REINVENTING MILWAUKEE: DNC host city is struggling with COVID-19, systemic racism, and its own past.

• Author: Holmes, Isiah
• Position: On Wisonsin

Growing up on Milwaukee's north side, David Bowen was always aware of the inequality inside one of Americas most segregated cities.

"It was very clear that suburban schools were being invested in much more than the [Milwaukee Public Schools] I attended," says Bowen, now a Democratic state representative. While Bowen feels the schools he went to were "amazing," he saw that "resources were given to those suburban schools much more."

Bowen would get up early in the morning and take a bus to the school he had transferred to in another corner of the city. As he remembers, "You literally see all the demographics of the bus change depending on what side of town it drives on."

While the Democratic National Convention, which is set to take place in Milwaukee from August 17 through 20, will not be anywhere near the scale of prior presidential nominating conventions, it is still bringing attention to Wisconsin's largest city (population: 585,589). And that's a good thing, because of both what Milwaukee represents and what it needs.

Milwaukee's slice of the Black Lives Matter movement is one of the nation's longest-running protests. It began on May 29 and daily protests were still occurring as this issue went to press in late July. There are strong constituencies for progressive politics throughout Wisconsin. And yet the Badger State went red in the 2016 presidential election, with a decline in the Black vote being a factor in Donald Trump's win.

Milwaukee County, with around 950,000 residents, is home to 240,000 African Americans, or 69 percent of the state's Black population, highly concentrated in the city of Milwaukee. Only about 8 percent of the county's African American population live outside of the city's limits.

Like Bowen, Mandela Barnes grew up on Milwaukee's predominantly African American north side. One of the first things he noticed as a kid was the very distinct experiences some of his friends had, depending on whether they lived in the inner city or surrounding communities. "It was like a night and day difference," says Barnes, now Wisconsin's lieutenant governor. "So the segregation's real on so many levels.

Whether it's where people live, or what people have access to."

In many ways, Milwaukee's neighborhoods are still sectioned off according to ethnicity, with African Americans living on the north side, and Latinx residents on the south side. College kids and young adults populate the east side, near Lake Michigan. Heading west, the communities get whiter, the roads get smoother, and the luxuries of upper-middle-class suburbia become more apparent.

Yet while they live in distinct areas, Milwaukee's racial minorities have much in common.

"So much of the problems that the African American community are facing are shared by the Latino community," says Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera.

Like the city's African American community, Latinx Milwaukeeans often find themselves confined to areas which are nearly mono-ethnic, including "a really high number that are working-poor communities," Neumann-Ortiz says. "So you have a lot of youth who depend on school support for food. You also have the same...