factories, Milwaukee's racial landscape changed dramatically. Between 1945 and 1970, the city's black population grew by 700%, from 2% of the population to 14.7%. In the intervening time, between the passing of Brown and the arrival of large numbers of African-Americans in Milwaukee, black America had gone from being overwhelmingly rural and southern to overwhelmingly urban and half-northern. Meanwhile, Milwaukee had built motorways, paving the way for mass suburbanisation. As blacks moved in, whites moved out.

Milwaukee got the chance to test its tolerance and, while it wasn't much worse than many other cities, it wasn't much better, either. The only difference between the north and the south, wrote the late James Baldwin, was that "the north promised more. And [there was only] this similarity: what it promised it did not give and what it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other." Today, according to the 2002 census, nine out of 10 of the most segregated cities in the country are outside the south (the exception being St Louis in Missouri, which came fourth). The others, in descending order, are Detroit (second), Cleveland, Newark, Cincinnati, Buffalo, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.

By the early 1960s, Milwaukee's residential areas were so segregated that its schools inevitably ended up likewise. When schools in black areas became overcrowded, whole classes of black students would be bussed to empty rooms in all-white schools, brought back to black areas for lunch, and then taken back to the suburbs to finish their entirely segregated day.

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[POA]

A local civil rights movement grew up, led by a white priest, Father James Groppi, protesting colour bars in city clubs and calling for the integration of schools. In July 1967, simmering tensions between black activists and the authorities flared into a riot.

The decimation of the town's heavy industry in the 1980s crushed its economic base, hitting the black community particularly hard. African-Americans in Milwaukee now earn 49 cents for every dollar earned by whites. According to the federal bureau of labour statistics, Milwaukee has the widest employment gap between blacks and whites of any city in the US. Its schools are as segregated, if not more, than they were in 1976. African-Americans in Milwaukee aged between 15 and 24 are also 18 times more likely to be murdered than their white counterparts.

These statistics are about class as well as race. "Today, money is what keeps this city segregated," says Jerry Ann Hamilton, president of the Milwaukee chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), the oldest civil rights organisation in the country. "You can move anywhere you want if you have the money. We don't hear of people not being allowed to live in certain areas."

"We left a whole generation of people without jobs or at the mercy of the service industry," says Wendell Harris, chair of education for the NAACP. "If the north side [of Milwaukee] were a nation, it would be a failed state. We're striving for economic equality, but that still means racial equality, because the reason people don't have money is because they can't get jobs, and they can't get the jobs because of racism."

But it is also about choice. A survey of African-Americans in the city showed that 60% of black Americans prefer to live in neighbourhoods that are at least 50% black. Milwaukee's Public Policy Forum found that, while there were some affordable homes in white suburbs, some black people simply didn't want to move there. "We always assumed the reason had to do with overt discrimination," Jeff Browne, the PPF's executive director told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "A more important factor might be cultural affinity, people wanting to live with other people they're comfortable with."

Every morning before they start their lessons, and after they have walked the corridors lined with African masks, children at the Blyden Academy in Milwaukee say the pledge. Not the pledge to the American flag, the one that most children in the US say - "We don't do anything that ties us to western culture from a ritual standpoint," says the principal and founder of the school, Taki Raton. Instead, they recite an "Afrocentric" pledge at an Afrocentric school: "I love myself/I love my beautiful image/I am in the image of my creator/My creator blessed me to be the best/The genius of my ancestors are in my genes/I will excel in school/I will work, study, create, build, and prosper/I am the perfect design of success/I am just simply magnificently fabulous."

Raton thinks that desegregation has been "a dismal failure". He set up his school six years ago for children aged 4-14 and has 97 students. It costs around $6,000 a child, most of whose parents pay with vouchers. "Black children need to be under the control and modelling and direction of black teachers," he says. "I don't have a problem with segregation. Nobody has the right to impose those conditions on us. But we had our best, strongest black communities when we lived together. We didn't have as much stuff, but we did much more with it."

Once, a white family came to the school, interested in enrolling their son. "I told them there's nothing here for your child. Your child will probably emerge with low self-esteem because there's nothing here that represents them."

What would he have done if the child's mother had persisted? "I would have talked her out of it," says Raton. "I would have had to take the child by law, but I would have made it very clear it was not in their interests. This does not have to be everything for everybody. There are 700 schools in Milwaukee, and this just isn't the right one for them."

Students at Blyden take regular academic lessons and have emerged with higher than average test results. Raton believes this is down to the school's message and mission. "Culture is the glue. Without the culture, nothing else matters. That's what gives the self-belief and determines the character. Then you can teach. With desegregation, they threw our children into a void."

Some African-Americans would vehemently disagree. "A lot of these feelings come from nostalgia," says Franklin McCain, one of the first students to stage a sit-in protest in North Carolina in 1961. "People remember how good it used to be. It was hell. Sure, there were some advantages. There was the dentist who lived next door to the ditch digger who lived next door to the preacher before economic stratification started to happen. But that's not right, either. It's not at all good for someone who has been working hard to get where they are in their profession to be forced to live in a shack. So now we have a choice. If you want to do that, you can. But I don't want anybody telling me I should or I have to, because I don't."

But while few African-Americans are as hardline as Raton, most believe that the end of segregation did not bring only benefits. Most refer to integration in the same way that east Germans talk about reunification - as the assimilation of the powerless into the world of the powerful. They do not want a return to the bad old days, but are not entirely happy with what the new situation has taken and given, either.

"Too often, integration is presented as an unalloyed benefit for African-Americans, as if we all had been clamouring to leave our communities," writes Charles Ogletree. "For many in the African-American community, however, integration was viewed with suspicion or something worse."

Integration, to many, meant their best students were bussed to white schools, and the most successful professionals moved to white suburbs. The baseball leagues collapsed as the major leagues signed up the best black players; the black cinemas, theatres and dance halls folded as the white-run venues could both show the talent and let in the visitors.

Today, it is often those who "moved up and moved out" who are most likely to try to simulate a black experience for themselves or their children, because they feel racially excluded, fear cultural isolation, or both. Many of the organisations set up under segregation - the sororities, fraternities and masons, churches and newspapers - still exist. But alongside them there is now the National Brotherhood of Skiers, whose mission is to get black American athletes winning gold medals at the winter Olympics, and a National Association of Black Scuba Divers. In Boston, black professionals have started staging "friendly takeovers" in the city. An organiser emails every local black professional group, from the Society of Black Engineers to the National Association of Black Flight Attendants. The emails give 48 hours' notice of which venue in downtown Boston "could use a little colour" - without, of course, notifying the venue. Then, suddenly, one night, several sharply dressed African-Americans will show up together.

I asked one participant why he thought it was necessary. "You work hard and then you go home to the suburbs," says Stacy Cowan. "You come into the city to work, then you leave the city to live." The process of integration has been strong enough to elevate a few black men and women into jobs and lifestyles that distance them from most African-Americans, who are poor. Yet racism has proved too entrenched for them to secure meaningful social relationships with their white colleagues and neighbours, people with similar economic and professional aspirations. Instead, they have been forced to create social and cultural networks from scratch.

It is a similar story with Jack & Jill, the black mother-and-children group. "We want to give children a solid foundation as to who they are and what their heritage is," says Ida Younge, the national president. "They may be the only [black] child in their school, and they are not going to meet other black children any other way in their normal day. The benefits of integration outweigh the downside. But when I get up before 7am on a Sunday morning and drive 25 miles to a black church, I know I'm reaching for something."

"Integration was a trade-off," says Wendell Harris at the NAACP. "We are just beginning to recognise what the terms of that trade-off were, and how that has affected us. We gave too much and got too little."