The rioting and unrest that followed the August 13 police shooting of Sylville Smith caught the eye of the country and proved to be a tipping point for Milwaukee’s long-simmering racial tensions. Coupled with the protests following the 2014 police killing of Dontre Hamilton, many have said that a bubbling over of the city’s Milwaukee’s racial tension has been a long time coming.
While the city’s race relations and persistent segregation come under the national media’s microscope, and precipitated think pieces from all over the country, a slew of locals have offered their own reactions, Others, like municipal court judge Derek Mosley, helped with the clean-up efforts. And tonight at 7:30 p.m., MPTV will air a special WUWM Lake Effect panel discussion featuring James Causey, Laura Marshall, Jarrett English, LaToya Dennis, and Reggie Jackson.
Jackson, the head docent at America’s Black Holocaust Museum and chairman of the Dr. James Cameron Legacy Foundation, published a piece in the Milwaukee Independent comparing the events of the weekend to the atmosphere of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Jackson explores specific reasons that might explain aspects of the violence in Sherman Park that included the burning of numerous businesses. And he discusses what should come next; namely, that “No downtrodden community in history has healed itself alone.”
To provide a contrast to what she thinks is the media’s relentless use of images of the fires set by rioters on Saturday, Northwestern Mutual’s Vice President of Corporate Communications Kimberley Crews Goode took to Facebook to publish photos of some of the Sherman Park neighborhood’s stately homes. “Families live there. Children play there,” she wrote. “Last night, some unfortunate events happened. The fires and vandalism were wrong. Today, people pulled together to begin to heal. The streets are cleaned. The burned buildings are boarded up.”
On Tuesday, a group of some of the city’s largest nonprofits met at the Milwaukee Bucks Foundation to discuss what can be done. “There was agreement that there needs to be some coordination and alignment to address the unrest, but I think it was a bit mixed in how we approach that,” Jerry Roberts, program officer at Bader Philanthropies, told the BizTimes. (During the approval process of securing hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds to build a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks, neighborhood advocacy group Common Ground argued that at least $150 million in public funds should go toward the improvement of inner city playgrounds and recreation areas, if the Bucks money was approved.)
Eugene Kane, former veteran columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, evokes the title of James Baldwin’s classic “The Fire Next Time,” in discussing the predictability and implications of the Sherman Park violence. He wrote the column for MilwaukeeMag.com.
Finally, the Milwaukee Catholic Archdiocese joined others praying for peace in the central city, when hundreds of Catholics, both African-American and white, gathered Thursday night at All Saints Catholic Church, 4051 N. 25th St., for a special Mass celebrated by five priests representing North Side parishes. The principal celebrant was Rev. Tim Kitzke, the Archdiocese’s vicar general for urban ministry. He told the faithful at the end of the Mass that church officials were committed to “springboard from prayer, where we should begin all things, to action.” You can read a profile of Kitzke in the September issue of Milwaukee Magazine.
