50 years after housing marches, faith communities continue to push for social justice

Seven years ago, the 2300 block of N. 46th St. in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood was practically in shambles. Houses were run down and in foreclosure or headed there. Several were vacant; some had been taken over by squatters.

Today, there is no sign of the blight that threatened the block. Most homes have been repaired and tidied; a few have been remodeled inside and out. New owners have moved in and property values are up.

The transformation of the block is the work of Southeastern Wisconsin Common Ground, a coalition of about 50 mostly faith-based organizations that forced a handful of billion-dollar banks to reinvest more than $30 million into a Milwaukee neighborhood that was all but gutted during the foreclosure crisis.

“While the city was drawing up a task force, we went after the banks that caused the problem,” said Bob Connolly, a longtime community organizer who founded the group in 2008. “We went to their shareholders' meetings. We went after their CEOs. … We went after their brands. ... And we made them do the right thing.”

Fifty Years after Fr. James Groppi, a Catholic priest, and the Milwaukee NAACP Youth Council led 200 nights of protests that pushed for an open housing law, people of faith continue to play a significant role in advocating for social and economic justice in Wisconsin. 

There is no central leader. No Groppi, or the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.

Still, activists continue to mobilize through their parishes and congregations; through interfaith coalitions; faith-based lobbying offices in Madison; and organizations such as Common Ground.

There have been incremental victories. But many at the forefront say the work is as arduous as ever, made increasingly difficult by the widening chasm between the rich and poor; deeply ingrained attitudes about race and class; and the growing polarization of Americans in their politics, in their neighborhoods and in the pews.

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"One thing that I'll say is ... this work is much, much, much longer term than most of us thought when we got involved," said David Liners, a former Catholic priest who heads WISDOM, a statewide network of 165 congregations, including those in MICAH, the Milwaukee Inner-City Congregations Allied for Hope.

"It's not just about enacting a few fair laws," said Liners. "It's about the deep, deep (racial) inequities that are built into our systems that need to be challenged. If you're not doing that ... then you're bailing out the ship with a teacup."

Power for the common good

Today, nearly a third of Milwaukee residents live in poverty, compared with 11% in 1970. And the city faces some of the worst racial disparities in the country, from health care and employment to education and incarceration.

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Over the same period, a tectonic shift in the religious landscape in Milwaukee and the nation left many faith communities unable or unwilling to address those issues beyond their vast charitable efforts.

Membership in mainline denominations has plummeted. Many congregations have closed, merged or left the central city for more affluent — and whiter — suburbs. Crises, such as the Catholic Church sex scandal, have diminished the moral authority of religious leaders. And many clergy are reluctant to address any issue that smacks of politics for fear of alienating people in the pews.

At the same time, the successes of the civil rights movement gave rise to organizations such as the NAACP and Urban League, which took the lead on issues of racial injustice. And the religious voice of the justice movements came increasingly from coalitions such as MICAH and Common Ground, which are part of national networks with expertise in community organizing.

"Because of the civil rights movement, the battle became more about politics and policy — and not just marching in the streets — and that becomes the sphere of specialized folks," said Lerone Martin, assistant professor of religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis.

SERIES: 50-Year Ache: How far has Milwaukee come since the 1967 civil rights marches?

Faith-based activists have won a number of victories in recent years, from increased funding for jobs programs and treatment alternatives to incarceration; to a $13.5 million settlement with the state that created special bus routes to take workers from the central city to jobs in the suburbs.

Among the most significant has been Common Ground’s efforts to hold accountable lenders that profited from the housing foreclosure crisis.

In addition to the $30 million the group secured from the banks in 2010, it helped the city get a $30 million commitment from Nationstar Mortgage in 2015 — at a time when Nationstar owner Wes Edens, who also co-owns the Milwaukee Bucks, was asking the city for a $47 million subsidy of its new $500 million arena.

It was the city that negotiated the deal. But it was Common Ground’s members who kept the pressure on Nationstar, publicly embarrassing Edens and at one point dropping off bags of trash from one of the firm's foreclosed properties at the Bucks’ offices.

Critics see some of the group's tactics as overly aggressive, but its leaders are unapologetic. Common Ground's national affiliate, the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation, is "really clear about building power organizations that go after big power,” said lead organizer Keisha Krumm.

"It's very focused on understanding power, using power and getting power for the common good."

How that translates into the lives of everyday people, members say, can be seen in the work of Milwaukee Rising, a limited liability company Common Ground founded with $1 million from the settlement with the banks. Milwaukee Rising buys, remodels and resells distressed properties and offers low-interest loans to homeowners for repairs.

In its five years, the group has renovated and resold 85 homes in the Sherman Park neighborhood, which has increased their assessed value from an average of $40,000 to about $100,000 and generated more than $200,000 in annual tax payments to the city.

“We went block to block,” said Frank Finch III of Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church and one of three Common Ground members who flew to San Francisco and Germany to speak at bank shareholder meetings. “And we didn’t leave until every house was addressed.”

One of the most high-profile issues on which faith groups have struggled to make progress has been in their efforts to slash the state's prison rolls, which hover around 22,000 and cost taxpayers more than $1.1 billion a year.

In 2011, WISDOM launched a campaign, supported by hundreds of clergy around the state, to cut prison rolls in half by 2015. It has had some incremental success, for example, a decline in the use of solitary confinement. But the target date has come and gone, and prison rates are rising.

Liners, who heads the group, attributes the lack of progress in part to the political polarization in Madison, where a single party, Republican, dominates the Legislature.

“When I first started in this work, some of the same issues we deal with today — criminal justice, transit, immigration —  they were never identified as partisan issues,” said Liners. “Today, it’s so hard not to be painted as partisan."

City-suburban match

That partisan landscape has inspired a new faith-based initiative aimed at building relationships between urban and suburban residents in hopes that they will together push lawmakers to address some of the systemic inequities that affect Wisconsin.

"One Community" is a collaboration between the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee and longtime community activist Mike Soika, a Catholic-turned-Quaker who previously ran the Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee's social justice efforts.

The effort brings together people who worship in the same religious tradition but in different communities — one urban, one suburban — to better understand how policies and prejudices helped create many of the problems facing Milwaukee. The hope is to inspire the suburban faithful to lobby their Republican lawmakers for changes on behalf of their friends in the city.

"The reality ... is, if we're going to get a win or two ... in the next budget, it's going to have to be bipartisan," said Tom Heinen, executive director of the Interfaith Conference. "And that might work in some of these denominations where people in the pews are divided."

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Getting there is creating some painful conversations.

In the first session, Soika walked members of two congregations — Central United Methodist Church in Milwaukee and Community United Methodist in Cedarburg —through some of the causes and consequences of the region's racial segregation and income disparities.

Among them: restrictive covenants that barred white people from selling their homes to African-Americans and Jews; and federal housing policy that restricted the use of Federal Housing Administration mortgages — on which a generation of middle-class Americans built wealth — to white neighborhoods only. 

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Milwaukee, Soika pointed out, has 38% of the population in the four-county region, but 72% of its poverty.

The information left many feeling deflated. "It kills the soul," one man said. After a second session, the Cedarburg church decided against participating further, for now, saying the project needs a stronger focus and clarity about the specific issues that need to be tackled.

Other congregations are lining up to take part, including several east side Milwaukee parishes that are co-pastored or administrated by the Rev. Tim Kitzke,

Kitzke has been deepening his own understanding of the segregation and racial inequities confronting southeastern Wisconsin since he was named the archdiocese's vicar general for urban ministry in 2015. He sees addressing those issues as part of his call in light of Catholic social teaching.

"We don't have city issues and suburban issues, we have Gospel issues," Kitzke said. "If one of the pillars we work on is dignity and respect of every human being, we have a long way to go."

In some ways, "One Community" is a return to the advocacy roots of the Interfaith Conference, which grew out of the civil rights movement but has focused in recent years on inter-religious, inter-cultural understanding.

"We do think this might be the moment when we have an opportunity to make a difference," said Heinen. 

"A lot of people are frustrated with how our society is working these days, on the left and the right," he said. "If there are going to be some solutions here, it may well come ... from people of faith acting out of faith rather than self-interest."

Join the discussion

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is sponsoring a Nov. 16 panel discussion that will explore the role of the faith community in advancing social justice today.

The event is part of the 50-Year Ache series, supported by Aurora Health Care, which examines how far we have come since the open housing marches of 1967.

The panel includes the Rev. Timothy Kitzke, the vicar general for urban ministry for the Milwaukee Archdiocese; the Rev. Marilyn Miller, pastor of Reformation Lutheran Church and president of MICAH; the Rev. Walter Lanier, pastor of Progressive Baptist Church; and Keisha Krumm, executive director of Common Ground.

The event will be held at Messmer Saint Rose School, 514 N. 31st St., located south of W. Michigan St. Doors open at 6 p.m. Panel discussion with questions from the audience will be from 6:30 to 8 p.m.

To register go to: www.jsonline.com/50yearevent.