The Milwaukee Metropolitan area was a fascinating place to me as I was coming of age in the 1960s. Although I grew up in the western suburb of Elm Grove, through the news and the “adventures” of my older brothers, I was are of what was going on in Milwaukee. And when my brother, cousins and I went down the Mississippi River on a raft from St. Louis to New Orleans one summer, we were delayed returning home because Milwaukee was under a 24/7 curfew because of the riots going on in 1967.

Some of the conflict — in my opinion — was caused by the urban planning going on that looked at the big picture of arranging for easy and timely transportation by car from the suburbs to downtown Milwaukee. During this process, they should have looked at the small pictures that were impacted along the way. For the ease of suburban drivers, the heart of Milwaukee’s Black commercial district was essentially destroyed as the housing for the residents who fed it were knocked down to make way for the freeway. An impoverished community was further impoverished because of the big-picture urban design that didn’t seriously take the interests of the Black community into consideration when designing and routing the I-43 freeway. People were still trapped by segregation, but now some of their economic means had been seriously hampered and destroyed.