Author: Reggie Jackson

This column is part of the special series From Mississippi to Milwaukee: My Journey to 53206 by Reggie Jackson, that explores the 53206 zip code of Milwaukee in an effort to educate about the historical context and social process that drove the once thriving part of the city into its current problematic condition. “The fight has just begun.” – Thurgood Marshall after winning Brown v. Board of Education case On May 17, 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. The work of decades of litigation by the NAACP (National...

“Hollywood movies are much more than a matter of entertainment. Hollywood has become a major source of education. For the majority of Americans, Hollywood’s movies are a constant source of images, ideas, and data about the social world.” – Joe R. Feagin In February 1899, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled The White Man’s Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands. In the poem, he called on the United States to take up the “burden” of empire in the same way that many European nations had already done. The British at one time bragged that the sun never...

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” – First Amendment to the United States Constitution A black sixth grade student was arrested in Florida after refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. The police arrested him for disruption and resisting arrest. The 11 year-old student at Lawton Chiles Middle Academy – in Lakeland, east of Tampa – refused to stand...

On a cloudy and overcast day in 1994, I was driving down North Avenue and saw something that caught my attention. It was a museum with an unusual name, America’s Black Holocaust Museum. I had only been back in Milwaukee for a little over a year after leaving California, which had been my home for most of the previous nine years. I parked my car on Fourth Street and walked up to the door of the museum. I had no idea what to expect, and didn’t even know if it was open. An elderly man who introduced himself as...

Making a conscious decision to sit down and put shoe polish on your face is a form of bullying. To appear in public or in a picture in blackface and pretending you did not know it is offensive is a form of bullying. Acting as if the 1980s was a time where people did not understand that appearing in blackface was offensive to black people is a form of bullying. I am tired of these bullies never having to really apologize. It seems we cannot escape being exposed to the enduring usage of blackface by white people across the...

Despite the fact that on four separate occasions the person that a majority of Americans voted for lost the Presidential election, the United States stubbornly holds onto the Electoral College to select the President every four years. Most of us, including those who argue for the system, are unaware of the role racism played in the creation of the Electoral College system. We claim to have democratic elections but in the most important election in the country, maybe the most important in the world, it is possible for the winner to lose the election. In the minds of most,...