Again and again, Milwaukee has protested police brutality and racist policies. What legacy will these marchers leave?

Milwaukee has been here before. This time, the question is: Will these protests lead to lasting change?

Four years ago, the city's Sherman Park neighborhood erupted in three nights of violent unrest after a fatal police shooting. 

Fifty-some years earlier, a riot sparked 200 nights of marches demanding an end to housing discrimination.

The underlying factors — systemic racism, inequality, troubled police-community relations — remain the same. In recent months, they have been compounded by a pandemic that is sickening and killing African Americans and Latinos at a disproportionate rate, laying bare health and economic disparities.

This time, though, the catalyst was a death at the hands of police in Minneapolis, a death that has outraged Americans of all races.

In Milwaukee, one of the most segregated regions in the country, thousands of protesters, diverse in age and race, have joined together to march for hours, traversing more than 10 miles each day, calling for justice for George Floyd and others killed by police around the country. Over four days, they have called to people peering out of windows and standing on front porches to walk with them, and many did.

The city's mayor and police chief have commended the thousands who marched peacefully and condemned Floyd's killing in Minneapolis last week, while drawing a sharp distinction with those responsible for the rioting, arson and looting at night.

In Sherman Park, the problems that were festering remain, said Reggie Jackson, a historian and diversity trainer who lives in the neighborhood.

"I tell people all the time these issues are so difficult because these are such longstanding, systemic issues, institution issues that are embedded in the way we do things," he said. "You cannot resolve this very easily."

Tito Izard is a family physician and president and chief executive of Milwaukee Health Services Inc. located on North King Drive. A Dumpster and other items were set ablaze near his clinic Sunday night. Several community leaders doused the flames with water, he said. 

Nothing will change, he said, until Americans descended from slavery become first-class citizens.

"When we talk about things getting better, nothing has significantly gotten better in four years," he said. "It hasn’t gotten better, ever." 

Will history repeat itself?

Looking back, longtime civil rights leaders and historians saw parallels between the 2016 Sherman Park unrest and the 1967 riot and fair housing marches. They worried that without a citywide reckoning, the root problems would persist — and they were right.

“None of this is happening in a vacuum,” said Reggie Moore, director of the Milwaukee Health Department's Office of Violence Prevention. “This is not happening in isolation geographically or even as a black community."

After the 1967 marches, Milwaukee passed one of the strongest fair housing ordinances in the country. Yet the region remains among the most segregated in America.

For decades, Milwaukee activists have pushed for equal educational opportunities, from busing to the school choice movement. Yet Wisconsin still has the worst gap between black and white academic success of any state.

Milwaukee once provided family-supporting jobs to African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South. Yet today, nearly half the city's African American children live below the poverty line. 

Milwaukee marches against police brutality have led to changes in state law, new training for police and widespread use of body cameras. Yet protesters still march with signs demanding “killer cops” be jailed and chant the names of individuals killed by police officers, on and off duty, in recent years.

"Unfortunately system-level violence against communities of color is as old as this country, and it’s important to understand that the pain and frustration is cumulative and not specifically situational to this one incident," Moore said.

What makes this moment different?

Both the Sherman Park unrest and this week's protests stemmed from the killing of black men by police. But the response has been decidedly different this time.

“What we witnessed in Minneapolis was one of the most reprehensible acts and shows the depths of man’s inhumanity to man,” said Milwaukee County Sheriff Earnell Lucas. “We’ve heard the people speak, and they want change. They want meaningful change. And now it’s time for all of us, for the business community, for elected officials, to make that change.”

As they were during the civil rights era, this spring’s events have been preceded by a slow build. The Sherman Park unrest was part of that, as were the protests of police killings in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore in 2014 and 2015. 

In 2020, Black Lives Matter has become a national and international movement, reaching from Fargo to Wausau, Salt Lake City to Green Bay. With the rise of cellphone cameras, live streams and social media, white Americans have witnessed, over and over, the injustices experienced by African Americans every day.

“I think it has led to the emotions of so many Americans coalescing for the first time around the anger of these unarmed black people being killed by police for no apparent reason and how unnecessary it is,” Jackson said.

In Milwaukee and elsewhere, white protesters have carried signs reading "White silence = violence" and organizers have challenged those participants to do more as allies.

“White people, I’m talking to you,” Angela Harris, chair of the Black Educators Caucus, said during a protest in front of Mayor Tom Barrett's house last weekend.

"We walk in the streets, we march, we chant, we wear our Black Lives Matter shirts," she said. "And still, black boys, girls, men and women are killed every single day, and that’s because you all are not having the tough conversations with your family members and your friends.”

Across the nation, government leaders and philanthropists have begun to discuss racism in new ways. Milwaukee County declared it a public health crisis last year. The president of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, Ellen M. Gilligan, who is white, reiterated that characterization in an opinion column earlier this week.

"Racism is our nation’s oldest sin and most vile disease," she wrote. "There are no excuses, and there can be no more delays. We need to eradicate the systemic racism that withholds wellness and power from people of color and keeps our entire region from truly thriving."

County Executive David Crowley, 34, is among a new generation of area leaders. Recently elected Milwaukee County’s first African American county executive, he grew up in the city’s 53206 ZIP code and experienced some of the area’s hardships, including multiple evictions, firsthand.

“Whether we're talking about gerrymandering, whether we’re talking about criminal justice reform, whether we talk about education or income inequality, this is the time to really be having those tough conversations about the policy changes that we absolutely need to have in order for folks to feel like that they're in this together,” he said.

Moving forward

The only way to ensure things are different this time — that real change happens — is for people of all races to hold elected officials and institutions accountable, community leaders said.

“People are grieving and their actions show it,” said Dakota Hall, executive director of the nonprofit Leaders Igniting Transformation.

“Milwaukee is ranked the worst place for black Americans, essentially the lack of equity in health, wealth and education is destroying black lives, so we must condemn the destruction of black lives as loud as some want to condemn the destruction of property."

In Milwaukee, valuing black lives means putting not only energy but also money behind plans that have been developed before and after the Sherman Park unrest, according to Markasa Tucker, director of the African American Roundtable.

"We want investment back in the community. People want to live, they want to thrive," she said. "We want the elected officials to do their job."

Her organization, along with the ACLU and more than 50 community groups, is calling for $75 million to be taken from the Police Department’s budget and put into public health and affordable housing.

They also demanded the firing of the Milwaukee police officer charged with reckless homicide in the death of Joel Acevedo and the immediate appointment of a diverse group of residents to a new city committee tasked with police reform.

That committee also will help oversee changes required by a settlement in a stop-and-frisk lawsuit filed by the ACLU.

Crowley was one of the plaintiffs in that suit. In it, he relayed an incident in which police drew their weapons on him and a friend and searched them without their consent.

As a result, he can understand where protesters’ anger and distress are coming from, he said. He believes this is the time to harness those emotions for action.

“That’s one of the reasons why people need to get out and vote in November,” he said. “Carrying the same energy, channeling this to absolutely change the policies out there is what we need to be focusing on. This is the time to really be having those tough conversations about the policy changes that we absolutely need to have in order for folks to feel like that they're in this together.”

Rory Linnane and Jordyn Noenning of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.