A view from outside
Same view as from the inside. It's just that foreign newspapers can just say it without nasty letters coming in.
A promise not kept
In 1954, the US supreme court outlawed segregated schools in a landmark case that gave rise to the civil rights movement. Fifty years on, Gary Younge visits Milwaukee, the most divided city in the US, to examine its legacy
Saturday May 15, 2004
The Guardian
Where Martin Luther King Drive meets Brown Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, things suddenly get dark. Not dark as in bleak, but dark as in skin. Heading north, past one of the city's three black newspapers and the country's only Black Holocaust museum, the only white faces you see for miles are the handful who stop to fill up their cars. And then, as quickly as they vanished, they will reappear as you approach deepest suburbia, a place called River Hills.
"It's like a foreign country to most whites," says Dennis Conta, 64, a public policy consultant and former state legislator, who is white, referring to the city's north side. "Most whites have never been in those neighbourhoods. They don't need to. With the freeways, they can just drive right past. You could spend three hours walking the streets before you saw any white people there, if you saw any at all."
Turn your car around, heading south towards the city centre and the huge sign for Usinger's sausages, and things lighten up. Not light as in mood, but light as in skin. At Walnut, a few streets down from Brown, Martin Luther King Drive disappears, changing its name to Old World Street. "White people weren't at all ashamed or embarrassed to say, 'We don't want this part of the street to be named after Martin Luther King,'" says Carla Allison, who runs People's Choice, a black bookshop on the street. White people visit the shop occasionally, she says. "Usually, it's a student who's required to read a book for class or a white person who's got a black friend."
