Milwaukee's historical Bronzeville lives on at a new website and app dedicated to preserving its stories
It dawned on Patricia Diggs one day as she chatted with her ailing father: Who would preserve his story, his history, once he was gone? That nagging question led to another. Who would preserve the stories of other Black elders in Milwaukee?
“We were chatting about the good old days at Allis Chalmers and A.O. Smith (major employers during Milwaukee’s manufacturing heyday), and I stood there and asked myself, ‘Who is going to write their stories?’ ”
That was 2003, and those questions have been gnawing at her heart ever since. It led her to help publish a 2006 book by Ivory Abena Black on Bronzeville and to a collaboration with Milwaukee PBS on the 2008 documentary “Punching In,” which examined how the loss of manufacturing jobs hurt the city’s middle class.
Telling the stories of Milwaukee’s African American families and businesses in a new way is the goal of a project just launched by Diggs and Kitonga Alexander, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “Milwaukee Bronzeville Histories” is a website and mobile app that will allow people to learn about the past — and the present — as they walk the northside neighborhood. It went live in time for Bronzeville Week, which begins Saturday.
More: What to know about Milwaukee's Bronzeville Week, from entertainment and art to culture and commerce
More: Milwaukee's Bronzeville neighborhood makes New York Times list of places to visit this year
This story is part of our yearlong effort to highlight people, like Diggs and Alexander, who are "weaving" our communities together. Our Wisconsin Weavers Project is an idea borrowed from The Aspen Institute, a global nonprofit headquartered in Washington, D.C. Aspen started Weave: The Social Fabric Project in 2018 to help solve the problem of broken social trust that has left many Americans divided. Aspen works to find weavers, tell their stories and offer them support and connection.
From Malcolm X to Larry Hill, a wealth of stories
Both Diggs and Alexander have strong ties to the city. Diggs was born and raised in Milwaukee before leaving to work for years in public relations in Washington, D.C., and now in Los Angeles, where she owns her own creative agency. Alexander, also a Milwaukee native, was a schoolteacher in the city for 12 years and also has worked in human services. His doctoral focus at UWM is Black Milwaukee history since the 1940s.
The website and app they’ve created tell the stories of famous people who once lived in or near Bronzeville — the martyred civil right leader Malcom X (who lived there a couple years as a young boy), the actor and singer Paul Robeson (he played for the Milwaukee Badgers, an early NFL football team), and the actress Hattie McDaniel (the first Black actor to win an Academy Award for her performance in “Gone with the Wind,” she said Milwaukee had been her "springboard" to Hollywood).
But they also tell more prosaic stories — about people like Larry Hill who for years ran Larry’s Lunch-ette at 619 W. Walnut St., or Mattiebelle Woods, a prolific journalist who spent decades chronicling the social life of Milwaukee’s Black community. When she died at 102 years of age in 2005, she was believed to be the nation’s oldest working journalist. Or Cleveland Colbert, a musician, upholsterer, crane operator, and aviator who flew (against his will) during the Spanish Civil War. He was an early advocate for the idea that African Americans should own their own factories to provide jobs for the community. He was active in local politics and wrote a book in 1951 detailing his ideas.
The mission in telling their stories? To knit the past cleanly with the present and show why Bronzeville mattered — and matters still.
Bronzeville lost, and regained
Historic Bronzeville was bordered by North Avenue on the north, State Street on the south, Third Street on the east, and 12th Street on the west. But Walnut Street was its economic heart. In an era of ironclad segregation, Milwaukee’s Bronzeville grew into a vibrant and self-sufficient business and cultural community, renowned for its nightlife and entertainment. Some of America’s top Black talent, including Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Louis Armstrong, played the clubs there.
After World War II, though, urban renewal and later the construction of I-43, led to the destruction of hundreds of homes and severely disrupted the community. In recent years, Bronzeville is seeing a rebirth along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and North Avenue, with millions of dollars of redevelopment, including the new home for America’s Black Holocaust Museum, Pete’s Fruit Market, the Bronzeville Center for the Arts, and the relocation of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s offices. The foundation is helping to fund the Bronzeville Histories website and app.
The app creates a self-guided walking tour of Bronzeville, offering stories and maps that pop up to show where people lived or worked. There are two tours: one of historical Bronzeville and the other of sites in the "new" Bronzeville, including the arts center and museum.
“I like to say that these were people that made a way out of no way,” Alexander said. “These were people who were transitioning a community from surviving to thriving. And that’s what we recognize about them.”
Alexander says the spirit of people like Larry Hill, a World War II veteran who was awarded the Purple Heart, lives on in the new ventures around the community. “Throughout the community, we see sprinkles of that spirit — one example is Sherman Phoenix,” he said, an entrepreneurial hub at 36th St. and Fond du Lac Ave. that arose as a response to unrest in that area in 2016.
“Efforts like that are, we argue, the rekindled spirit of Bronzeville.”
Diggs says the goal is two-fold: create a digital library for both scholars and the community, “especially young people.”
“We see this as an opportunity for all Milwaukeeans to be able to learn not just about the old Bronzeville but also about the new Milwaukee,” Diggs said. “And so that’s something that we’re looking forward to, to really weave those threads of understanding and community, which we all need right now.”
Alexander and Diggs hope this is just the beginning. They realize there are hundreds more stories like the ones they’ve collected so far. They would like to add to their collection.
As Alexander notes, “There is some great information just sitting in somebody’s attic right now.”
For more information, go to: milwaukeebronzevillehistories.org. To contact Patricia Diggs, email her at: [email protected] To contact Kitonga Alexander, email him at: [email protected]
David D. Haynes is editor of the Ideas Lab. Email: [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @DavidDHaynes
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee's historical Bronzeville lives on at a new website and app
