Freedom Road: Katrina: Two Years Later, the Tragedy Continues

"The Selma of the North": Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee

Between 1958 and 1970, a distinctive movement for racial justice emerged from unique circumstances in Milwaukee. A series of local leaders inspired growing numbers of people to participate in campaigns against employment and housing discrimination, segregated public schools, the membership of public officials in discriminatory organizations, welfare cuts, and police brutality.

The Milwaukee movement culminated in the dramatic—and sometimes violent—1967 open housing campaign. A white Catholic priest, James Groppi, led the NAACP Youth Council and Commandos in a militant struggle that lasted for 200 consecutive nights and provoked the ire of thousands of white residents. After working-class mobs attacked demonstrators, some called Milwaukee “the Selma of the North.” Others believed the housing campaign represented the last stand for a nonviolent, interracial, church-based movement.

Patrick Jones tells a powerful and dramatic story that is important for its insights into civil rights history: the debate over nonviolence and armed self-defense, the meaning of Black Power, the relationship between local and national movements, and the dynamic between southern and northern activism. Jones offers a valuable contribution to movement history in the urban North that also adds a vital piece to the national story.

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Blurbs:

Think you know the full story of the civil rights era? Patrick Jones's masterful study of the movement in Milwaukee will make you think again. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, The Selma of the North provides a devastating rebuttal of many of the conventional narratives of the civil rights movement. Here a vibrant nonviolent movement in the de-industrializing Midwest grows into a Black Power movement led by urban youth and a white Catholic priest who use confrontational direct action to lay bare the fissures of racial inequality in the 'liberal' North.
--Jeanne Theoharis, Brooklyn College, editor of Freedom North and Groundwork

A well-researched, well-written, and important history. Based on a rich array of sources, this book enhances our understanding of civil rights activism in the postwar urban North and establishes a useful foundation for the comparison of similar developments elsewhere in the country.
--Joe William Trotter, Jr., Carnegie Mellon University, author of Black Milwaukee

This book fills a serious gap in the literature of the civil rights revolution, joining studies on other cities in laying the groundwork on race and civil rights in the postwar urban North. Jones tells a good story, capturing events that might otherwise be lost to history.
--Arnold R. Hirsch, University of New Orleans, author of Making the Second Ghetto

The Selma of the North is an insightful and invigorating addition to the growing literature on black freedom struggles outside of the South. Jones's important and informative account writes Milwaukee back into the narrative of the civil rights-Black Power era and in the process expands our understanding of postwar America.
--Peniel E. Joseph, Brandeis University, author of Waiting Till the Midnight Hour

The Selma of the North is a riveting new story of the civil rights movement in America, a tale on par with Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery in its power and importance. Jones's magisterial research and magnetic prose illuminate the untold story of the battle for the urban north in the 1960s, a battle that shows how race has always been the Achilles heel of white progressives. This story transcends easy dichotomies of black and white, North and South, radical and reformist. How did a group called 'the Commandos' define nonviolence? How did a white Catholic priest become a 'Black Power' leader? If this is not a saga for the age of Obama, I don't know what is.
--Timothy B. Tyson, Duke University, author of Radio Free Dixie and Blood Done Sign My Name

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Katrina: Two Years Later, the Tragedy Continues

Well, here we are, two years after the worst natural disaster in American history. Two years after Hurricane Katrina killed roughly 2,000 people and forced the dirty little secret of race and poverty in American society into the mainstream consciousness, at least for a few weeks. And, here, two years later, the Gulf Coast remains devastated... and poverty runs rampant across the nation. This is the shame of our society, domestically.

Over the next few days I will be posting what I think are some good materials on Katrina during this anniversary period. I hope you will take some time to check them out and I hope we might all meditate deeply on the implications of this ongoing disaster for our nation... and give some thought to what we might do to make a more compassionate and just society.

I am starting with an essay by Earl Ofari Hutchinson because it focuses on poverty, which is by no means a regional issue. It is a national epidemic, yet there remains no political will to do anything about it. For a nation so wealthy, this is pathetic... and immoral. Remember after Katrina hit, there was all this blabbering by politicians, business leaders and other "important people" about a new "War on Poverty"? Nothing ever came of it. The money that was appropriated, like much of the money that was thrown at Iraq, was wasted, or mismanaged, or "disappeared" altogether.

I live in Nebraska. Omaha is home to the third poorest black community in the nation and the poorest for black children. A full 60% of all African American children in Omaha live in poverty! That is not a typo. Sixty percent! I grew up in Cleveland, one of the poorest cities in the country. About one third of all people in that city live in poverty. And on and on and on...

In the article, Hutchinson writes,

"They all missed the real story and tragedy of Katrina: the naked face of poverty that shocked the world two years ago remains just as naked and shameful two years later. And Bush and the Democrats are to blame for it...

"The national soul searching about attacking poverty has evaporated. The nearly $100 billion that Bush says his administration has shelled out to aid the recovery effort has either been wasted on showy and ineffectual redevelopment, public works reclamation and retrenching projects, inflated construction contracts, or has flat-out been 'misappropriated' (some would say 'stolen')."

Here is the full article:
Hutchinson, "After Katrina - Poverty Is Still America's Shame"

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"The Selma of the North": Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee

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Thursday, August 30, 2007

Katrina: Two Years Later, the Tragedy Continues

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