Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

The Menominee River Valley cuts through the middle of the city and functions like its Mason-Dixon Line, dividing the predominantly black North Side from the predominantly white South Side. Milwaukeeans used to joke that the Sixteenth Street Viaduct, which stretches over the valley, was the longest bridge in the world because it connected Africa to Poland. The biggest effort to change that came in 1967, when two hundred demonstrators, almost all of them black, gathered at the north end of the viaduct and began walking to Poland to protest housing discrimination. As the marchers approached the south side of the bridge, they heard the crowd before they saw it. Chants of “Kill! Kill!” and “We want slaves!” rose up above the rock-and-roll music blasted from loudspeakers. Then the crowd appeared, a deep swell of white faces, upwards of 13,000 by some counts. Onlookers hurled bottles, rocks, piss, and spit down on the marchers. The black demonstrators marched; the white mob pulsed and seethed—and then something released, some invisible barrier fell, and the white onlookers lurched forward, crashing down on the marchers. That’s when the police fired the tear gas. The marchers returned the next night, and the night after that. They walked the Sixteenth Street Viaduct for two hundred consecutive nights. The city, then the nation, then the world took notice. Little changed. A 1967 New York Times editorial declared Milwaukee “America’s most segregated city.” A supermajority in both ho...