Story maps of Milwaukee, Denver, Charlotte a first step for the national Redress Movement

Although he is more well-known for focusing his keen eye on the past, Milwaukee historian Reggie Jackson is using that expertise in an endeavor to change the future.

Jackson helped research and produce a “StoryMap” of Milwaukee that illustrates the city’s path to becoming one of the most segregated cities in the country.

His work was in service of a national racial justice movement, the Redress Movement, designed to document and reverse the effects of segregation across the cities of Milwaukee, Denver and Charlotte.

Opinion piece:Redress Movement aims to repair damage caused by decades of racism, discrimination in Milwaukee

The movement aims to educate members of the public on their city’s history of racial segregation, support the formation of groups that will form goals for redress and carry out “Redress Campaigns” with those groups.

Research from Brown University’s Diversity and DisparitiesProject assessed the Milwaukee-Waukesha area as the second-most segregated metro in the country.

Henry Louis Taylor, director of the University at Buffalo’s Center for Urban Studies, said the Redress Movement is about undoing decades of disenfranchisement.

“The value of white homes and neighborhoods established on the basis of its exclusivity and its whiteness. As a result of that, that evaluation of white spaces automatically triggers the devaluation and underdevelopment of Black spaces,” he said. “Wittingly or unwittingly, what the Redress Movement is attempting to do, is deconstruct the land evaluation system that creates the kind of conditions people are talking about in Milwaukee.”

‘People knew segregation was wrong’

The Redress Movement formed as a response to the revelations in Richard Rothstein’s 2017 book, “The Color of Law,” which detailed how the government and communities used laws and fear to relegate non-white residents into crowded and disinvested areas.

The book crystallized what is an often a vague acknowledgement of segregation’s existence.

But John Comer, the national field organizing director for the movement, said too many Americans see segregation as a piece of history firmly anchored in the country’s past and often limited to southern states.

Few, Comer said, realize the pervasive nature of segregation, the various policies and tactics used to perpetuate it and how it has led to cycles of generational poverty and scarcity in many neighborhoods.

“People knew segregation was wrong,” Comer said. “People knew segregation could contribute to obstacles in wealth building, even obstacles in school districts being funded properly for equal education.“

One codified type of segregation could be found in the racially restrictive covenants of property deeds. Those deeds mandated homes only be sold to white owners and only be occupied by white residents, with the exception of live-in servants. Most of Milwaukee’s suburbs contained such covenants at one point.

But Jackson said moving to the suburbs is not necessarily the goal for the residents who will drive this movement.

“What people want is to have the same opportunities in where they live now,” he explained. “They want the same opportunities to access to gaining homeownership … they want to look at some of the organizations that have been responsible for creating the disparities and hold them accountable and ask them do something to fix the problem.”

StoryMaps bring the past to the present

Segregation is the throughline for each city’s StoryMap, Jackson said.

“It is helping people, from a contextual standpoint, understand how we got to segregation and then mitigating the damage,” he said.

Historically, in the early 20th century, access to purchase housing was often denied to prospective Black buyers in nearly every municipality in the country. After World War II, Black residents were segregated into tenement-style public housing, while white residents were given access to loans for single-family housing. Today, some real estate agents engage in steering, which involves only showing clients homes in neighborhoods predominately poplated by their racial/ethnic group.

Milwaukee’s Black neighborhoods in particular were devastated by the destruction of a thriving Black business district along Walnut Street and the sudden and swift loss of high-paying factory jobs.

Decades since the end of official segregation, the majority of residential neighborhoods still have clear racial delineations and there are stark racial homeownership disparities between the two groups.

As a result, today’s inner cities are predominately Black and have become saturated with renters.

Higher rents have particularly hurt this demographic at the same time increased real estate prices have placed homebuying out of reach.

Dynasty Ceasar, the senior field organizer in Milwaukee, said fear of being priced out is prevalent among homeowners and renters.

In Black neighborhoods that built their own quasi-suburbs, many seniors told her they find it difficult to adjust to the higher property taxes associated with high property assessments. From the downtown adjacent Halyard Park to the storied neighborhood of Sherman Park, residents have feared gentrification, partially attributed to downtown development and rising home values, will increase their tax bills and force them to sell.

Renters are also described overpaying for their housing.

“A lot of schools in these areas have children who are part of the breakfast program, and then their parents are paying $1,000 for rent,” she said. “A lot of apartments aren’t including heat in the rent, sometimes not even water. It’s just preposterous because our communities are suffering.”

And renters who are lucky enough to receive Housing Choice Vouchers struggle to use them, in spite of anti-discrimination laws.

“As I comb through countless ads on Craigslist and Trulia, there are landlords openly saying they don’t accept Section 8 vouchers,” she said.

Comer said although the tactics to maintain segregated spaces may change, the goal has not.

“Without a doubt, some of the same things are arising in different areas, whether it be discriminatory policies in appraisals, zoning, (and) the new efforts of gentrification are happening,” he said.

The Redress Movement has bigger goals

The impact of segregation goes far beyond housing, according to Comer.

“It allowed for under-resourcing to happen, for over-policing to happen, for so many different things that come from poverty and segregation,” he said.

The ultimate goal of the movement is to mobilize residents and public officials to reduce housing inequities.

Other cities have made attempts at this, particularly through alternative models of homeownership. Cooperative housing, known as co-ops, involve a corporation or group that owns real estate and its shareholders are the residents who pay to live there.

In the Bronx of New York, “Co-op City” was developed in 1968, and it is one of the largest in the country with more than 15,000 residential units and 50,000 residents. The co-op features its own power plant, garbage pick-up, public safety department and even a newspaper. Even in Milwaukee, community land trusts are being explored, which involve a trust permanently acquiring and owning land as prospective homeowners leasing it and receiving a small share of the increased property value.

Taylor said these styles of ownership represent a more sustainable workaround for the exclusivity and unaffordability of high-opportunity neighborhoods.

“We have to look at cooperative housing, limited equity dividend housing and creating greater levels of ownership over the land inside of these communities,” he said. “(We need) a common space that is publicly owned but controlled by the people not city. We have to fight to establish affordable housing units in these exclusive suburban areas.”

Comer said he wants the movement to last beyond housing.

“If we were to connect the dots on how we got to certain social ills and certain levels, it all kind of runs back into historic times and the dungeons of segregation,” he said. “People have to open themselves to redressing these issues also in order to address the current issues because it’s all connected.”

Taylor said his research has shown the best outcome involves racial/ethnic and class integration.

“I’m opposed to all of these forms of rigid income segregation that are also, by their nature, racially segregation,” he said. “What we’re talking about is class and race inclusive groups, where low-income groups and high-income groups can be together.”

Talis Shelbourne is an investigative solutions reporter covering the issues of affordable housing, environment and equity issues. Have a tip? You can reach Talis at (414) 403-6651 or tshelbourn@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @talisseer and message her on Facebook at @talisseer.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Story mapping of Milwaukee a first step for the national Redress Movement