By Jimmy Carlton Sportswriter Published Sep 22, 2016 at 5:01 PM

Grizzled, frank and impassive, sitting behind his cluttered desk surrounded by various articles, awards and calendars, peering out with discerning eyes but speaking straightforwardly without emotion, Thomas E. Mitchell looks and sounds like a hardened newspaper editor who's seen and heard a lot in his career.

And that fits because he is, indeed, the editor of the Milwaukee Community Journal, which for 40 years has reported on the plight, struggles and victories of African-Americans in Wisconsin and tried to advance the causes of its local readers. Those struggles and causes have never been more in the mainstream news than they have since the shooting and protests in Sherman Park last month, and, partly because the Community Journal was already covering them industriously for four decades before now, Mitchell welcomes but is also wary of the sudden attention on and ostensible interest in Milwaukee's racial issues.

A National Newspaper Publishers Association award-winner and the state's largest African-American publication with a weekly readership of 200,000, the Community Journal was uniquely positioned, and duty-bound, to cover Sherman Park and report on the institutional issues affecting black Milwaukee. And as a veteran journalist who has seen, heard, read, reported on, written about, produced, published and been personally and professionally immersed in stories about race, and particularly the way it colors economic and political inequality in the city, Mitchell is a local expert with a knowledgeable – if even overly objective, he admits – perspective on the conversation. 

We sat down with Mitchell at his Community Journal office to discuss his reaction to the Sherman Park unrest and how he processed the events and sentiments that followed; how we talk about race in Milwaukee and across the country (and whether we really do); white supremacy and the need for black people to control their own economic and political processes but also regain "certain values and standards"; disruption and discomfort, what the next protest could look like and where it might take place; and the media's role in covering racial issues. Be sure to watch the video at the end of the article for Mitchell's idea for one way to make Milwaukee a better place to live for African-Americans.

To read other installments in the Milwaukee Talks Race series, click here.

Here is our interview with Thomas Mitchell, unfiltered and (only slightly) edited for length.

OnMilwaukee: I’ve had a little bit harder time than I expected getting people to want to talk to me for this series. Some are very eager and open, but many – especially those in high-profile positions, big companies, government leaders – have declined or been reluctant or they want to know my angle and agenda, which I really don’t have any. It’s just a conversation. Thank you for speaking with me. 

Thomas Mitchell: The aldermen will want to talk, I would hope. Some of the county supervisors maybe. But as far as the business community or white individuals in government, they’re not going to want to talk, or they’re going to talk in the usual stuff, say the usual things that are safe and they’re not going to challenge anything as far as the status quo. The corporations, especially. Now in the city you have a Bucks arena coming up, a new one. You have the Northwestern Mutual building almost finished. You have a plan for the lakefront to redo Lincoln Memorial Drive and do it in such a way that it goes right into Third Ward, which is the new downtown in Milwaukee. You also have the trolley car coming.

All good and hopefully they'll create some jobs in the community, but you really need to address the overall problem of racism, of employment inequality, a struggling school system that has some of the lowest reading scores for fourth and eighth graders in the country. You have a high incarceration rate in the state more so than any other state in the nation. You've had problems with police, which has been ongoing in Milwaukee and of course the country. Milwaukee is notorious for mistreatment. Police-community relations is really nonexistent, especially at this point.

Have you observed change since Chief Flynn came in and at least vocally said he wanted to improve community policing efforts? Have you noticed actual change at all?

Recently, in an editorial we ran in the paper, we talked about returning the Police Athletic League. But the budgeting seems to go towards putting more police on the streets, buying these armored vehicles that would normally be in Iraq or Afghanistan and stun guns, sound cannons and stuff like that. They have ShotSpotter, this new communication system that really isn't all that new, that doesn't work very well. It still doesn't work very well.

You do have a number of problems with the police department. My mother asked me about Flynn this morning when I went to see her. I said that Flynn is nothing more than a cop. He's a smart cop and he's basically just doing the things that cops do, that police chiefs do. They do have programs. They have a program in which they go into classrooms and work with youth to get them to understand what it is that police officers do, what the court system does, but that's limited. Nobody'd ever heard of it until I got a call from the outgoing president of the Urban League, Ralph Hollmon, telling me that he wanted me to come down here about a story because he had just heard about this program. I did a story, front page.

Maybe he's doing some things, but it's really not enough to really change the opinion of people in the community as to how they feel about the police. You have police officers now who can live outside of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County, and they'll be taking advantage of that. They're even more disengaged from the community than they were before. They don't have any real stake in it. They'll do their eight hours and then go home, and that's about it. The attitude of police officers towards African-Americans and other minorities is still negative, as it is around the country.

I think in the last eight years that President Obama has been in office, and even now in this election cycle with Donald Trump, I always say that President Obama opened up Pandora's box when it comes to the issue of race. What Donald Trump has done is taken the box and turned it over and dumped it out, and everybody now seems free to say or do what they feel they want to do. It’s basically the fear of losing control, of white America losing control.

Going through the myth of white supremacy and the myth of black inferiority, which the President has completely, I think, dismantled by his ascension to the office. It's also I think in our community just an awareness that we have to get back to certain morals and certain values and standards that have been missing for the last 20-something years, or some will say even 30 in our community. I've interviewed a number of individuals. I wrote a story on the front page for this week, and I talked to one woman whose been in their neighborhood, grew up there in the ‘70s, she and her husband still live in the neighborhood, Sherman Park, saying that what we need to do is get back to a sense of values, morals, spirituality, grounding of the family in our community.

Part of that I agree with her. Another part is jobs, another part is the education system. All those things, as well as the church being more involved and more out there and doing more than just what they do on Sundays. My wife and I didn't go to church (the Sunday after the Sherman Park shooting). We went out and we put the gospel into action. We had food, we had water, juices, chips and stuff just to give out to people who were there milling about, ready to protest some more, and those individuals who were just out there just to clean up after the night before. We need a lot more than that in the community. We need to listen and talk to one another more and respect each other.

It's a two-way, double-edged sword, if you will, in Milwaukee. Also we as a community have to take control of our situation, of our economics, of our education system and start preaching those things about the family. We can't wait for government. Government's not going to want to do that.

Those community-based organizations like United Way and some of the other bigger ones, they don't want to see themselves go out of business because they basically survive off our pain, off our misery, off the negative indicators that the city leads the nation in, that I noted before. I think we're also seeing somewhat of a backlash of the crack epidemic from the ‘80s, the children who were born and impacted by crack cocaine are now growing up and having children of their own.

And compounded with this prison industrial complex, especially in Wisconsin where we jail more black men than any other state, that just exacerbates those social issues.

Right, because now individuals are coming out, they don't have jobs, they're on the corners, they're falling back into a life of crime. The father of the young man who was shot in Sherman Park, he admitted that he wasn't a good role model for his son, being in and out of jail, being on the streets, not really being the type of role model and standard that his son and children needed. It's a wide range of things in our community that I think we as a community have to get our hands around and work ourselves.

Those individuals from the majority community who want to help, the mainstream community, they're more than welcome if they're sincere and understand that we as black people here have to be the ones who are in control. If you want to offer your two cents, fine, but we have to be the ones in control and who put forward the action that is going to change things.

That brings up a question I wanted to ask you because I’ve heard different points of view on it, about what can and should white people be doing to – I don’t know if improve life for black people is the right way to say it – but help make this not the worst city in the country to live in for African-Americans? Obviously we’ve gotten to be so segregated, city and suburbs, so let’s use a place like Shorewood just as an example. There are a lot of good, well-meaning white people in Shorewood who aren’t overtly racist and don’t like what’s going on in the city and wish things would be better, but maybe aren’t actively doing a lot to change Milwaukee’s institutional problems, in a big or small way. What is their role or responsibility?

With Shorewood, there's a number of people in Shorewood who are Democrats who were trying to oust Lena Taylor. I think from that standpoint, I think just getting into, being in our business, because Shorewood's a small pocket compared to the rest of the people in the district. Yet they seem to think – or tried to succeed in basically impacting the direction that the election would go. They wanted Lena out. They wanted Mandela Barnes in there, who is a nice guy; I met him a couple of times. But he doesn't have the experience. He doesn't have the track record that Lena does. Lena grew up in the community. She has, obviously, empathy for the community. She has a ton of legislation that she has passed that has impacted the community. Why are you going to take one experienced black person who is really sincere about what she's doing being a public servant, and put in somebody who has no experience?

Basically in the eyes of many people in our community, it was in the hip pocket of the Wisconsin Working Families organization, which was started by Chris Larson. You know about Chris Larson and some of the statements he's made. I think it's that type of thing – trying to control our politics as well as our economics and who we can have in offices, who's going to champion our causes and try to make change. Basically using black folks and our plight in order to solidify their political positions or to increase them, as Larson tried to do by running for County Exec, but not really respecting us as a community, our opinions, our needs.

When you have that, I think the answer to your question is basically just get out the way. Just clear away the obstacles and just allow us to move forward, open a door and as James Brown was saying, we'll get it ourselves. Just to remove the obstacles. If you don't want to deal with race, if you're not comfortable with it, then don't make any comments about black people and some of the things that we do that's negative, but mostly negative towards our own – statements that we make when we express problems with race. Don't say, "Well it's in the past," like with slavery. Slavery still impacts us.

Dr. Joy DeGruy’s book lays it out perfectly as it relates to slavery's impact even today. There's a book I read ("Brainwashed" by Tom Burrell) … and he basically talked about the imagery and how imagery has been used to bolster white supremacy and bolster black inferiority. It's those things, image and history that we have to contend with. If you want to gain an understanding, then you seriously have to take into consideration whenever we say that something is racist in this country, that we're not just making it up to make it up.

Some of us do use that as a way of putting some money in our pockets, but they're hurting our community more so than they're hurting the white community because nobody's going to take the next person seriously who really has a bone to pick, as it relates to race and what they're going through. They're race hustlers basically. Basically I think it's just try to understand and accept that, if not you personally having done anything, but your people in the past historically have done something and still benefit even today.

That’s the "institutional" part of all these race-related issues we talk about.

Institutionally. You have communities in upper Wisconsin that have prisons, farming communities that without those prisons wouldn't exist anymore. They still depend on the prison industrial complex, which is an offshoot of what was done in the South. If you were black after the Civil War, you didn't have a farm, or maybe even if you did have a farm, you could be arrested for vagrancy and thrown into prison. Then you would be rented out to another farm plantation that's white-owned or a company to do manual labor, the chain gangs and everything else like that. Picking cotton or tobacco during the day and at night going back to the prison.

It's history, the past and then the present. It's something that all of us have to deal with, black and white. A late friend of mine said that what we, as black people, need to do is depressurize or sit down and pretty much just realize that we've gone through a trauma, that's what we're still going through, and that we have to come to grips with it, accept it and realize that we've come through it for the most part. Surviving something that I don't think any other culture would have been able to survive. We've turned out inventors. We've turned out teachers, educators, politicians, a president. All of those things we have accomplished despite what we've gone through.

We as a people have to do that and I think we also have to unite economically and do things that we are capable of doing because we have the money to do it. We just have to direct it in a way that's going to benefit our community and our future.

It seems like there’s a major problem with how we talk about race, a whole-society cognitive dissonance, and we don’t really talk about it unless something happens, but even then everyone is saying different things. How do people become more comfortable having these racial discussions, the public forums and this conversation, that aren’t just "talk is cheap" but actually lead to something actionable and meaningful for the black community in Milwaukee? Have you seen initiatives or situations that have broken down barriers and brought people together and been truly integrative and useful? Where are those successes and how can they be replicated or pursued more?

I really haven't seen anything. Plus I'm a little suspicious about the whole diversity thing. I don't have a problem with diversity and everybody getting along of different races, colors or nationalities and stuff like that, but I always saw it as a way for the mainstream to maintain control of the dollars and of the directions and the actions that black people take, who are trying to move forward. I just get a little suspicious about diversity, especially if it's coming from a company or entity that's predominantly white, because basically it's about maintaining control.

Like I said earlier, we have to be in control of those entities that would move our community forward. Advice or help when needed would be appreciated, or the dollars, as long as we have an understanding that we're going to be in control of the final decision and the action of those dollars. The entities Downtown don't want us to be in control of those dollars; private and government don't want black people to be in control of it.

I think there's this fear in white America that if we were to finally really gain control, that we would do to you what you've done to us. I think that's a fear that you have. From what I understand from talking to other black folks in leadership positions, it's really just about making improvements in the community. It's not about getting back at white people. It's about moving our community forward and our people forward to do those things. What's done is done. If you acknowledge it and you try to rectify it by, as I said, just not getting in our way and obstructing us and just letting us do what we need to do as people, then it's all good. Hopefully in the process seeing us move forward and doing what we need to do, you'll relax and not worry about what we're going to do to you.

We have enough problems to worry about. I think it's just that. Just the idea just let us have control, move out the way and let's move forward. We're going to stumble. We're not always going to get it right. There are going to be some of us who are going to try to take advantage of the situation to enrich themselves, and those individuals will be promptly gotten rid of by being dismissed from whatever or criminal charges if it's really some malfeasance, like stealing money from a company or an organization that's trying to do good. I just think it's those things. Just remove the obstacles. The whole ID required for voting type of thing. We have enough trouble just trying to get our people to vote. We don't need our governor trying to push, along with the legislature that's dominated by Republican conservatives, legislation that keeps people from exercising their right to vote.

We’ve got to be focusing on getting our people out to vote and then voting for individuals who are going to do things for our community, which will strengthen people’s opinion about the vote. Oh yeah, I voted. This guy or woman's doing something. The system's not bad, as long as you vote in the good ones and vote out the bad ones. It's things like that. I think it's, again, this fear on the part of mainstream white America of black people taking control of their destiny and moving forward, because of this idea that we're going to do to you what you did to us. That's not the case from what I see. I think it would be a mistake if we were to do it because then we'd be no better than you and those white individuals who came before us who oppressed or are oppressing us now.

A couple years ago, I think, Wisconsin Public Radio sponsored this forum. It brought the leaders, the mayor, together along with other entities, Latinos, as well as whites, blacks. This one guy from the City's Tourism Commission Board, whatever they call it, somebody asked about what do they think about Milwaukee and he said, "I think everything is fine," basically. "From what I see, everything is going great." I just looked at him and I didn't really do this – I think maybe now that I've gotten older I'd start doing it more, I'd just call him on it – and say, "You're crazy. You’ve got all of these problems in our community, particularly as it relates to test scores, unemployment, other things, and you think everything is fine? You're nuts." He didn't get it. He didn't say anything else, I think, that much.

That’s just this idea that everything is Pollyanna-ish for white Milwaukee. They see all of the great things that are happening, etc. In our community we see the things that are not going well for us. We're seeing the dollars being spent Downtown, but not in the neighborhoods, in the communities that really need it. You saw the results of that in Sherman Park with the shooting by the cop. Even if it was a black cop who shot the guy, he was still a cop. You have some black cops that are worse than some white cops. But that's what sparked everything, because people wanted to know the conditions, they wanted to know what happened, the police weren't saying anything. After Dontre Hamilton, after Derek Williams and all the other incidents that have taken place over the last few years, it just came to a head and you got what you got, which was the burning down of a gas station and several other buildings, police cars being trashed and the cars being set on fire in the street.

I wanted to ask you about Sherman Park, specifically. Can you tell me about how you found out what happened that Saturday night and then the protests and the unrest on Sunday, and how you processed all of that?

My wife and I had just gotten home from dinner, turned on the TV and saw this breaking news story about a shooting. My wife got visibly upset about this because we have a son who's 25 who lives in the community and she worries about him being caught up in this stuff and phoning him to find out where he was, texting him and stuff and just concerned about the community as a whole. She takes it personally, I think more so than I do, given my job and looking at it from a more objective perspective – sometimes maybe too objective I admit, compared to her.

We saw it on the news and watched it all night, listened to the reports, what transpired in the next few hours. Then we saw the looting and the burning, hoping that wouldn't have happened but it did. We saw it on the news again. Saw the young man we found who was being interviewed by a reporter on Channel 58, who happened to be the brother of the young man who got shot, and he pretty much summed it up. He summed up the anger, the frustration, the anguish that the community is going through. He summed it up perfectly.

He just let it out. He said basically, "This is what you get when you do this to us, when you have your boot on our neck economically and you have these police out here doing just anything. This is what you're going to get." You saw it in Ferguson. You saw it in a number of other cities around the country, Baltimore. You just push us enough that we're going to snap. The next time it may not be just our neighborhood. Next time it may be Downtown, the Third Ward, the lakefront. You saw some of that with the Coalition for Justice marching through the streets in rush hour, I think, a few weeks after Dontre Hamilton, on I-43, just marching, disrupting traffic. If we reach into your pocketbook, your wallet, then you're going to listen, maybe listen. Because the first reaction you'll have is the cops and the police and the National Guard and those big armored vehicles that they got from the Army coming out, just like they did with Ferguson.

But it won't be in our neighborhood the next time. It will be in your neighborhood, on your streets, in your places of business. Look what happened after the shooting in Wauwatosa. What did they do? They did the next best thing. They marched through the mall. The Mayfair Mall is the biggest thing in Wauwatosa. It represents Wauwatosa. It is Wauwatosa. Without it, Wauwatosa has nothing. They marched through that mall and it saw a decrease in business. They saw store owners closing their shops early. You probably have some of them wondering if they're going to continue and if they're going to renew their lease and stay there. I would imagine that the mall's owners have called Tosa police and city officials and said, "You better rectify this quick. Do whatever you need to do in order to resolve this or this is going to continue and we're going to have shop owners pull out of their lease and you're going to see it become a ghost town." To me they're starting to do that. We realize that it's the pocketbook.

You’re talking about economic disruption?

Right, economic disruption. It's not going to be a boycott. It's going to be us showing up and making you uncomfortable, and you being white America, white Milwaukee, don't want to be made uncomfortable, especially by us, because then it puts in your face what we've been talking about and what we've been dealing with, which is racism in the city and in the state. I think that'll be the next move of protesters is the impact Downtown, the Third Ward and making life uncomfortable.

What you're describing is creating a more proactive, antagonistic and uncomfortable discomfort, which obviously could get pretty ugly. Is that something where you look at it as the ends justify the means? How would that play out and what would it look like on a practical level?

I think to agitate would be the best way to draw attention, particularly with the media, as to what it is that's going on in our community, short of violence. Violence is not going to solve anything. It would be self-defeating. To go in and to sit down and to just create that discomfort and disrupt business for the business owner, that's what's going to do it because, short of violence, that's the only thing I think we really have left. Just marching down the street isn't going to do it.

Marching down our own street is not going to do it, but if we shut down Wisconsin Avenue, we shut down Water Street in the Third Ward, we shut down Chicago Street or Buffalo Street, if we shut those streets down by just our presence, nothing's going to get done. People are going to see this, shy away and get in their cars and leave or go into their apartments in the Third Ward and start looking at the realty pages to find out where else they can live. That's what any agitation our shutting it down is going to do. Then you're going to have to listen. Then you're going to ask the question, "What is it that you want? Why are you doing this?" Then we'll tell you why we're doing it and what we want. Then it'll be up to you whether or not you want to give us what we want or you want to see more of the same. Not violence, not burning anything down, but just our presence.

It's got to be about coming together in our community, coming together and finding out, OK, what's our agenda? What is it that we want? As I said before, to me, it's just to clear away the obstacles and allow us to move forward with our agenda, which we are in control of. That's basically it. You don't have to like us or become pals with us, but just move out the way and just treat us as human beings. We'll treat each other as human beings. Nobody's perfect. I think that's what we need to do, or the mainstream, those who are in control need to do. Just move out the way and just let us do what we need to do.

It sounds like you’re talking about a pragmatic equality, rather than this grand, idealistic, "Let’s all come together and have this diverse coalition and create a united, better world." Like, you’re more interested in utilitarian, tangible results than holding hands and singing songs.

Yah, that's all fair and good, but everybody knows, even the ones that are holding hands singing "Kumbaya," that nothing's going to happen. That basically it's going to go back to being the same old. Money might be thrown at it by United Way or some other corporation like Northwestern or Potawatomi or whatever, but is it going to be thrown at or given to those entities that would really make an impact with it or is it going to be controlled by the same individuals who pick and choose. Like Community Advocates, which is a community based organization that is basically controlled and started by white individuals. They pretty much played Pac-Man as it relates to the dollars that come to organizations that try to effect change, whether it be in housing, whether it be in healthcare, whether it be in education or early child development, housing rehab, that type of thing. They came and grabbed everything.

SDC (Social Development Commission) is a shell of itself as a result of that and other organizations like CYD (Career Youth Development) barely exists. OIC (Opportunities Industrialization Center) no longer exists. That was part of a national group and had branches and cities, Milwaukee being one of them. I learned that they helped to finance African World Festival. They were giving money to businesses, helping to keep CYD alive. All the government money that came in was funneled through and then disseminated. That was too much power. They weren't comfortable with us having the power or taking the dollars and using them for good, without them being in control. What'd they do? They cut it off. They found some dirt, got it out there in the media and justified the news; they had to justify taking them dollars away. Now you have these entities that no longer exist. You have this one big one that does, but really it's no more than another company, Community Advocates. They put out their brochures with black and white faces, Latinos and everything and Asians, and making it look all Pollyanna-ish again, but the problem still persists.

Then you have our illustrious governor, that idiot, who changes everything around, especially with FoodShare, where you have three months to find work and get training for work, or for three years you lose your Food Share benefits. What kind of BS is that? Then they hire a private company. This is how they keep themselves from getting mud on themselves and why they all want privatization. They get a private company to come in and run it for profit. They don't care anything about the people that they're servicing. They just want to meet the bottom line. Did they get the percentage of people on the program, and are they going through this or that, that type of thing? They don't really care. Why should they? The company that runs it is ResCare; they're based in their regional offices.

They get these companies to do this, and basically again, black people are being used to fill the pockets of individuals who do not look like them. The state, they wash their hands of it, they give it to this private company, let them do whatever they want. The thing that they didn't do is they didn't give them any dollars or budget to do any PR work to really disseminate the information about what people had to do in order to keep their benefits. You had a lot of people fall through the cracks. As a result, you see a spike in car thefts for instance, robberies, personal robberies, one-on-one type things. You're seeing an increase in that. This just exacerbates the problems that already exist and not try to solve them. Again, the governor hates Milwaukee anyways for whatever reason, and he's done everything in his power from the time he was in the legislature to county executive to governor to destroy Milwaukee without having the sense enough to realize that the city is the straw that stirs the economic drink.

Without us, it's just like there's nothing. It's just a bunch of farm people, Green Bay and Madison and that's about it. Wisconsin would be about as important as Wyoming in the grand scheme of things, as compared to Chicago and Illinois. You have these Republicans and even some Democrats, like Larson, who they think know what's best for us and who use us in order to gain their own political power. Either way we lose basically. I think it's incumbent upon us as a people to take control of our economic destiny and our education and move forward with that. Then culture comes into play there knowing our history, know where we come from as a people and incorporating that into what we do as a community. It has yet to really take shape because we're so un-unified. Again, it comes from slavery – divide and conquer.

During slavery they set the young against the old, the men against the women, the children against the adults, and did everything, separate families, to disrupt, keep total disorder and disunity. A lot of that continues today. The welfare system is nothing more than a sophisticated way of doing what they did during slavery, separate the man from the woman, from the household, take him out, diminish his respect, his standing in the family, his power, his patriarchal place in the family as the leader of the family and you give it to the woman. Why? She's not a threat. The black man is a threat in of his intelligence, his physicality. All of those things are a threat to whites who know that we are as good, if not better. A friend of mine who I said passed away wrote articles for our papers talking about not only are we as good, but we're also better because we've done these things through our history, despite our history.

After the events in Sherman Park, I heard some differing messages. You had Gov. Walker and others saying, "Sherman Park’s a good neighborhood, this doesn’t represent Sherman Park." And then Ald. Khalif Rainey and some others saying, "It doesn’t matter that it happened in Sherman Park; this was a powder keg that was going to go off somewhere." Do you think the protests and unrest were inevitable? Was this a ticking time bomb, given the inequities and problems for African-Americans in Milwaukee? And do you think it can be the galvanizing force that actually creates good, real changes in this city?

I think it was inevitable. I didn't see it coming, but I think something like this was inevitable, bound to happen in Milwaukee. As it relates to this being something that we can use, I think we can use it but we have to be smart about how we use what happened and the threat of it happening again. That really would depend partly on the powers that be, realizing that there is a problem, there's always been a problem. There's always been a problem in the city. It's unfortunate that we had to come to this point to really resolve.

I heard the mayor or his spokesperson saying this is a moment of opportunity, for change. What do you think that could look like and do you think it will actually happen?

I think the mayor is a good person. I think he's sincere. He wants to see things get better, but he's constrained by, again, the individuals who helped elect him. They put money in his election coffers so he can be reelected, who push him for governor. This is the business community, the Greater Milwaukee Committee, the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce or whatever they call it. As long as it doesn't hurt the bottom line and what they’re about, they don’t really care. The may play lip service, but they don't care. They just care about those businesses being happy and staying here and more businesses coming here.

I see that reflected when I look at the Business Journal, those parties that they give, like United Way, those affairs that they have every year talking about how much money they raise and who the money's going to. It's just a corporate pat on the back. They're patting themselves on the back for what they pretend to be doing when it really doesn't deal with the real issues. Maybe a small percentage of those dollars go to the entities that need it or those initiatives, but it's just a small bite.

You're going to need a lot of individuals, a lot of companies, community groups and people in the community who have a vested interest and who want to see improvement, to be able to take a larger bite out and make any real change. That's just window dressing. Unfortunately they're just waiting for something really big, bigger than what happened in Sherman Park to take place before they finally go, "Okay, yeah, now we get it." They don't really get it. No, we better do something now or this is really going to jack our money, and they don't want the money jacked. That's really what it comes down to. What can we do that's not going to allow them to have any power over us black people, have us keep what we have and yet still not solve the problem but be a temporary band-aid where everybody will be relatively happy with it or satisfied and it won't be on anybody's radar anymore?

That's basically what they want. They want this thing to go away. They want these problems to go away. Okay, if (Ald. Russell) Stamper and Rainey want some money, make sure that we get them some money, give us some money and let them go away. We can go back, finish the tower Downtown, redo Lakefront Drive so that it goes into the Third Ward, which expands that and everything will be fine. But it won't be fine. You'll just be waiting for another Dontre or another Sylville Smith, another situation like that and you're going to have the same thing over. But it's not going to be in Sherman Park. What they're going to do is they're going to take it to Downtown, to the City Hall, to Wisconsin Avenue, to the Third Ward and make you uncomfortable. Not hurt anybody. Some idiots are going to do that, but for the most part basically just make you uncomfortable. Put it in your face.

Somebody once said that in order to get white people to listen you sometimes got to get in their face and act black. Just get in their face and look like you're going to hit them in order for them to pay attention and listen out of fear of getting hit. We basically have to do that. I hope it doesn't come to that. I hope cooler heads prevail and somebody really realizes that this is a problem and we’ve got to solve it and do something about it now before it becomes bigger than what it was Saturday. I think everybody's just waiting to see who's going to do what.

It’s sort of nerve-wracking to hope that something good comes from all of this, but then understanding that there’s a long history, especially here, of really nothing happening that’s positive or changed.  

You'll have another study, another commission, another task force, more articles written. They'll spend three to six months on it. Then they'll come out with a report, tout that for about a week, put it on the shelf and watch it grow dust and nothing is going to happen. It's always been the case with everything that has come about in the city where people have been rocked to the core and we’re gotten their attention. But they already know what the game plan is going to be: for a commission or task force to do a study, tout the study, put it on a shelf and go back to business as usual.

As a member of the media, and especially as a black media leader in the black community, I’m wondering what you view to be the role of the media in covering issues like race and the problems surrounding it? I’ve heard complaints about white reporters trying to cover things like Sherman Park or related stories and, since they’re not black, how can they properly cover that stuff? Where do you stand on media covering sensitive issues like race and racism effectively and fairly and empathetically, even if they’re white? My view is that, as a journalist, I cover things all the time where I am not a part of that community – I’m not gay, but I can write about LGBT issues; I’m not a professional basketball player but I can write about the Bucks. If journalists only covered things we inherently understood or were a part of, we really wouldn’t cover a whole lot.

Well it would help if you were gay. And if you were not in the NBA, maybe played high school or college, you just have a passion for the game. If you're a woman covering a woman's issue. If you're black and you're covering something like what happened in Sherman Park, it's going to lend you credibility and you're going to let the reporter probably do what he wants to do, basically report on his community. Instead of having to report on everybody else's community but his so that you can bring his perspective to your newsroom and to your readers or the observers on the website as to what's really going on because you have somebody who’s been there, done that, who's born and raised in Sherman Park, for instance, who knows the people there, who can go and talk to them. They're going to give him the honest answer that he's looking for and then write it in such a way that everybody's going to understand it.

Ideally, right. That would be great, especially if you could hire somebody who was born and raised in Sherman Park and put them on your staff to cover that story. But on an immediate and practical level of responding to a news event related to race, what is the media's role? You've covered these stories a lot more than just whenever they happened and they happen to be in current events. What should the media's role be? What should OnMilwaukee's role be or the Journal Sentinel’s when something like this happens? What is your newspaper’s role?

Our role is to bring attention to the issues before they come to a head like what happened with Sherman Park, and what we've been doing for 40 years is talking about issues that the Journal Sentinel doesn't touch on. Our front pages usually have a lot of photos of events that go on in our community. What was it? The 500 Black Tuxedos. We did something on our front page this year. The whole front page was basically about that event – the photo, the big photo of them at the lakefront and everything else and a story to go with it, on our front page in full color and more pictures on the inside. The Journal Sentinel had one photo of the event way in the back of the main section in black and white. They had a photographer there. He took all kind of pictures. I give them credit, they put it online, but nobody in our community goes online to see the Journal Sentinel.

We put it on our paper, we try to put some pictures on our website showing black pride, and the community expects that from us. They expect us to show those things that are happening in the community that are positive and show pictures because, let's face it, social media is about pictures more than words. It's about video, it's about slideshows, showing what's happening. We try and reflect that on our front page and somewhat on the inside. We try to show the positive and at the same time tell people things that are happening, whether in government or in education or on the streets that we feel they need to know that they may not be aware of.

I like to think we had a hand in Larson losing because Mikel Holt wrote a number of columns about Larson and about his Working Families party and what the real objective of him and that group was, which was basically to commandeer black politics and the black political leadership and use them like they're puppets for their own agenda. I think that helped people crystallize what's really important politically and why Lena Taylor should be reelected and was reelected. Larson tried to get an interview and stuff like that and we said, "Okay, call us." They didn't call us.

Our job basically is not just to cover bad things that happen, but to try to give people a warning as to what's going to happen if this doesn't happen. Whether it be in the schools or politics or whatever, our responsibility basically is to inform the community, get them the information that needs to know because the mainstream doesn't pay any attention. They're looking at the bigger picture. They might have one or two stories or profiles, and they still have no clue how to do it. I try to do what I can, associate publisher Mikel Holt does what he can. Try to use freelance every once in a while just to tell the story and then try to tell the story in pictures and short captions, as well as with the occasional news story that comes in that speaks to the problems. That's what we do, speak to the issues in our community that are important to us that are often ignored by the mainstream media.

There are major systemic issues in Milwaukee that need large coalitions of involved people, sincere efforts, lots of money and much more to even begin being addressed. That needs to happen and hopefully it will. In the short term, though, what is a basic, specific, actionable thing people in and around the city can do to make the lives of African-Americans better here?

There are major systemic issues in Milwaukee that need large coalitions of involved people, sincere efforts, lots of money and much more to even begin being addressed. That needs to happen and hopefully it will. In the short term, though, what is a basic, specific, actionable thing people in and around the city can do to make the lives of African-Americans better here?

Born in Milwaukee but a product of Shorewood High School (go ‘Hounds!) and Northwestern University (go ‘Cats!), Jimmy never knew the schoolboy bliss of cheering for a winning football, basketball or baseball team. So he ditched being a fan in order to cover sports professionally - occasionally objectively, always passionately. He's lived in Chicago, New York and Dallas, but now resides again in his beloved Brew City and is an ardent attacker of the notorious Milwaukee Inferiority Complex.

After interning at print publications like Birds and Blooms (official motto: "America's #1 backyard birding and gardening magazine!"), Sports Illustrated (unofficial motto: "Subscribe and save up to 90% off the cover price!") and The Dallas Morning News (a newspaper!), Jimmy worked for web outlets like CBSSports.com, where he was a Packers beat reporter, and FOX Sports Wisconsin, where he managed digital content. He's a proponent and frequent user of em dashes, parenthetical asides, descriptive appositives and, really, anything that makes his sentences longer and more needlessly complex.

Jimmy appreciates references to late '90s Brewers and Bucks players and is the curator of the unofficial John Jaha Hall of Fame. He also enjoys running, biking and soccer, but isn't too annoying about them. He writes about sports - both mainstream and unconventional - and non-sports, including history, music, food, art and even golf (just kidding!), and welcomes reader suggestions for off-the-beaten-path story ideas.