Bronzeville: Built Inside a Cage, Then Bulldozed

When Black Southerners rode the Illinois Central Railroad north to Milwaukee during the First World War and after, they arrived in a city that had already decided where they could live. Ninety percent of Milwaukee's residential subdivisions carried racial covenant restrictions prohibiting the sale or rental of property to people of color. The housing they could legally access occupied a small band of the Near North Side. They were enclosed by law before they unpacked their bags.

Within that enclosure, something remarkable happened. The neighborhood centered on Walnut Street, just north of downtown, became Bronzeville, a name borrowed from Chicago and applied to Milwaukee's equivalent. By the nineteen thirties and forties, Walnut Street had Black-owned banks, law offices, newspapers, barbershops, funeral parlors, and hotels. The jazz clubs along the street were black and tan, meaning they accepted white patrons. White Milwaukeeans crossed the line to hear the music that Black Milwaukee was making because the music was that good.

The community's boundaries were the result of exclusion. Its vibrancy was its own.

Then came urban renewal. Congress passed the Housing Act of nineteen forty-nine and cities across the country designated blighted neighborhoods for clearance. Milwaukee targeted Bronzeville. Simultaneously, Interstate Forty-Three was routed directly through the neighborhood. Between nineteen sixty and nineteen seventy-one, the city demolished more than twenty thousand homes. Walnut Street as a commercial district was effectively eliminated.

Former Mayor John Norquist told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in nineteen ninety-eight: Urban renewal was really urban destruction. It did damage beyond just the economic damage.

The community scattered. The institutions did not reassemble. America's Black Holocaust Museum, which stands today on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, is one of the few remaining anchors of what Bronzeville was. It is worth stopping.