Midwest Nice Apartheid with Reggie Jackson

Presented by MPL and ABHM

Join award-winning local historian Reggie Jackson, author of "Midwest Nice Apartheid," for a series on Milwaukee's history of segregation and its ongoing impact on housing, education, and equity.

Join award-winning local historian Reggie Jackson, author of the upcoming book Midwest Nice Apartheid, for a series on Milwaukee’s history of segregation and its ongoing impact on housing, education, and equity. Presented by the Milwaukee Public Library and America's Black Holocaust Museum.

Reggie is the author of the upcoming book Midwest Nice Apartheid: The History and Harms of Segregation in Milwaukee, which covers how segregation policies and practices beginning in the early 1900s led to segregated spaces in metro Milwaukee. These policies and practices created a two-tier system of homeownership between blacks and whites while forcing blacks to have limited opportunities in terms of where they could live. Their residential spaces were relegated to the oldest housing stock in the city and mostly as renters because they could not acquire a mortgage from most banks while living in a redlined part of the city. This segregation limited educational and employment opportunities. Eventually black people saw that the segregated schools limited their ability to find upward mobility. By the late 1970s the manufacturing jobs that brought black people to Milwaukee started to go away creating high levels of unemployment and pockets of concentrated poverty that impacts their social determinants of health. The challenges we see in the black community today are a direct result of the past discrimination they faced in housing.

Reggie Jackson is a U.S. Navy veteran, and internationally renowned expert on race relations, the 2021 winner of the Carter G. Woodson Memorial Award from the National Education Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, has conducted seminars at over a dozen college campuses around the state of Wisconsin while traveling to over fifty communities conducting lectures, workshops and facilitated dialogue sessions on American history. He is the winner of over twenty awards for his work as a journalist and activist supporting closer race relations within multiple communities throughout the state and served as Head Griot (oral historian) at America’s Black Holocaust Museum for two decades. Reggie is the protégé of the museum’s founder Dr. James Cameron, and the author of the forthcoming book Midwest Nice Apartheid: The History and Harms of Segregation in Milwaukee. Reggie’s approach to U.S. history is what he calls parallel journeys in history, recognizing that Americans of all backgrounds have shared histories that emphasize our commonalities instead of differences.

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