Part 1 of 2

by Jonathan Gramling

Pia Kinney-James, the first African American female to serve as an officer in the Madison Police Department, is a home-grown Madisonian whose life is a microcosm of the Black experience in the Madison area.

Kinney-James grew up on Madison’s south side, depending on how one defines it. The notion of the south side has been expended to go as far east as Bridge Road and as far west as Allied Drive. Some shrink it down to include the areas adjacennt to S. Park Street south of Wingra Creek.

“Almost all people of color — except for some of the Italians — and people who were lower than lower got pushed out to South Madison, which was not developed,” Kinney-James said. “There were no sidewalks. We had open gutters. There was a lot of farmland and undeveloped land. There were people already living in South Madison like the Harrises and the Caires.”

South Madison was also looked down upon and neglected by the city of Madison in those days.

“S. Park Street was a country road south of Wingra Creek,” Kinney-James said. “It was all country. There was no major development at all. It was the Black women who finally got together after living further south who got support and campaigned the city to have roads put in and sidewalks and gutters and make it usable for their kids basically. We had to walk to Franklin School on Lakeside Street.”

It was the Black mothers who lived in the Bram Hill area, the area east of S. Park Street who made South Madison a community.

“Mrs. Willie Lou Harris was one of the main persons who organized other women to get the South Madison Neighborhood Center built so that the kids would have something to do,” Kinney-James recalled. “And in that, it was an educational building as well. There were two old barracks that were put together. It was just an old raggedy building from Truax Field. And the educational part of it was I learned a new tap dance. There was a library. We learned basic cooking and basic sewing. I got my first internship as a teenager, because I was going to be a nurse, to work at a clinic. There were about 20 of us who went to different places in order to learn what our career might be. So I went into nursing. My internship was at a clinic. And Charlene Liz Harris wanted to be a journalist, so she ended up taking an internship to do that. It was something that the women of South Madison basically said, ‘We want our kids to have something because the city and other resource spaces were not providing those types of things. We also had the St. Martin House. That was on Beld Street and is now part of the Catholic Multicultural Center. And that was an extension of the things that were taught at the old Neighborhood House in the Bush. A lot of the Italian, Jewish and German families learned English there. They had a daycare center. Like I said, we were a melting pot and we supported each other. It was a community that was positive on the inside and looked at from the outside as bad or negatively.”

But when Kinney-James was growing up, south side meant the areas south of Regent Street to the Beltline that included the Greenbush area, which is where Kinney-James’ story begins.

“This was during the 1960s and 1970s,” Kinney-James said. “We were all considered lower-class. We intermingled with Italians, Jewish, Germans and basically poor-white trash. We were a melting pot because we all worked together and supported each other. It was the outside influences from white people and the establishment/government that would enter the area and cause problems and not give us resources. We were such a melting pot of getting together. We knew who we were and stood our ground. We knew not to date each other and things like that. But yet we supported each other and bartered with each other for goods, whether it was food or wood, things that we needed to survive. That’s why I say it was a melting pot. I know of several instances where the police were involved in coming into the Bush area and going after those making alcohol. Also there were white men who were trying to date Italian women. That caused a couple of fights.”

The heart of the Bush was the triangle of land bordered by Regent Street, Park Street and W. Washington Avenue. While it was low-cost housing and some properties were run down, it was still a community. But the land it occupied was valuable land, approximate to Madison General Hospital and Brittingham Park and only a stone’s throw away from downtown Madison. Tghe area wasa slated to be cleared and “renewed.”