Highlights Archives
Discover Milwaukee's Bronzeville
Join cultural anthropologist Ivory Abena Black on Tuesday, February 6, at 12:15 p.m. at the Wisconsin Historical Museum, for an eye-pleasing journey through Milwaukee's Bronzeville neighborhood when she discusses her book Bronzeville: A Milwaukee Lifestyle. Bronzeville, bordered by State Street, North Avenue, 3rd and 12th streets, became a vibrant African American neighborhood, enlivened by night clubs, restaurants, and social centers focused on family and community building in a starkly segregated city. The African Americans who came to Milwaukee in search of employment and better living conditions created a city within a city in Bronzeville that thrived as a business, economic and cultural center for many African American residents between the early 1900s and the 1960s.
African Americans have lived in Wisconsin since before statehood, but their numbers remained relatively small until the 1940s. Wisconsin, unlike many of its surrounding states, did not experience the sizable interwar migration from the South due primarily to the nature of its economy. Wisconsin's agricultural and skilled manufacturing jobs did not offer many opportunities to African Americans.
Labor shortages during World War II improved the economic situation for African Americans, and between 1940 and 1960 Wisconsin's African American population increased nearly 600 percent. Drawn to jobs in industrial cities during the war, many African Americans stayed to raise their families. Wisconsin's black population remained extraordinarily concentrated in a few urban areas, with nearly 90 percent living in Milwaukee, Beloit, Madison, Racine and Kenosha. Even in these cities, it was possible for most white people to have little contact with African Americans due to restrictive racial covenants and local custom.
The name "Bronzeville" was not specific to Milwaukee, but was a generic name applied to any area of a city populated primarily by blacks. Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit also have Bronzevilles. Milwaukee's Bronzeville was not just an African American neighborhood, however. Germans, Jews and Italians also lived there. Bronzeville's heyday lasted until the 1950s and 1960s, when city plans to rid urban blight cleared many buildings for revitalization and the construction of the freeway I-43 cut directly across the neighborhood, eliminating thousands of homes and destroying the heart of the community.
Learn more about African Americans in Wisconsin:
:: Posted February 2, 2007
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