The battle of Milwaukee.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: 'Lessons from the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-'Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City' - Book review

Lessons from the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City

By Barbara J. Miner

The New Press. 305 pages. $2Z95.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a microcosm of America's social problems. Racism, poverty, deindustrialization, crime, and the rightwing's aggressive attempt to privatize our public schools all play out in this city that once elected a string of socialist mayors.

No journalist knows Milwaukee and the issues that swirl around it better than Barbara Miner, an occasional writer for The Progressive who worked for many years at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Rethinking Schools. In this book, she does for Milwaukee what J. Anthony Lukas did for Boston in his classic book, Common Ground. She humanizes the issues even as she offers a panoramic sweep of the city's history and tensions.

For thirty years, I've lived just eighty miles from Milwaukee, and I've visited it many times, but I've never had a grasp of the city like I do now, thanks to Miner's magnificent work.

Milwaukee today is a city in decay. And for African Americans, it is a city in despair. It ranks worst in the nation for black joblessness and illiteracy. And it is the most segregated city in the country.

It was not always thus.

"A half century earlier, in the 1950s, Milwaukee was a symbol of industrial power and a promised land of family-supporting jobs," Miner writes. African Americans came up from the South at the tail end of the Great Migration and found well-paying jobs in the factories that so defined the city.

Racism was prevalent, of course. Even Hank Aaron, the great slugger for the Milwaukee Braves, was hassled when he bought his home in an upscale suburb, Miner tells us. And his younger sister was taunted so relentlessly in the public schools that she went back home to Mobile, Alabama.

Miner vividly chronicles the civil rights movement in Milwaukee, which centered initially on desegregating the schools. The Milwaukee school board's answer was "intact busing," where black students were bused to predominantly white schools but not vice versa. Once the black students got to the white schools, they were "taken to separate, self-contained classrooms," Miner notes. "In most cases, they would also have a separate recess period. At lunchtime, they would be bused back to their original school, fed lunch, and then bused once more to the white school."

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Not surprisingly, black Milwaukeeans found this degrading. And...