1950s Milwaukee

Race, Class, and a City Divided in Postwar Milwaukee

Cooley Curd, an African American student attending the Milwaukee Vocational School under the G.I. bill in the early 1950s, sought to become a bricklayer. But Curd was told by instructors that while

he could learn the trade there . . . they would not be able to place him for [even] one day a week for job training because the Germans and the Poles have the Bricklayers union “sewed up,” and they were [only] able to place the white boys.

Curd heard the same elsewhere: “The union would not accept him [for] on the job training because of his color.” ¹

Locked out of the white building trades unions in union-dense Milwaukee meant Curd likely would not be able to pursue higher-wage employment in the city’s construction industry. Curd faced a further hurdle in winning acceptance in his new city: He was a recent arrival to Milwaukee. A Kentucky native who enlisted in the army in Cincinnati, Curd fit the pattern of postwar African American southern migrants to Milwaukee, the majority of whom had lived in one or two other locations before coming to the city. ²

Thousands of African Americans moving to Milwaukee in the 1950s faced a combination of racial discrimination and class-based bias built on perceptions that all black migrants were lower skilled, low-income workers who did not fit into the city’s “culture.” At the same time, the increased number of African American migrants moving to Milwaukee brought into sharp relief the struggle of all black Milwaukeeans to secure decent jobs and housing. African American job seekers found little recourse in the local labor movement, with union leaders and members mirroring the city’s sociocultural biases. Local lawmakers resisted legislation that would eliminate barriers to housing for black residents, and even sympathetic city officials viewed the newcomers through a classist lens. Furthermore, even as the presence of new residents challenged long-held notions of white privilege, their arrival also was not uniformly welcomed by the city’s longtime middle- and upper middle-class African American residents, whose classist perspective often aligned with white municipal lawmakers and community leaders. Ultimately, middle-class black leaders who breached the class divide to champion equality for all the city’s African Americans helped propel the movement for change and set the stage for a new civil rights generation of activists.

Within the emerging field of postwar African American urban history, ³ which examines the experiences of, and reactions to, the Second Great Migration of five million African Americans between 1941 and the late 1970s (Gregory 2009, 19), scholars have moved past the initial “ghetto synthesis model,” dominant in the 1960s and 1970s (Goings and Mohl 1996). In emphasizing the external and internal forces “that gave rise to nearly all black communities in northern cities,” the ghetto synthesis model “tended to overplay the significance of residential segregation,” treated important facets of black life “in highly pathological terms,” and also gave inadequate attention to the importance of class formation within the black community (Trotter 1996).

Departing from that analysis, historian Kenneth Kusmer in 1976 detailed the economic, political, social, and cultural development of Cleveland’s black community from the antebellum era to the end of the 1920s. In 1985, historian Joe Trotter illuminated the distinct role of the African American working class in Milwaukee from the late 1800s to the mid-1940s and highlighted how the black working class helped shape its own working and residential experiences (Kusmer 1976; Trotter 1985). At the same time, the publication of historian Arnold Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960, in which Hirsch argued that government policies fueling residential segregation augmented similar practices in the private sector, sparked a surge of “second ghetto” studies, returning scholarship to an emphasis on structural factors and away from examinations of black working-class agency (Trotter 2016, 4-5).

In 1996, Thomas Sugrue’s pathbreaking Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, brought forward an analysis of postwar race, economics, and politics in a powerful examination of the structural forces underlying the evolving urban challenges, yet moved away in part from the ghetto synthesis model (Trotter 2016). Critically, Sugrue’s examination of northern white homeowners’ attempts to maintain racially segregated neighborhoods and white opposition to equal employment opportunities for African Americans reframed the historical dialogue that had identified the 1960s as the onset of the postwar white conservative “backlash.”

More recently, African American urban history has challenged the second ghetto thesis with studies on class formation and class interactions, and has brought in the role of women, families, and religion (e.g., Goings and Mohl 1996). In American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, Robert O. Self analyzes black working-class struggles to achieve jobs and eradicate poverty within the lens of the civil rights movement. Historians such as Martha Biondi, Matthew Countryman, and Heather Thompson offer alternatives to the urban crisis school of scholarship (Biondi 2003; Countryman 2006; Heather Thompson 2001). As Trotter (2016, 5-6) argues, “Class and cross-class black community building, political, and social movements occupy a central place in this scholarship.”

Much more scholarship on the postwar African American urban experience is needed in examining class division and contestation within the black community. By examining African Americans’ struggle for decent jobs and housing in the immediate postwar war years in Milwaukee and its suburbs, this study brings to light the interconnected roles of race and class, an intersectionality that likely delayed the emergence of a robust movement for civil rights. Critically, this study pairs the external effects of racism with the internal dynamics of social and cultural forces originating in the black community itself.

In examining public- and private-sector restrictions circumscribing African American efforts to secure remunerative employment and quality, affordable housing, this study necessarily includes elements of the “second ghetto” scholarship. Yet it moves beyond that paradigm to explore persistent white hostility against African Americans and the ways in which African Americans challenged the status quo. The pioneers of Milwaukee’s civil rights movement articulated a vision that stretched beyond the incremental steps counseled by white city and community leaders and many members of the black middle class by demanding immediate affirmation of their civil and human rights.

As historians Kenneth Kusmer and Joe Trotter assert,

despite important strides in the development of African American urban history over the past several decades, perhaps the greatest challenge facing the field is the need for comprehensive assessments of the immediate postwar era and the subsequent period of suburbanization and deindustrialization.

Furthermore, while scholars have detailed case studies of New York, Philadelphia, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh, with Sugrue’s study of Detroit “the first most systematic historical treatment of postwar black urban experience” (Kusmer and Trotter 2009), few midsize cities have been examined.

By exploring the response to African American migration in a smaller city, the Milwaukee model offers the opportunity to assess the impact of population and other demographics alongside structural factors. Milwaukee, representative of the postwar African American urban experience in northern Rust Belt cities, presents an environment in which to examine racial and class expressions as they manifested in a blue-collar setting unfamiliar to many and fast receding from view. At the same time, by periodizing African Americans’ experience in the immediate postwar years, a time that, in Milwaukee, paralleled the influx of migrants to Detroit and Chicago before and during the war, the study sharpens the focus on the experiences formative to African Americans’ assertion of their rights in the civil rights era.

Only by recognizing the interplay of economics, politics, and race can the issues at play in cities today be fully understood and confronted. Such insight is especially essential for Milwaukee, where in 2015, a national media outlet could declare that, statistically, Milwaukee “is one of the worst places in the country for African Americans to reside,” a city that as late as 2013 was the most racially segregated city in the nation (“The 25 Most Segregated Cities in America” 2013; “Why Is Milwaukee so Bad for Black People?” 2015). Yet the African American experience in Milwaukee is situated on an extreme end of a spectrum in which segregation, marginalization, and discrimination are defining features of industrial urban areas in the second half of the twentieth century. This study aims to shed light on the early postwar roots of these vast disparities, while, at the same time, complicating our notions of both race and class.

Milwaukee’s Strong Black Middle Class

Overwhelmingly white and middle class, Milwaukee in the 1950s stood at the brink of rapid demographic change as tens of thousands of African Americans migrated to the city. From 1950 to 1960, Milwaukee’s black population grew from 21,772 to 62,458, a 187 percent increase that alarmed many white residents and provided fuel for a race-baiting mayoral campaign against the city’s liberal mayor in 1956. For many African Americans, Milwaukee was the second or third stop on their way from their homes in the South (Geib 1998). The black community these new residents found was anchored by a few dozen leaders who comprised the city’s African American middle class, which had solidified in the 1920s. Among them, Wilbur and Ardie Halyard, who founded the Columbia Building and Loan Association in 1925, a venture they undertook because of what the city’s black press described as efforts by the Milwaukee Real Estate Board to “restrict blacks to a black belt because of growth of the black population.” In fact, Ardie recalled nearly forty years later, “it was almost impossible for Negroes in Milwaukee to obtain loans prior to the formation of Columbia” (“Halyards Go Far in City’s Business Life” 1962).

The Halyards opened their first office in a room inside an undertaking parlor, with Ardie staying up at night to balance the accounts after her job at Goodwill, where she was ultimately promoted to personnel director. Ardie, a Georgia native, was one of twelve children and helped take care of her siblings after her mother died. In 1950, she reactivated the dormant Milwaukee chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and served as its president. Wilbur, who grew up in South Carolina, recalled he was inspired after hearing Booker T. Washington speak. “I came away from that meeting with the idea of improving myself,” he said (“Halyards Go Far in City’s Business Life” 1962).

Like nearly all of Milwaukee’s black population, the Halyards operated their business and lived in an area dubbed Bronzeville, located on the city’s near North Side. After 1915, “through a mixture of choice, economic necessity, restrictive housing covenants, discriminatory real estate and loan practices, and overt racism, an identifiable thirty-five-block ‘black district’” emerged, “an area also known for its brothels, liquor joints, and gambling dens” (Jones 2009).

By 1940, Bronzeville, increasingly called the “inner core,” expanded to seventy-five blocks and housed more than 90 percent of Milwaukee’s black population. For many years, a mix of the original German, Jewish, and Eastern Orthodox settlers lived side by side in Bronzeville, along with the newer black residents. As white residents left the area, their large homes were subdivided into rooming houses or one- and two-bedroom apartments (Jones 2009, 19). Compared with Midwestern cities like Chicago and Detroit, Milwaukee’s prewar black population was minuscule. As late as 1945, African Americans made up 1.6 percent of the city’s population, putting Milwaukee’s wartime black population nearly at the bottom of the nation’s twenty-five largest cities (Trotter 1985, 228).

By the 1950s, Milwaukee’s Tenth and Twelfth Wards, which covered large portions of the inner core, had become a safe seat for Democrats and African Americans in the state assembly. Isaac Coggs, owner of the popular taverns, 700 Tap, the Rendezvous, and Cross Town, served six terms in the state assembly before being elected to the county board of supervisors. Coggs’s father, Theodore, was an Oklahoma native and Howard University graduate who served in World War II before completing his law degree at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and opening a legal practice on Walnut Street. The younger Coggs began his education at the city’s Marquette University and finished at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Isaac Coggs led the fight in the state legislature to add enforcement powers to the state’s Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), legislation that Republicans shot down year after year. Wisconsin, like several states, had formed its own FEPC as Congress failed to renew the short-lived (1941-1946) federal FEPC. But along with Indiana, it was one of two states in which its commission had no legal mandate to redress discrimination in hiring (Brown 1957; Coggs 1957; “FEP Law with Teeth Enacted” 1957; Shadd 1950).

The tightly knit Bronzeville community watched over its neighborhood children, Chuck Holton remembers. “Your deportment and manners were overseen by the entire community.” Former Bronzeville resident Ralph Jefferson recalls smoking a cigarette with a friend on Walnut Street and being scolded for it by his mother when he arrived home. ⁴ White Milwaukeeans mingled with black residents at black-and-tan clubs such as the Metropole, with its blend of jazz and blues. Between seventy-five and one hundred social clubs, such as Le Mesdames and La Pal, each with ten to fifteen members, rented the clubs on Sunday afternoons for matinees, providing entertainment that ranged from amateur hour to nationally known acts.

The number of self-employed African Americans reached its peak in the 1950s, with black-owned restaurants, shops, and hotels filling the nine block stretch of Walnut Street, Bronzeville’s Main Street (Vick 1993). From 1940 to 1950, black-owned businesses nearly doubled, growing from 109 to 210. The 1950-1951 Negro Business Directory of the State of Wisconsin listed more than 150 licensed rooming houses, thirty-five taverns, dozens of restaurants and eating establishments, twenty-one dry cleaners, fourteen beauty shops, nine barbershops, and eleven grocery stores, along with eight attorneys, seven doctors, six dentists, eleven entertainers, and nine orchestras. A 1957 survey found that on a per capita basis, Milwaukee’s black residents owned and operated more businesses than in any other large metropolitan area, including the nation’s twelve largest cities (Shadd 1950; “The Pride of Ownership” 1957).

Anchored by a strong black middle class with deep roots in Milwaukee, Bronzeville remained a self-contained world well into the late 1940s, geographically central yet set apart from the city’s white, ethnic European residents, with members of each group interacting primarily at the workplace or Black and Tan clubs, if at all (Trotter 1985, 228-29).

Subtle and Not-So-Subtle Job Discrimination

Although the return of veterans to Milwaukee after World War II did not result in large-scale layoffs of black workers, employment among black males declined in the postwar years, with employment for black females, like that of women workers across the nation, dropping much more precipitously, from 869 workers to 561 workers in 1949. Black workers remained concentrated in manufacturing, generally given the dirtiest and most difficult jobs, and were “not accepted in financial institutions and in the majority of the professions within the area.” ⁵

One of the largest employers of black workers, A.O. Smith, a major producer of bombs in World War II, had a reputation by the end of the decade as an operation that would hire black workers. But it had been only through the intervention of the federal FEPC that the heavy industrial plant hired any black workers at all. In January 1942, the FEPC “dragged A. O. Smith over the coals” for not having a single black worker among its twelve thousand employees. “After several days of public castigation and behind the scenes negotiations, A.O. Smith relented.” By the war’s peak, the company employed more than eight hundred black workers, 5 percent of its workforce (Kersten 2007).

Such a large number of workers represented a significant proportion of the city’s black working population and clearly helped account for the high levels of black employment in Milwaukee, where in 1952, 4,786 black workers were employed by 167 firms in the city, primarily in manufacturing. Elsewhere, employment opportunities were more limited. Briggs-Stratton, Allen-Bradley, and other large industrial plants refused to hire nonwhite workers, or made minimal attempts to do so. ⁶ Milwaukee breweries, which included Pabst, Blatz, and Schlitz, began hiring black workers only in 1950. Jobs that required interaction with the public were especially difficult to break into. It was not until 1952 that the first black sales clerk was hired at a major department store (Loewen 2005). A 1952 Milwaukee Urban League sample found that black workers were not hired at 25 percent of places where they applied for work—a rate the league cited as progress (“Negro Labor Gains Noted” 1952). As historian Nancy MacLean has demonstrated, economic exclusion of African Americans was more than a matter of financial well-being. “Job segregation restricted their very membership in the mainstream of national life because the work ethic and the success myth have long constituted the bedrock of American culture.” Labor was the sure route to the democratic promise of the American dream (MacLean 2006).

Although discrimination often was subtle, when it was not, African Americans like Curd used the FEPC to redress discrimination in employment, an area in which, unlike housing, they had immediate recourse to effect change. Hettie Barnes also reached out to the FEPC. Barnes, who sought to apply to Sperry Candy Company, reported to the Fair Employment Division that she entered the company as two white women asked for the employment office. “Having overheard the conversation,” Barnes said,

I proceeded to continue to follow these two women, whereupon, the switchboard operator asked if she could help me. I said “Yes.” I said that I wanted the employment office, and she replied that she didn’t have any more applications for the day.

When Barnes told the staff person she had just sent two women up to the employment office, the switchboard operator again stated, “I am sorry, we don’t have any more.” Barnes then asked “if she meant for Negroes, and she said, ‘Yes’.” ⁷

The concentration of African Americans in Milwaukee meant that the employment division almost exclusively served residents there. Between 1950 and 1952, it recorded fifty-two complaints. Probable discrimination was found in thirty-three cases, none in eighteen, and two were withdrawn (“Fair Employment” 1952). Yet the division, which had been created to carry out the Wisconsin Fair Employment Practices Law of 1945, was a one-woman operation and had no enforcement powers until 1957. Its director, Virginia Huebner, relied on discussions with employers when discrimination cases arose, and in 1952, she optimistically noted that “persuasion and persistence have worked—so far.” Without the regulatory authority to hold businesses accountable, the division depended upon toothless appeals to employers to essentially do the right thing. Limited to changing attitudes rather than enforcing behavior, the division spent much of its time and resources taking part in conferences and radio and television programs and in producing educational posters, pamphlets, and newsletters (“Fair Employment” 1952).

Like Curd, some black job seekers enrolled in the Milwaukee Vocational School, which offered skills training for black workers in line with Milwaukee Vocational School Director William Rasche’s belief that “restriction of Negroes to menial jobs is unjust and un-American” (Rasche 1946). The school also offered the area’s industries a ready hand in launching a “properly conceived program of Negro employment” and told employers its staff would work with employers in “effecting a smooth integration of Negro workers with white employees” through the school’s services.

Similarly, the Milwaukee Urban League worked to create a climate in which white employers felt comfortable hiring black workers. The league operated a Department of Industrial Relations and later a Manpower Advisory Committee, both of which connected black leaders and members of white corporations to facilitate job placement in a variety of occupations. Yet, early in the decade, it was clear most employers would go only so far. In 1951, the league held a luncheon with top management of large firms and reported a “marvelous response.” Following up on the meeting, the league developed a nondiscrimination hiring policy statement for the firms to sign on to. But when an Urban League representative met with managers the organization had been working with, management “totally rejected the hiring policy” developed by the Industrial Committee. Allen-Bradley, in fact, denied it had a discrimination policy and went on to say there was no need to hire black workers when the company began hiring again. ⁸

The Milwaukee Urban League also sought to work with the local labor movement in improving job options for African Americans. F.H. Ranney, the general secretary of the Federated Trades Council of Milwaukee representing AFL unions, agreed with Urban League President William Kelley that “the most important phase of postwar planning concerning Negroes is that of employment.” Ranney went on to quote from resolutions passed at numerous AFL conventions affirming the national federation’s support of fair employment. Hy Cohen, executive assistant at the CIO-affiliated Milwaukee County Industrial Council, told Kelley that “with respect to the specific problem of Negro workers, all CIO unions have accepted them as members without any distinction as to their color.” Yet the local AFL and CIO councils repeatedly stonewalled the league’s request to join its board of directors. In 1954, the League tried again, but never heard back from the local AFL—even though it had been directed by the national office to join the board. The nominee the CIO selected declined to do so. The mistrust between labor and the league carried over to the workplace as well. Despite the league’s lack of progress with Allen-Bradley management in addressing its hiring practices, some league members opposed working with the United Electrical Workers’ Union, even though they recognized the union played no role in keeping out black workers. ⁹

At the shop-floor level, black workers found that the extent of union support varied from union to union. In general, CIO-affiliated unions tended to actively support African American co-workers and job seekers. United Autoworkers (UAW) Local 248, affiliated with the CIO, established its own FEPC and vigorously worked for employment and upgrading of black workers at Allis-Chalmers, challenging the company for not hiring more African Americans during intensive periods of hiring of whites (Trotter 1985, 173-74).

Like their locals, union members also were not unified in their acceptance of black workers and, in some instances, unions acted as deterrents to rank-and-file racial bias. At one industrial workplace, three white women refused to allow a black woman inspector to evaluate their work. Yet both the employer and the union supported the woman inspector, and two workers who refused to have their work inspected were discharged. From City Hall, Milwaukee Frank Zeidler, who served as mayor from 1948 to 1960, observed that “while many labor leaders are genuinely opposed to racial discrimination, rank-and-file members in many cases feel the Negro is a potential competitor for jobs” (Rasche 1946; Zeidler 1954).

Some unions also worked with employers to keep out black job seekers. As historian Joe Trotter has shown, when black workers sought employment in Milwaukee breweries in the 1930s, employers uniformly pointed to union opposition as the basis for barring black workers. “White workers benefited somewhat from black exclusion and exploitation, but industrialists, exploiting their fears, reaped greater profits by a generally depressed wage structure.” In the 1950s, after several years of complaints from black workers, Urban League President Kelley concluded that in many instances, unions and management were working together to limit black workers’ access to employment. ¹⁰

The stance of AFL-affiliated building trades unions toward black workers was more uniform. The building trades, which had been a key part of the AFL since its founding in the late 1800s, had been a driving force of conservatism within the AFL, steering its leaders away from radical stances. The trades’ unions were set apart structurally from other unions by their apprenticeship training. Offering higher pay and better safety protections, unionized building trades jobs were and are today highly sought after. But to qualify for a unionized trades job, workers first must go through thorough apprentice training programs, meaning unions, not employers, determine which workers would be accepted. Essentially acting as employers, building trades unions often replicated the exclusion of minority workers prevalent throughout the private-employment sector. In May 1952, when the Milwaukee Urban League held an FEPC workshop that included labor unions, those in the building and construction trades refused to take part. ¹¹

Black workers like Curd understood they were not wanted in the white brotherhood and most did not apply for membership. Yet some were willing to make the financial and personal sacrifices involved in the lengthy legal process required to challenge the status quo. Willie Blue was one of them. When the Plasterers’ Union at first refused to accept him for apprentice training, he took the case to court. Simultaneously, the Urban League board of directors discussed whether to take the issue to the international Plasterers’ union, but ultimately decided that the international union’s direction would be ignored by local union officers. While the court ruled in Blue’s favor, it only required the Plasterers take him for a six-month trial period. ¹²

Yet, each time African Americans refused to give ground and challenged racial bias, their actions made it more difficult to discriminate. Furthermore, each time black workers asserted their rights, they helped pave the way for others to do so. In the city’s highest-profile race discrimination case, Randolph Ross, a contractor, and James Harris, a mason who worked for him, took their failed attempts to become members of Bricklayers’ Local 8 all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where the verdict ultimately resulted in success for all African American workers in Wisconsin.

In 1950, both Ross and Harris had sent the union the required $100 initiation fee, but the union denied receiving the fee. In fact, a year earlier, the head of the Bricklayers had posited a unique reason for the union’s refusal to accept black workers: “In times of depression and slack work, Negroes being the most recent employed, would be the first laid off and therefore would be inclined to raise the question, at such times, of discrimination.”

At the Urban League’s request, Milwaukee Building Trades Council President Peter Schoemann agreed to look into the issue of Bricklayers’ refusal to admit Ross and Harris, but he dragged his heels. Years of litigation followed, and in April 1957, the Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed the ability of the union to bar Ross and Harris from membership, saying a union was a voluntary association with no more restriction on its power to admit or reject applicants than would be imposed on a group of people for a social or fraternal group.

In its ruling, the court highlighted the lack of enforcement powers of the state’s Fair Employment Practices code, motivating the state legislature to pass and Republican Governor Vernon Thompson to sign a bill that added enforcement powers. The court ruling had galvanized widespread support for the measure, pushing even Republican state legislators, who had blocked the proposal for years, into voting for its passage. The state Chamber of Commerce was the only dissenting voice. That October, seven years after they first sought to join the union, Ross and Harris, along with two other men, were admitted as the first black members of the Bricklayers in Wisconsin. As onerous as it was to achieve admittance in building and construction trade unions, African American laborers who did so often began a lengthy journey toward acceptance by union leaders and members, with issues of seniority and job delegation stacked against them. ¹³

Housing Segregation “Greater Than in Any Other Northern City”

By the early 1950s, Milwaukee’s inner-core living conditions were rapidly deteriorating at the same time it was becoming more segregated. The 1950 Census showed that 55 percent of Milwaukee’s black residents lived in fewer than 2 percent of the city’s census tracts. In 1954, Milwaukee’s deputy inspector of buildings estimated that four thousand buildings in the city were “so dilapidated, insanitary [sic], or structurally unsound they would qualify for razing under the condemnation statute,” but noted that only 578 buildings had been razed between 1948 and 1953 because of limited personnel. Zeidler, who had made achieving affordable housing his primary goal as mayor, calculated that the rate of the city’s housing stock was becoming obsolete at approximately sixty blocks per year. Although he pressed the municipal Housing Authority for action, the agency’s efforts to build affordable housing were stalled in a legal dispute between 1951 and 1953. Finally, in 1953, the Common Council adopted a resolution to move on an approved city housing project, the Hillside Terrace Addition. ¹⁴

Stymied in its ability to create more affordable housing to alleviate congested neighborhoods and provide decent living space for low-income residents, Milwaukee faced a burgeoning crisis. The city’s growing African American population, prevented by discriminatory practices from purchasing housing, lived in increasingly crowded neighborhoods. At the same time, the city’s financial future was imperiled by a diminishing geographic base unable to provide space for tax-generating industry. Milwaukee’s solution to these twin problems centered on annexing adjacent land—a move that sparked a suburban backlash, one premised on economic conservatism and racial prejudice.

United in their desire to annex adjoining suburbs, Zeidler and the Common Council sought to enforce a long-standing policy of refusing to extend Milwaukee’s water service beyond city boundaries as a tool for annexation. Threatened by Milwaukee’s ultimatum to consolidate with the city or lose water access, suburbs engaged in high-profile rhetoric that made clear their opposition to joining Milwaukee centered on their intent to remain removed from urban residents of dissimilar race and class.

Appeals to class-consciousness had formed the basis for early suburbanization across the nation. Milwaukee’s wealthy North Shore suburbs sought from the start to zone their land to prevent low-income residents from moving in. Among those suburbs, Shorewood even banned all apartment buildings in the early 1920s. By enacting zoning restrictions that mandated residences be built on large parcels of land, suburbs not only kept out middle- and lower income families, many of whom were minorities. They also avoided extensive fiscal outlays for sewers, water lines, schools, and other public services, thus minimizing government (Abrams 1995; McCarthy 2009).

Throughout the annexation debate, Milwaukee suburbs often camouflaged their racial animus in language attacking urban crime, poverty, or the city’s social safety net. Issues of race and class were inextricably associated with suburban hostility to expansive government. Decrying public assistance programs, editors at the suburban Wauwatosa News-Times called out the “vicious circle” in which “dependence on government has encouraged the inevitable human inertia that saps the people’s initiative” and results in more government dependence (“Prosperity and Poverty Still” 1957). Wrapped in individualism, suburbanites’ economic conservatism evoked the freedom to choose where to live and which government to support. Milwaukee suburbs in large part succeeded in remaining separate governmental entities, entrenching segregation across the county.

The city itself also was highly segregated. City attorney Bruno Bitker, who chaired the city’s Human Relations Commission, described housing segregation as greater in Milwaukee than in any other Northern city. In 1952, black residents occupied nearly half of substandard housing in Milwaukee, although they made up only 3.6 percent of the population (Zeidler). As in many cities across the nation, African Americans who sought decent housing were blocked from doing so by a gamut of tactics, including discriminatory housing covenants, blockbusting, and “sundown suburbs.”

Nationally, the emergence of sundown suburbs in 1946 built on practices set by sundown towns, in which thousands of communities kept out specific groups, such as African Americans, Chinese Americans, and Jewish Americans by force, law, or custom. Until the civil rights era, some Milwaukee suburbs “enforced laws that forbade blacks to buy homes in their communities or to walk the streets after 10 p.m. (Loewen 2005, 5-6, 414-15). As more black families moved into Milwaukee, the city’s already large housing shortage was exacerbated, and sundown suburb restrictions further circumscribed African Americans’ ability to move beyond the inner core. In 1958, a Milwaukee NAACP survey found only sixty-eight black families, exclusive of those in low-cost housing, moved outside the inner-core and transitional areas, ¹⁵ in sharp contrast with the numbers of wealthier black families in Chicago and Detroit who increasingly moved out of the inner city. In Milwaukee, at least, the notion posited by historian Kenneth Kusmer that midsized Midwestern cities did not exhibit the same pattern of ghetto formation as did large cities with the most intense forms of racially segregated urban spaces, does not bear out (Kusmer 1976).

Another common discriminatory tactic involved written covenants prohibiting the sale of homes to specific racial or ethnic groups. In 1948, a Supreme Court decision barred written covenants, but it did not prevent white homeowners from selecting buyers based on race. Furthermore, the ruling did not include rentals. At a Common Council meeting in November 1952, George Brawley, a black attorney, told aldermen that black residents were not permitted to rent flats or apartments in many areas, although the dwellings had been vacant for as long as a year (“Movement of Negroes Nothing New, Exciting” 1952).

Unlike in the area of employment, in which African Americans had access to support through the Urban League and to the judicial system where laws prohibiting employment discrimination could be enforced, African Americans in Milwaukee had little recourse to address housing issues. The city’s black middle class pushed for change through the available avenues, including an unsympathetic Common Council and members of municipal committees, like the Human Relations Commission—which received its funding through the Common Council. Working through officially sanctioned structures, with no legal foundation from which to challenge the status quo, however, afforded African Americans little progress in opening housing access.

With few options, even middle-income African Americans were locked out of decent housing. The Milwaukee Journal reported on one such instance in which a black couple with a child and another on the way, unable to obtain suitable living conditions despite a good income, lived in a basement flat with two closet-sized bedrooms, broken windows, and water dripping through the ceiling when the upstairs tenants took a shower. As the reporters noted, “A white family making $80 a week wouldn’t be in the market for a country estate . . . But they wouldn’t be living under conditions like these, either” (“Search for Housing Made as Test for Discrimination” 1960).

Blockbusting, widespread in Milwaukee and in many urban areas, occurred when realtors sought to persuade white residents to sell their homes cheaply by playing on fears that black residents were set to move into the neighborhood. Yet, as late as the 1950s, some members of the Milwaukee Common Council denied blockbusting existed in the city. The council repeatedly refused Bitker’s request for funding so the Human Rights Commission could investigate blockbusting practices. At one such council hearing, a black resident pointed out that a member of the Human Rights Commission said a real estate man “had boosted the price of a house from $12,500 to $14,500 when he saw the prospective buyer was black” (“Movement of Negroes Nothing New, Exciting” 1952). Nor would many of the council members listen to one of their own, Fred Meyers, the longtime Sixth Ward alderman, who told the council that blockbusting had been around for a dozen years. At one council meeting, in which aldermen alternated expressions of disbelief that the real estate industry would engage in such tactics with digressions about crime, Meyers quickly got to the point: The issue involved white resentment against blacks moving next door.

“Those real estate birds went around from house to house saying the Negroes are coming,” Meyers related.

People called me up and said the real estate men had frightened them to death. I told them that there’s a Constitution in this country and people have a right to move and that it’s the owner’s right to sell the house or keep it and not to get excited.

Meyers was an exceptional voice on the Common Council, many of whose members a few years earlier had expressed their opposition to relocating black residents displaced by slum clearance to a primarily white housing project (“Movement of Negroes Nothing New, Exciting” 1952).

At the end of the decade, when the League of Women Voters commissioned a report on the city’s human relations, the study found records showing that realtors had purchased properties in or surrounding the inner core at prices far below market value. The properties were then sold within a few days or months to African Americans, sometimes at twice the price paid the original owner. The report noted that “no building permits are on record for these properties, so no additions or alterations could have been effected.” ¹⁶

Scapegoating Minority Migrants

Even as African Americans pushed for equal access to quality housing through the Common Council, the city’s lawmakers, who long had fought efforts to provide affordable housing to black residents, found a new tactic to do so: residency requirements. The influx of African American migrants, perceived by many in the city as low-skilled and “culturally” set apart from mainstream Milwaukeeans, provided lawmakers with a convenient cover for enacting racially discriminatory legislation. By implicitly using a class argument, Milwaukee aldermen pointed to the existence of a group outside Milwaukee’s normative middle class, while deflecting the perception of racism. In December 1951, the Common Council approved a resolution supporting the action of the county to restrict eligibility for public housing to those who had several years’ residence. Zeidler returned the resolution to the council unsigned, with a note stating that “the action of the County Board was apparently taken in contemplation of preventing migrant people of southern origin from getting Milwaukee County aid easily.” ¹⁷

Although a lifetime member of the Socialist party, Zeidler did not subscribe to its theory that the “problem” of African Americans, like that of women, would automatically be resolved with the institution of socialism. Rather, he attributed his more activist approach to addressing racial disparity to his early upbringing. “I was taught at church and Sunday school and at home, ‘Treat everybody alike. Treat everybody equally.’ That’s what I did.” ¹⁸ Throughout his twelve years in office, Zeidler championed integrated public housing and pushed hard—although mostly unsuccessfully—for creation of thousands of new affordable housing units. He also recognized the economic conditions underlying issues that often manifested as racial.

As long as conditions are attractive in northern cities for southern people’s lives—white, colored, American, or Puerto Rican—these people will migrate northward. We cannot pretend to believe the issue is not here, nor can we leave to hope that the situation will miraculously work itself out. Consequently, foresight, planning, and energy are needed to cope with the problem in the interests of democratic rights. ¹⁹

Yet, if the real estate industry, Common Council, Mayor Zeidler, progressive housing supporters, the city’s two daily newspapers, and the area’s founding black community did not find common ground on the solutions for overcrowding in the inner core, they all agreed on the cause of the crisis: black migrants from the South.

The “difficulties in the Negro area are not caused by the Negro citizens of Milwaukee but by newcomers from the South,” asserted local real estate leader John Roache. Discussing the problems of the inner core, Zeidler said,

What makes this problem difficult to manage is the cultural difference that exists between the southern people—both white and non-white—and the northern people—both white and non-white. As the new migrants come into the community they bring with them standards of living which are not acceptable to their newly established neighborhoods.

The city’s evening newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal, repeated the claim without question, and the South Side voice of far-right conservatism, the Milwaukee Times, editorialized that

Milwaukee and the rest of Wisconsin has [sic] many Johnny-come-latelies from the undernourished cotton fields of the south and the barren wastes of neighboring counties. These exploited peoples, brought here on promises of jobs and easy money should be sent home by the people who brought them if, within the year, the rash promises fade.

Chiding its African American readership for its stance on newcomers, the Milwaukee Defender implored,

we must help our brothers . . . and join with our legions of white friends in helping the immigrant Negro to become oriented to a new and strange though better way of life. We should not and must not resent his coming lest our already limited freedom be destroyed. ²⁰

In his study of black Milwaukee through 1945, historian Joe Trotter found a “fundamental division of the black population . . . between expanding urban industrial and domestic worker class and small black bourgeoisie.” By 1950, class divisions sharpened, as large numbers of generally low-income southern African Americans moved into the city’s black working- and middle-class neighborhoods. Such a divide paralleled that in other cities. As historian Thomas Sugrue notes, while the process of “community formation” occurred during the first Great Migration, in the increasingly heterogeneous post–World War II black metropolis, “the process might better be described as the formation of several distinct communities” (Sugrue 1996, 207; Trotter 1985, 109).

Many in Milwaukee pointed to the rural roots of the new migrants and the “cultural” practices they brought with them. As the Milwaukee Journal put it, “In the South, they sweep the yards, they don’t mow them.” Although differences in “cultures” were attributed to the assimilation challenges of these newcomers, “culture” easily stood for “class,” a term so fraught since the founding of the nation it was avoided by even the city’s reigning socialist. The committee charged by Zeidler late in the decade to examine the conditions of the city’s black neighborhoods wrote in its report that “we must recognize the existence of at least three different cultural systems in the inner core”—and then went on to distinguish these “cultural” groups by class: “the middle class, the laboring and industrial class systems, and the culture pattern of the people newly migrated from the deep South.”

Continuing to muddle “culture” with “class,” the report went on to note that

in the past, a large portion of the area had a middle class, and so leisure and social-welfare services were geared to that group. In the current shift in population, these families are being replaced by people with different cultural background who do not respond to the traditional agency services.

The solution then was to reorient municipal services “from middle-class values to the habits and concepts of the people living there.” ²¹

The use of the less politically charged term, “culture,” notwithstanding, throughout greater Milwaukee and within the African American community, class identity shaped the debate over and response to black migrants to the city. Vel Rogers Phillips, who became the first female and first African American Milwaukee Common Council member in 1956, recalls her childhood as one in which she and her sisters were raised with strict rules of deportment and urged by their parents to achieve a college education. The Rogers girls were not allowed to chew gum on the first floor of their spacious house, which was cleaned by a maid, because “ladies did not chew gum.” They were taught the polite way to get in and out of a car. When black families from the South moved in down the block, Phillips says her mother, Thelma, was appalled by their behavior, unaccustomed to neighbors shouting outside to each other. Phillips recalls her mother commenting that “they are so crude and they have no class.” Her mother, Vel said, “was very class conscious.” ²²

Another African American community leader, Mary Ellen Shadd, had founded the Milwaukee Defender in 1956 in an effort to redress the lack of a black press in the city, where a series of such publications had been short-lived. Like Phillips, who went on to play a pivotal role in the fight for fair housing in the 1960s, Shadd straddled two worlds: the city’s politically alienated but established black community, one that had long been willing to accept incremental improvements and that was at times disdainful of new residents outside their middle-class milieu, and a new generation of black leaders impatient with driblets of change who demanded full rights as they led the city’s civil rights movement.

From this “in-between” world, Shadd sought to exhort her peers in the manner of Booker T. Washington while simultaneously denouncing their complacency in accepting the status quo that denied African Americans their civil and human rights. “The Negro in this city is not taking advantage of the excellent opportunities for a first-class education,” Shadd wrote in one editorial. “He is not yet alive to the tremendous power in politics for his protection and well-being [and] we have yet to produce and follow dynamic leadership.” The “true leaders of this area” had yet to come forth, Shadd said, and the black community “is divided and thus conquered” (“What Does the Future Hold for Us?” 1957).

Isaac Coggs, who wrote a column in the Defender in his capacity as state assembly representative, regularly excoriated the “Uncle Toms” whom he saw as holding back the black community (see, for example, Coggs 1957) and called the county’s moves to stiffen residency requirements in 1957 “a special effort to send as many people back behind the cotton curtain of Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, and other southern states” a move he likened to “sending people who believe in freedom and Democracy back to Russia and Hungary” (Coggs 1957).

Some churches and activists in the black community held fundraising drives and solicited other means of support to aid the often jobless new arrivals. But, in general, black religious leadership on civil rights issues was notably absent in Milwaukee during this period. The Rev. W.J.G. McLin, pastor of St. Matthew’s Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, was among those who spoke out. When crime hit the city’s inner core, nearly all the city’s residents attributed it to these newcomers, and McLin asserted he was sick of the claim that newcomers were at fault. Crime and delinquency, he said, were caused by “old-timers” who have “laid a foundation to exploit newcomers” (“Discuss Crime in 6th Ward” 1953).

As late as 1957, the Milwaukee Urban League engaged in a discussion centering on whether the organization should encourage southern African Americans from moving to the city. Kelley, the Urban League’s longtime president, believed that in the midst of a tight labor market, “we continuously have Negroes coming into the city with no special skills, and when unable to find jobs or when laid off from jobs find it impossible to receive relief, and this is creating a great problem.” Still, Kelley and other board members pushed back on a suggestion by an African American community organizer that the league get the cooperation of ministers to tell their congregations to discourage members of their family coming to Milwaukee unless they have a trade or skill. ²³

Campaigning against Zeidler in 1956, Common Council President Milton McGuire expressed the widespread belief that providing social services encouraged low-income residents of other states to relocate to Milwaukee. Race, never mentioned, was implicit in such assertions. “We shouldn’t invite people from all states, North, South, East, and West, anywhere,” McGuire said. “We want to see our people get relief and when they need it. But we don’t want to invite people from all over the country just to get relief.” McGuire made his statement despite a 1952 countywide commission study that concluded African Americans were coming to Milwaukee for economic opportunity, a conclusion sociologist and political scientist Charles Tilly reached in the early 1960s, when he found “the quality of public services does not seem to make much difference to the flow of migrants, and the migrants who do come place no exceptional demand on services” (Tilly 1968).

Milwaukee, unlike Chicago, did not act to alleviate the adjustment difficulties of migrants. Chicago’s Migration Services Department was responsible for developing techniques to ease the adaptation of migrants to the city. Much of the work was done by volunteers among white migrants from the South and Southwest. The agency also assisted community organizations in areas of racial transition that “are recognizing the futility of trying to preserve the quality of their neighborhoods simply by excluding minority groups.” ²⁴ And while the court system had proven to be an avenue for Milwaukee’s black job seekers to win redress, albeit at a personal cost, African Americans’ efforts to work through municipal government to expunge the city’s discriminatory housing and residency policies in the 1950s were just the beginning of a protracted battle for civil rights. The stalemate reflected structural inequities as well as contention within the black middle class over whether to undertake action and what form it would take.

For instance, black leaders were active in Council meetings and on community boards, but were not always appointed to key bodies. A Crime Commission established in 1952 to examine recent incidents included six residents from the city and six from the county, none of whom were from the black community. Acting NAACP Chairwoman Ardie Halyard decried the lack of representation before the Common Council, a particularly glaring omission “since 80 percent of crime is supposed to be committed in the [primarily African American] Sixth Ward,” she said (“Negro Group Suggests One of Its Members Be Given a Place on Crime Commission” 1953).

At the same time, many in the city’s black middle class resisted direct action. In the Milwaukee Defender, political commentator Cecil Brown Jr. called for the formation of an independent voting league to mobilize minority members for elections. Brown noted he would be “very much surprised if such a group was formed without the opposition from Uncle Toms.” In Wisconsin, 12,500 black residents in 1957 were registered to vote out of 20,750 eligible, with 90 percent of the black population living in Milwaukee. His column drew a lot of mail, some supporting his proposal but most against it. Yet, Brown persisted. He invited forty black ministers to a tea to discuss their roles in making arrangements for an upcoming visit to Milwaukee by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Out of the forty invited, twelve said they would come. Eight showed up.

“Once there,” Brown noted,

they came up with no plans and the only positive suggestion was that the ministers meet with King before his speech. And even that suggestion failed. Only one minister was on the platform with Martin Luther King when he spoke. ²⁵

The Shame of Milwaukee

The 1956 municipal elections unleashed a simmering racial backlash. Zeidler defeated McGuire in the closest election of his three terms, a target of a race-baiting campaign so virulent that Time magazine labeled it “The Shame of Milwaukee” (1956).

McGuire, who centered his campaign on opposition to the rising number of African Americans in the city, had represented the city’s downtown East Side Third Ward and had been Common Council president since 1948. His campaign fueled a rumor circulating since 1951 that Zeidler posted billboards throughout southern states to attract African Americans to Milwaukee, luring them with promises of low-cost public housing. The rumor was so threatening to Zeidler’s 1956 reelection, the local AFL asked central labor councils throughout the South to report on whether the billboards existed. From High Point, North Carolina, to Meridian, Mississippi, union leaders avowed they never had seen such billboards from the mayor of Milwaukee. But union leaders did find one solicitation urging southern African Americans to come to Milwaukee—from the Wisconsin Employers’ Association seeking summer agricultural workers. ²⁶

Although Zeidler supporters forced McGuire to publicly come out against the billboard rumors, McGuire’s campaign repertoire included the slogan “Milwaukee needs an honest white man for mayor,” and it was reported that “McGuire aides have sneered at Zeidler workers for associating with a ‘nigger lover.’” The alderman also used more subtle appeals. At a meeting of Milwaukee’s Certified Rental Operators, a group “especially exercised over the race issue,” he promised that, as mayor, he would keep Milwaukee free of “southern migrants,” a euphemism for African Americans (Arndorfer 1999; Kempton 1956; “The Shame of Milwaukee” 1956; “‘Vicious’ Race Rumors in Mayor’s Fight Decried” 1956).

Playing on white voters’ fears that large numbers of low-income African Americans were moving to Milwaukee worked in tandem with the McGuire campaign’s false accusations that the city’s crime was escalating out of control because of gang violence. Police Chief John Polcyn took after McGuire, following a campaign ad that declared marijuana- and liquor-crazed “hoodlum mobs” ranged the city “with wolf-pack viciousness.” Calling it “the most infamous falsehood ever perpetrated against the citizens of Milwaukee,” the outraged chief, supported by other law enforcement officials, succeeded in getting McGuire to repudiate the “wolf pack” ad, which McGuire attributed to an outside ad agency that created it without showing it to him in advance (“Shifts Made by McGuire Campaign” 1956; “The Smear That Failed” 1956).

The city’s racial dynamics came to the fore in 1956 after years in which economic conservatism and racial prejudice had worked in tandem to restrict African Americans’ access to housing by limiting their ability to move to the suburbs. Milwaukee’s solution to these twin problems centered on annexing adjacent land—a move that sparked a suburban backlash, one premised on economic conservatism and racial prejudice. The suburbs’ high-pitched struggle to attain water service from Milwaukee had always masked much deeper issues involving economic conservatism interwoven with racial and class prejudice.

By the end of the decade, the fatal shooting of a twenty-two-year-old black man, Daniel Bell, as he ran from white officers, was among policing-related incidents that escalated racial tensions. A few years earlier, the Milwaukee Police Department had rounded up 260 African American men for questioning after the rape of a white women, a dragnet that furthered the black community’s distrust of city law enforcement. Similar, but smaller episodes had taken place throughout the decade, prompting an explosion of pent-up frustrations after Bell’s death, with some in the black community staging protests. Others, such as Phillips and other middle-class African Americans, joined Zeidler in opposing the gatherings out of fear they would escalate into violence (Jones 2009, 32-35, 38).

But the tragic event proved a turning point for the city, shifting the sociopolitical dynamics between the black community and the city’s municipal leadership and galvanizing some longtime African American Milwaukeeans like Isaac Coggs. Just a few years earlier, Coggs had backed the Near Northside Businessmen’s Association’s efforts encouraging black migrants to cooperate with Milwaukee police. After the Bell shooting, Coggs publicly denounced the police and equated their actions with the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi. Twenty years later, one of the police involved confessed that he and his partner had planted a knife in Bell’s hand after shooting him to provide them with an excuse for the unprovoked murder (Dougherty 2009; Jones 2009, 38, 270n1).

The 1956 elections also saw Phillips win the first of several terms as Common Council member, representing the largely African American Second Ward. Her election helped set the stage for a new generation of black activists who, working with members of the established black middle class like Shadd, Coggs, and McLin, would take their demands for fair housing to the streets in 1960s. While still rooted in the presumptions and experiences of the middle class, these activists breached the class divide to help create momentum for change in the ensuing decade.

In the 1960s, the housing shortage was compounded, and demands for housing grew after many African American homes were bulldozed for highway construction. Between 1960 and 1967, 14,219 housing units were razed to make room for Interstates 43 and 94, and more than half the occupants were African American (Jones 2009, 25). Mayor Henry Maier, who was first elected in 1960 after Zeidler declined to run for a fourth term, warned his community-relations commission to go slow on civil rights and refused to push the Common Council to pass fair housing legislation, telling Phillips the South Side would never reelect him if he advocated open housing (Jones 2009, 25; Vel Phillips, Interview by the author, October 18, 2009).

In 1967, after pushing fair housing legislation fruitlessly year after year on the Common Council, Phillips joined the Catholic priest, Father James Groppi, who led the NAACP Youth Council and Commandos, in leading a series of marches for open housing that extended for two hundred consecutive nights. Marching from downtown south across the Sixteenth Street viaduct and west into Wauwatosa, a conservative-leaning suburb, protestors encountered violent reactions by white South Siders and suburbanites, leading Maier to declare curfews. Despite the protests, Maier refused to support open-housing legislation for Milwaukee, arguing it was a countywide problem. Late in 1967, according to Phillips, he declined an attractive package of federal benefits that would have helped implement his proposed city improvements because they were contingent upon his support of a city-only open-housing ordinance (William F. Thompson 1988). Months later, the federal 1968 Fair Housing Act overrode the resistance of city officials. The 1960s protests were the last major civil rights actions in the city.

Maier’s response was widely seen as exacerbating the city’s racial tensions. He left “a community divided along racial lines,” the Milwaukee Journal editorialized following Maier’s exit after twenty-eight years in office: “If asked about segregation in the city, he would point to segregation in the suburbs. He would be right, of course, that a metropolitan answer was needed. But his response did not address what the city itself could do” (“The Mayor, the Press, and a Stormy Era” 1988). Yet Maier’s hardline stance against open housing and civil rights propelled him to his largest margin of victory in 1968, when he won all nineteen wards and 95 percent of the vote in two wards on the conservative South Side (William F. Thompson 1988, 394). Milwaukeeans voted in Maier time and again over the next two decades until he decided to retire from office.

Conclusion

In 2014, Wisconsin had the highest black unemployment rate in the nation, at nearly 20 percent, with the vast majority of African Americans living in the Milwaukee metropolitan region. Furthermore, an analysis of 2014 Census Bureau data showed that in Milwaukee, the gap between white and black high school attainment, 14.2 percent, was nearly double the national average. Income disparities between white and African American Milwaukee households was one of the worst as well, with a median income of $61,675 for white households, versus $25,646 for black households. Compared with other metropolitan areas where African Americans made up at least 5 percent of the population, these data made Milwaukee the worst city in the nation for African Americans. Notably, the ten cities found to be the worst for African Americans were all in the Midwest (“Projected Decline in Unemployment in 2015 Won’t Lift Blacks Out of the Recession-Carved Crater” 2015; “The Worst Cities for Black Americans” 2015).

Over the decades, calculated policy decisions have fueled Milwaukee’s escalating racial inequality, its extreme manifestation in the city separated by degree but not kind from other postwar industrial cities. Suburban resistance to consolidation with Milwaukee had been only one step in a long process to ensure suburban residents remained racially and economically homogeneous. A key mechanism inhibiting African American economic advancement has been the evolving tactics of Milwaukee’s sundown suburbs to prevent lower income, mostly African American, residents from moving out of the deteriorating inner core. As late as 1990, eleven Milwaukee suburbs were found to be “violating agreements that they take steps to promote fair housing,” according to the Milwaukee County public works director (Loewen 2005, 412).

Efforts limiting African Americans’ residential options have largely succeeded. As late as 2000, less than 2 percent of Milwaukee’s suburban population was African American. In 2010, African Americans made up an estimated 8.6 percent of the population in the city’s suburbs, including exurban Waukesha, Washington, and Ozaukee counties. ²⁷ By comparison in Cleveland, where blacks made up 21 percent of the metropolitan area, 49.1 percent of metropolitan Cleveland’s suburbs were African American. In Baltimore, where 29 percent of the metropolitan area was African American in 2010, suburbs were 49 percent African American. African Americans in Detroit suburbs made up nearly 40 percent in a metropolitan area that was 23 percent African American (“Comfort Zones” 2014; “Profile of General Population and Housing Characteristics” n.d.; “The Old South up North” 2002).

The 1950s proved pivotal for Milwaukee’s African American community. African American migration to Milwaukee in the 1950s had challenged long-held presumptions of race and class within both the white and black middle class, and upended a status quo that had implicitly sanctioned incremental progress in reducing racial discrimination. New residents faced discrimination in jobs and housing, as did other black Milwaukeeans, but the added burden of class bias—whether manifest within the city’s elite and middle class or wielded as a political tool—further hampered their efforts to secure jobs and decent housing. In their search for good jobs, they found little recourse within the city’s union movement. Working through the Urban League and the judicial system, African Americans chipped away at entrenched discrimination. In their struggle for housing, they were attacked by the most extreme elements in the city elite, as exemplified in the McGuire campaign. Yet the efforts of the city’s black middle class to achieve fair housing through city-sanctioned systems in the 1950s paved the way for mass street action in the 1960s.

In their bid for acceptance in the metropolitan milieu, low-income African Americans were marginalized both by the city’s white leaders and among many black religious leaders, small business owners, and other solidly middle-class residents of the inner core. Separated by race, bifurcated by class, low-income African Americans struggled to overcome deeply embedded structural and normative biases. Ultimately, the response of lawmakers, labor, and key leaders of Milwaukee’s black middle class in 1950s Milwaukee, as in Detroit and Chicago in earlier years, set the direction for decades to come.