Lessons from the Heartland

A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City

Barbara J. Miner

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781595588647
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Politique d'éducation

"Miner's story of Milwaukee is filled with memorable characters... explores with consummate skill the dynamics of race, politics, and schools in our time." —Mike Rose, author of The Mind at Work Weaving together the racially fraught history of public education in Milwaukee and the broader story of hypersegregation in the rust belt, Lessons from the Heartland tells of a city's fall from grace—and its chance for redemption in the twenty-first century. A symbol of middle American working-class values, Wisconsin—and in particular urban Milwaukee—has been at the forefront of a half century of public education experiments, from desegregation and "school choice" to vouchers and charter schools. This book offers a sweeping narrative portrait of an all-American city at the epicenter of public education reform, and an exploration of larger issues of race and class in our democracy. The author, a former Milwaukee Journal reporter whose daughters went through the public school system, explores the intricate ways that jobs, housing, and schools intersect, underscoring the intrinsic link between the future of public schools and the dreams and hopes of democracy in a multicultural society. "A social history with the pulse and pace of a carefully crafted novel and a Dickensian cast of unforgettable characters. With the eye of an ethnographer, the instincts of a beat reporter, and the heart of a devoted mother and citizen activist, Miner has created a compelling portrait of a city, a time, and a people on the edge. This is essential reading." —Bill Ayers, author of Teaching Toward Freedom "Eloquently captures the narratives of schoolchildren, parents, and teachers." — Library Journal

Part I

Segregation, Prosperity, and Protests:
1950s and 1960s

1.

THE GLORY DAYS OF 1957

Glory days, well, they’ll pass you by

Glory days, in the wink of a young girl’s eye

Glory days, glory days

—Bruce Springsteen, “Glory Days”

Henry Aaron was well established as a baseball legend when, at the age of forty, he beat Babe Ruth’s career home run record on April 8, 1974, and reached what some consider the pinnacle of accomplishment. But it is 1957 that Aaron recalls as his most memorable year. Just twenty-three years old at the time, he helped the Milwaukee Braves win the National League pennant and go on to defeat the seemingly invincible Yankees and capture the 1957 World Series. His lightning-fast wrists, impeccable eyesight, and ability to understand pitchers were in top form that year. Even Casey Stengel, manager of the New York Yankees, was forced to admit so—especially after game four of the World Series at Milwaukee’s County Stadium.

With temperatures in the fifties, gusty winds were blowing off Lake Michigan on that Sunday. It was the fourth inning and the Yankees had led 1–0 since the first inning. But suddenly they were in trouble: there was a walk, then a double by Milwaukee’s ever-popular third baseman, Eddie Mathews. Henry Aaron stepped up to the plate. Yankee pitcher Tom Sturdivant, knowing Aaron’s ability, wanted to walk him. Stengel disagreed. “No, pitch to him,” Stengel said during a huddle at the pitcher’s mound. “With this wind, Babe Ruth couldn’t get one out of here.”

Sturdivant did as he was told, and Aaron hit a three-run homer. By the inning’s end, the Braves were ahead 4–1, winning the game 7–5. The Yankees, who had hoped to wrap up a third win and destroy the Braves’ confidence, instead found the series even at two games apiece. Sturdivant entered the dugout after that fourth inning and said to Stengel, “I thought you said Babe Ruth couldn’t get one out of here.” To which Stengel reportedly replied, “Well, that wasn’t Babe Ruth you were facing.”¹

It was the pennant race, however, where Aaron found the most glory, with an extra-innings homer that clinched the pennant for a city not yet fully accustomed to playing in the major leagues. Time magazine explained Aaron’s feat by referencing the Israelites’ journey into the Promised Land. Quoting from Exodus 8:17, Time wrote: “For Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod, and smote the dust of the earth.”²

In his autobiography, Aaron recalls both the World Series and being named Most Valuable Player of the National League that year: “All of those things made 1957 the best year of my baseball life, and it went along with the best year of baseball that any city ever had. It doesn’t get any better than Milwaukee in 1957.”

A surprising number of Milwaukeeans, even today, would agree with that assessment. Beneath the surface of 1957, however, two separate and unequal realities existed—as Aaron himself realized.

The morning after his home run won the pennant, the Milwaukee Sentinel printed a front-page photo of Aaron being carried off the field by his jubilant teammates, under a banner headline: “We’re the Champs! Bring on the Yankees.” To the left of that photo, relegated to second-place coverage, a modest headline noted: “I’ll Send U.S. Army, Ike Warns.” In Little Rock, Arkansas, white mobs were beating on black students attempting to integrate Central High School.³

In his autobiography, I Had a Hammer, Aaron speaks of his conflicted feelings on seeing that day’s newspaper. “The morning after, there was a picture in the paper of me on the shoulders of my teammates,” he writes. “Most of them, naturally, were white. On the same front page was a picture of a riot in Little Rock, Arkansas. It seemed that Little Rock, like much of the South, wasn’t leaping into the spirit of Brown vs. Board of Education.”⁴

Little Rock became a symbol of southern resistance to school desegregation. Its historical significance was amplified by the media attention that zoomed in on what was a little-known southern city, foreshadowing the nonstop news cycles of the future. With a population of just over 100,000 people in 1957, Little Rock was a small city that became a big story.

Ernest Green never considered Little Rock, Arkansas, as part of the Deep South, where opposition to desegregation was the strongest and not a single black student attended school with whites during the 1955 school year.⁵ When Green was a junior in the spring of 1957, he put his name in as a student interested in integrating Central. He didn’t anticipate the raw racism that would greet him the following September. After all, he recounts, “the year before we went to Central, both the city buses in Little Rock and the public libraries were integrated without any problems.”⁶

Although he attended the all-black high school Horace Mann, Green was familiar with Central. Horace Mann students often got Central’s hand-me-down textbooks, with the names of the students still inside. He knew that the all-white Central had better facilities, a better curriculum, and better science labs. Shortly before school started he was told he wouldn’t be able to be in the band, play football, or go to the prom. But he figured helping to integrate Central was more important than continuing to play tenor sax, as he had done for five years.

Green, the only senior among the black students who came to be known as the Little Rock Nine, never made it to Central on the first day of school. The night before, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus warned that “blood will run in the streets” if black students entered Central. When the school doors opened on September 4, 1957, troops from the state’s National Guard were on hand—not to protect the nine black students but to stand guard, bayonets and all, to keep them out.⁷

Faubus had thrown down the gauntlet. He made clear he was not about to obey the U.S. Supreme Court and its decision three years earlier in Brown v. Board that separate schools were inherently unequal and violated the U.S. Constitution. And he was backing up his defiance with National Guard troops under his command.

The drama of the Little Rock Nine seized the nation’s attention. “The prolonged duration and the military drama of the siege made Little Rock the first on-site news extravaganza of the modern television era,” Taylor Branch writes in his seminal work, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63.⁸ There were important legal issues as well. Faubus was using armed forces to oppose the federal government, creating what some considered the most severe test of the Constitution since the Civil War.⁹

President Dwight Eisenhower, never a strong supporter of civil rights, hemmed and hawed. For weeks the crisis went unresolved. On September 23, Faubus seemed to comply with White House demands and withdrew the National Guard—only to leave the Little Rock Nine at the mercy of white mobs. “By mid-morning,” Branch writes, “angry whites had beaten at least two Negro reporters, broken many of the schools’ windows and doors, and come so close to capturing the Negro students that the Little Rock police evacuated them in desperation.”¹⁰

Eisenhower was furious. A military man, he decided to send in his own troops, and enough of them to crush any thought of defiance. Forget U.S. marshals, he told the Pentagon. Call up riot-trained units of the 101st Airborne Division. By the end of the day, fifty-two planeloads had brought more than one thousand federal paratroopers to Little Rock.¹¹ The next morning, the Little Rock Nine were transported via military convoy to Central High and protected by federal troops. Once inside, the paratroopers transferred the nine students to military personnel who would accompany each student to their classroom so that they were never alone.

The troops were gradually withdrawn, and by the second semester they were gone. For Green, those were the roughest months, as hostility from white students increased. That spring, he became the first black ever to graduate from Central. During the graduation ceremony, he had a space on both sides of him inside the auditorium “because nobody wanted to sit next to me.”¹²

History, however, embraced the Little Rock Nine, and they became a beacon of courage for generations to come. It was a young senator from Illinois who acknowledged his debt to the nine on the fiftieth anniversary of Little Rock, saying: “They proved that Brown could work, signaling the beginning of the end of Jim Crow, and making a life of hope and opportunity possible for someone like me.”¹³ Barack Obama again recognized his gratitude in January 2009, inviting the Little Rock Nine to Washington for the inauguration of the first African American as president of the United States.

At the time of the Little Rock crisis, Milwaukee media coverage was overshadowed by what was deemed a more important event: the World Series. After all, Little Rock was a faraway place, a minor-league town somewhere down south.

Located on the shores of Lake Michigan in a state known for its lush farmlands and bucolic landscape, Milwaukee has always been a blue-collar city. If you had the good fortune in the 1950s to be on the top floor of one of downtown’s tall buildings (what remains the tallest skyscraper, at forty-two stories, was not built until 1973), to the east was a never-ending line of blue water. City residents bragged Lake Michigan was better than the ocean because it was fresh water. In all other directions, the skyline would have been dominated by symbols of the city’s foundational institutions—the belching smoke of factories, well-maintained multistory schools, and church steeples reaching to the heavens. Nearby would have been another Milwaukee trademark, the neighborhood tavern, where the typical order was a draft beer and a shot of bourbon.

The population of Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city, has hovered around 600,000 in recent decades. For generations, the city has lived in the shadow of Chicago, ninety miles to the south. As a result, Milwaukee has developed a personality that both resents and boasts of its image as a small-town big city. Spend a day strolling along Milwaukee’s lakefront or go to one of its many summer festivals where strangers may treat you as a long-lost friend, and the small-town description is easy to understand. But it has always been difficult for Milwaukee to claim that it is a big city able to compete with the big boys. Over the years, Milwaukee has consistently resorted to one surefire way to bolster its big-city ambitions: host a major-league baseball team.

Milwaukee briefly had such a team, back in 1901, known as the Milwaukee Brewers (a name also used by the city’s current National League team). But that moment of glory didn’t last, and after one season the team moved to St. Louis. For the next fifty years, the city’s team was still called the Milwaukee Brewers, but it was a minor-league team. Which meant that Milwaukee was a minor-league town. It stung. The term “minor-league” became an enduring source of shame, hauled out by critics to describe not just Milwaukee’s status as a baseball town, but also the city’s shortcomings in every imaginable sphere.

Even Cleveland and St. Louis were major-league towns. But not Milwaukee. “It was fun to go to Borchert Field on a hot afternoon and sit on the wooden bleachers, pulling out splinters and drinking beer and yelling for the Brewers,” Robert W. Wells recounts in his book This Is Milwaukee. “But when the game was over, Milwaukee was still in the minor leagues.”¹⁴

In the 1950s, Major League Baseball mirrored the nation’s mood and was eager to expand. Although no team had relocated since 1903, Milwaukee believed that its fantasy of a major-league team could become a reality. The city had such faith that in 1950 it decided to build Milwaukee County Stadium, three years before it was even sure it could woo a major-league team. “The decision to build County Stadium was a staggering leap of faith for a community that no one has ever mistaken for impetuous,” notes historian John Gurda in his book The Making of Milwaukee.¹⁵

With a stadium in place, deals and dreams were bandied about. On Thursday, March 19, 1953, it all came together: league owners okayed the transfer of the Boston Braves to Milwaukee. At the time, the Boston Braves were playing a spring training game in Bradenton, Florida. It was the fifth inning, the game more than half over. Sud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Milwaukee, Public Schools, and the Fight for America’s Future
• Part I. Segregation, Prosperity, and Protests: 1950s and 1960s
• Part II. Desegregation, Deindustrialization, and Backlash: 1970s and 1980s
• Part III. Resegregation, Abandonment, and a New Era of Protest: 1990s and 2000s
• Notes
• Index