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Common Ground Over Common Water: Defining The Public Interest In The Milwaukee Watershed, Thomas Anthony Gentine

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation examines government and nongovernment entities’ attempts to restore and protect the use and health of the Milwaukee River and its watershed from 1960 to 2000. Under Mayor Henry Maier’s leadership, Milwaukee worked to reclaim the urban riverway to stimulate economic growth. However, state and federal representatives, after the passage of the 1965 Water Quality Act, demanded that the city government prioritize updating the combined storm and sewer system to lessen pollution in the Milwaukee River. At the same time, other groups worked to save rural areas from unplanned development and further degradation of the waterway. Influential groups included …

White Resistance To Public School Integration In Milwaukee, Wisconsin And Prince Edward County Virginia, Joseph Ryan Moore

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACTWHITE RESISTANCE TO PUBLIC SCHOOL INTEGRATION IN MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN AND PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY, VIRGINIA by Joseph Moore

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2022Under the supervision of Professor Amanda Seligman The white community demonstrated fierce resistance to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The forms of resistance to integrated public schools varied by region, state, and locality. This study aims to compare the forms of resistance to integrated public schools that took place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Prince Edward County, Virginia between 1954-1976. I have used historical archival materials to permit comparisons between the types of resistance …

A Beer For The People: Black Capitalism And The Brewing Industry In Civil Rights Era Wisconsin, John L. Harry

Theses and Dissertations

The term “Black Capitalism” was coined by Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidentialcampaign as a means of both quelling the unrest of the previous decade regarding the more volatile factions within the larger civil rights movement as well as helping African Americans enter the economic mainstream. Once president, Nixon’s rhetoric became a policy through the creation of the Office of Minority Business Enterprise and loans through the Small Business Administration. In 1970, a group of Black businessmen in Milwaukee took advantage of these programs to become the first Black brewery owners in Wisconsin when they purchased Peoples Brewing Company in …

The Little Man With The Big Mouth Stands Up For Wisconsin: George Wallace And The Political And Constitutional Struggles Between Federalism And Equal Protection In Wisconsin Elections From 1964 To 1976, Ben Hubing

Theses and Dissertations

Alabama Governor George Wallace ran for the presidency four times between 1964 and 1976, bringing his candidacy north of the Mason-Dixon Line to Wisconsin. Wallace’s campaign in the Badger State fostered a debate among residents regarding constitutional principles and values. Wallace weaponized federalism and states’ rights, arguing that the federal government should stay out of school segregation, promote law and order, restrict forced busing, and reduce burdensome taxation. White working-class Wisconsinites armed themselves with Wallace’s rhetoric, pushing back on social and political changes that threatened the status quo. Civil rights activists and the black community in Wisconsin armed themselves with …

Milwaukee's Unequally Gendered Commemorative Street Names (1920-2021), Ayodeji Oladipo Obayomi

Theses and Dissertations

Urban commemorative spaces have consistently shown vast gender disparities through the domination of men at the expense of women; this is evident in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This thesis employed an archival research method to locate useful primary materials from the City of Milwaukee (which included the Common Council Proceedings) and from other sources. In addition, I employed a geographical information system to visualize gender disparity and also express the spatial distribution of the identified commemorative streets. The study argues (among other ideas) that commemorative street naming is problematically gendered.

Of the 233 commemorative street names given between 1920 and 2021 in …

"Accountable To No One": Confronting Police Power In Black Milwaukee, William I. Tchakirides

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation uncovers the roots of discriminatory police power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and traces Black-led efforts to make the city’s police bureaucracy more accountable to all citizens. It analyzes the politics of police reform in the century spanning the passage of two state laws that reconfigured Milwaukee’s law enforcement arrangements. The first (1885) removed City Hall’s managerial control over the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD). Corporate elites and social reformers fearful of rising working-class power and moral degeneration in the immigrant-industrial city lobbied for the statute’s enactment. The second (1984) reversed course, re-empowering non-police officials after decades of Black-led campaigns for …

Brew City Black Ball: Milwaukee As Microcosm Of The Early-Twentieth Century Black Baseball Experience, Ken Jon-Edward Bartelt

Theses and Dissertations

While historians have learned a great deal about the Black professional baseball played during organized baseball’s Jim Crow era, there are many teams whose stories are yet to be told. Two of these teams, the McCoy-Nolan Giants and Milwaukee Bears, played their home games in Milwaukee, Wisconsin during the 1920s. By exploring the untold histories of the McCoy-Nolan Giants and Milwaukee Bears, much can be learned about overarching themes in early-twentieth century Black professional baseball. By analyzing newspaper coverage of the McCoy-Nolan Giants, an independent barnstorming team without Negro League affiliation, important truths about the experience of Black baseball on …

Redistributing Resources: Henry Maier, The Wisconsin Alliance Of Cities, And The Movement To Modify Wisconsin's State Shared Revenues, Samantha J. Fleischman

Theses and Dissertations

During the 1960s, the City of Milwaukee was enduring fiscal distress. Mayor of Milwaukee, Henry Maier, turned to the State of Wisconsin to modify the state shared revenues formula as a method to increase funding for central cities. Maier created the Wisconsin Alliance of Cities, which was comprised of mayors throughout the state, in order to gain the support needed to pass formula changes through legislation. This thesis examines how the Alliance of Cities was able to modify the state shared revenues formula. Although the Alliance faced rejection from the state legislature, two factors enabled a reform. First, the Alliance …

Measured Expectations: An Examination Of Urban Agriculture Development And Operations In Milwaukee, Wi, Jamison Ellis

Theses and Dissertations

Urban agriculture has begun to shape urban spaces throughout the United States. Building from research on urban agriculture projects in Milwaukee I argue that in order for researchers to better understand urban agriculture, they must more thoroughly examine the various developmental and operational strategies that urban agriculture nonprofit organizations implement. The research questions that guides my thesis are the following: first, how do the developmental and operational strategies of urban agriculture projects differ? Second, how do different stakeholders perceive the implications of these approaches for creating positive and negative effects? To do this, I collected data through interviews and participant …

The Invisible Crisis: Framing The Remediation Of Milwaukee's Lead Laterals, Isabella Rieke

Theses and Dissertations

When Milwaukee’s municipal water system was developed in 1874, one-half-inch lead pipes were used to convey water from the mains in the street to a customer’s home; the City has since acknowledged that nearly 100,000 such lead pipes are still in use today, a revelation which has opened for debate whether or not these pipes pose a galvanizing public health risk with far-reaching policy and infrastructure implications. This study explores the community response to Milwaukee’s lead laterals through the efforts of the Freshwater for Life Action Coalition (FLAC). How do Milwaukeeans understand the risks posed by the lead laterals? In …

Making An Old-World Milwaukee: German Heritage, Nostalgia, And The Reshaping Of The Twentieth Century City, Joseph B. Walzer

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the importance of white ethnicity, and especially Germanness, in the “civic branding” and urban restructuring efforts of city officials, civic boosters, and business leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Scholars have increasingly identified the significant roles the “revival” of European ethnic identities played in maintaining white racial privilege in response to the Civil Rights Movement since the 1960s. I contribute to these new veins of scholarship by tracing the continued and evolving prominence of Germanness in the Midwestern city of Milwaukee, long after common assumptions of ethnic assimilation might have expected such nineteenth century …

Through Highways: Construction Of The Expressway System In Milwaukee County, 1946-1977, Gregory Dickenson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis traces the route selection and planning of the Interstate Highway System in Milwaukee County and places it within a larger national context. It asks why Milwaukee's expressways were built along their eventual routes and why certain routes were cancelled. The thesis finds that a combination of transportation studies, compromise between units of government, and the availability of funding—especially federal funding—most contributed to route selection, while decisions at the county and state level to cancel specific expressway segments came after citizen opposition and political pressure.

The need for a major system of express highways, wide boulevards or avenues, or …

"Murderous Mania": Gender And Homicide In Milwaukee Newspapers, 1840-1900, Kadie Kroening Seitz

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the ways in which Milwaukee's newspapers used gender norms to make sense of acts of murder during the nineteenth century. First, women victims of men's violence are examined, particularly through the lenses of ethnicity, class and race. Women victims who did not fit into middle class gender norms were less likely to be portrayed as "beautiful female murder victims." Then, women perpetrators of violence (not exclusively against men) are discussed, including a specific examination of women's use of an insanity defense. Newspaper tropes used to describe women's motivations for filicide are also examined, and found to vary …

Urban Renewal And The Development Of Milwaukee's African American Community: 1960-1980, Niles William Niemuth

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the impact of urban renewal on the development of Milwaukee's African American community, with a particular focus on the 1960s and 1970s. While urban renewal programs of various stripes were promoted as a means of stoking economic development, these programs had a particularly negative impact on African American communities throughout the United States in the post-World War II era. Urban renewal resulted in the wholesale destruction of black neighborhoods, wiping away important areas of residential, economic and cultural development.

This case study of developments regarding urban renewal and its relation to the African American community in Milwaukee …

3 Up, 3 Down: The Complex Relationship Of Professional Sports And Community Identity In Brooklyn, Milwaukee, And Washington, D.C., Peter Lund

Theses and Dissertations

This paper seeks to understand the role that professional sports teams play in influencing community identity. Specifically, it hypothesizes that community identity is one of the main factors in cities choosing to provide public funds as subsidies for the construction of sports stadiums and arenas. This influence is important, as economists generally accept that stadiums do not provide the economic contributions that popular rhetoric presents as justification for their construction. By looking at three cases where considerations of a publicly funded stadium resulted in a city losing its professional team, the larger discourse of public subsidies is augmented in complexity. …

Past And Present Milwaukee Civil Rights Education: The Significant Arenas Of Community Activism And Current Digital Archival Collection Assessment, Kathryn Otto

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores civil rights education as practiced by civil rights activists from the 1960s to the present day using the city of Milwaukee as a geographical focus. The first part of the thesis focuses on the civil rights historical narratives employed throughout the second half of the twentieth century, with a focus on activists in Milwaukee. The first chapter describes the various social realms in which activists employed civil rights education including law, religious organizations, and schools. The second chapter uses 1964 Milwaukee Freedom School curricula as a case study to analyze a historically significant form of civil rights …

New Urbanism As Redevelopment Scheme: New Urbanism's Role In Revitalization Of Downtown Milwaukee, Leila Saboori

Theses and Dissertations

By the turn of the twentieth century persisting decay of many large American urban centers signaled the failure of redevelopment efforts to solve inner city problems and to stop destructive patterns of suburban sprawl. This serious concern persuaded many urban specialists to study the history of urban redevelopment in the United States in order to examine the urban problems and to discuss alternative solutions to the demise of U.S. cities. The past two decades have seen a growing turn toward New Urbanism in the revitalization of urban neighborhoods; as an alternative to conventional suburban development and social and environmental problems. …

The Price Of Change: Historiographical, Fiscal, And Demographic Considerations Of The Milwaukee Movement, 1966, Jonathan Charles Bruce

Theses and Dissertations

The work presented in this thesis argues for a new schema with which to approach the civil rights literature. Arguments for the necessity of this new approach utilize Milwaukee as a case study, analyzing the texts considered canonical to the city and offering a critique that will begin to break away from a lionized individual in favor of an egalitarian approach to history, specifically through the use of non-traditional methods such as quantitative analysis. Perhaps most important to the literature, this thesis addresses a fundamental, long-ignored aspect of the Civil Rights Movement by analyzing fiscal realities that face a grassroots …

From No Choice To Forced Choice To School Choice: A History Of Educational Options In Milwaukee Public Schools, James Kenneth Nelsen

Theses and Dissertations

Americans cherish freedom and value local control of education. The issue of "school choice," a movement that supports publicly funded tuition vouchers for students who attend private schools, appeared on the public agenda in the 1980s and has remained a controversial topic into the twenty-first century. Milwaukee had one of the first and most expansive school choice programs in the United States. If one is to understand school choice, one must understand its origin in Milwaukee. Milwaukee moved through three eras of choice--the eras of "no choice," "forced choice," and "school choice." The Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) followed a "comprehensive" …

An Improvised World: Jazz And Community In Milwaukee, 1950-1970, Benjamin Barbera

Theses and Dissertations

This study looks at the history of jazz in Milwaukee between 1950 and 1970. During this period Milwaukee experienced a series of shifts that included a large migration of African Americans, urban renewal and expressway projects, and the early stages of deindustrialization. These changes had an impact on the jazz musicians, audience, and venues in Milwaukee such that the history of jazz during this period reflects the social, economic, and physical landscape of the city in transition.

This thesis fills two gaps in the scholarship on Milwaukee. First, it describes the history of jazz in Milwaukee in a more comprehensive …

Never Stop Working: Examining The Life And Activism Of Howard Fuller, Sarah Barber

Theses and Dissertations

Howard Fuller, a long-time community activist born in Shreveport, Louisiana and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has become a nationally renowned advocate for school choice. Coming from humble beginnings, Fuller learned from his tight-knit community growing up that he could be anything he wanted to be if he worked hard enough and focused on his education. Wanting future generations of black Americans to have the same opportunities he had, Fuller would dedicate his life work to uplifting his people through education. How Fuller approached that work, however, led to seemingly contradicting approaches and ideas. This thesis attempts to make sense of …