Milwaukee’s Long History of Race and Inequality
Last year, NPR tried to figure out why Milwaukee is so bad for black people. Earlier this year, the Toronto Star suggested that Milwaukee’s racial segregation makes it seem as though the city is stuck in the 1950s. And, just this week, Vox published an article arguing that this past weekend’s protests and violence were not the result of a single shooting but were instead one consequence of decades of racial segregation, discrimination, and inequalities.
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| NAACP Youth Council marches with Fr. James Groppi (MPL Historic Photo Collection) |
There are countless other articles and blog posts all over the internet about these and similar topics. Many of them are well-researched and thoughtful, but many likely are not. If you’d like to gain a deeper understanding of the context surrounding what has been happening in Milwaukee, take a look at the books listed below. They cover Milwaukee history, urban history more generally, African American history, and related topics.
- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
- City with a Chance: A Case History of Civil Rights Revolution by Frank A. Aukofer
- Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
- American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton
- The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee by Patrick D. Jones
- The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
- The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue
- Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North by Thomas J. Sugrue
- Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 by Joe William Trotter, Jr.
Submitted by Liz @ Central Library