🌊 Roca Visits America's Most Segregated City

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Ed Hennings didn’t intend to become a murderer when we went out on his Milwaukee block. And after he pulled the trigger, he didn’t think he’d ever be free again.

With some 500,000 people, Milwaukee – Wisconsin’s largest city – is repeatedly found to be one of the US’ most segregated cities. Studies by the Brookings Institution and Brown University have found it’s one of the cities where whites are most likely to live with whites, blacks with blacks, and Hispanics with Hispanics.

The typical explanation attributes this to two things – redlining and white flight – but our trip made clear that this is only half of the story.

Redlining dates to the Great Depression, when the federal government was seeking to stem home foreclosures. To help banks refinance mortgages, it created maps that outlined areas by financial risk, with green-coded areas being the safest investments and red-coded being the riskiest. The “green” areas were overwhelmingly white; the “red” ones – “hazardous for investment” – mostly black. Investment and mortgages went to the green/white areas, making them better, while the red/black ones were neglected. The trends entrenched divisions between the communities.

Then white flight: In 1967, race riots broke out in Milwaukee, forcing the deployment of the National Guard. That precipitated an exodus of white people and businesses to the suburbs, further exacerbating divisions and poverty.

Yet redlining and white flight are only half of the story, as our visit made clear. And it’s the other half that explains why polls suggest Trump’s appeal is growing in America’s inner cities.

60 years ago, despite relining and other policies, inner-city areas were relatively prosperous.

Ed Hennings – a felon, entrepreneur, and activist from Milwaukee’s roughest area – told us that the reason inner cities like Milwaukee were black in the first place was because of the Great Migration, when millions of blacks in the south “moved to Milwaukee and midwestern cities because of the manufacturing boom.”

“That gave them a better quality of life from the south,” said Hennings. Milwaukee provided “economical advantages…There was a company called A.O. Smith. There was a company called Briggs & Stratton. Alice Chalmers. Miller Brewing Company. They were hiring left and right. They were booming.”

“And then it left. That was the late 80s, early 90s. All of those different industries and manufacturing companies left. And that's what left the city kind of crippled in the inner city. And we have yet to replace the economy.”

When you cross into parts of north and west Milwaukee, the landscape becomes desolate: There are few businesses that aren’t corner stores or liquor stores, buildings are shuttered, and houses are dilapidated. Few people are outside. We heard gunshots in the distance.

Hennings said that most people in such neighborhoods have no idea what life is like outside of it, even in the suburbs just a few miles away. He says this lack of perspective and poverty breeds violence. And he would know: He murdered a man at age 24.

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