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Milwaukee was to get a big-league image that summer -- but not one it wanted. This was a summer of unrest in America: riots and civil conflicts, dozens of them, broke out across the country, including the huge conflagrations in Newark and Detroit. A week after the baseball game, Milwaukee joined the list, when a riot broke out in the city's "Inner Core." The mayor, and others, preferred to call it a civil disturbance. Seventeen hundred were arrested, nearly a hundred injured, and four dead: a young man, two old women, a cop.
On a muggy August night, we heeded the mayor's curfew, eating quietly at a picnic table in the backyard, spraying Off! on our arms and legs. The city's most improbable civil rights leader, a Catholic priest named James Groppi, was in the Journal, calling the riot a "revolt."
It was our last summer in the backyard. Soon, we'd pay to put an indoor pool where the yard was now. The doctors now thought that what Dad had was multiple sclerosis. Unlike the polio that got his left side, the M.S. hit his strong right side. He was already losing some of those powerful muscles in his right leg, the one that compensated. The only way to slow the right leg's deterioration, the doctors said, was by exercise, and the only way to exercise was to swim.
We had time to think that night: to slap at mosquitos, and chew slowly on burgers, and look at Dad's crutches, lying in the grass; to imagine the electric shovels, soon to breach the moist soil and make a hole beneath our feet; to wonder about the riot, and the curfew, and what Father Groppi was calling a revolt.
Would this revolt reach us? And if it did, what would we do? Mom and Dad believed in integration. Since the fifties, they'd sent us to an integrated grade school, the Campus School of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. But this riot, this "revolt" -- no one had taught us anything about that.
At the heart of the battles that summer -- as I learned from my fifth-grade classmate Dale Phillips -- was the right for blacks to live wherever they wanted in the city. Dale's mom, Vel Phillips, the first black and first woman on the Milwaukee Common Council (and a friend of Hank's), had many times introduced a bill to allow open housing in the city. As Hank had said in the paper, there was "de facto segregation" in our town. Certainly I'd never noticed any blacks living in my neighborhood. Again and again Dale's mom put forward the open housing resolution. Again and again it was defeated, 18-1, by aldermen saying they feared that if the resolution passed, the whites would move to the suburbs, where no such laws existed. The mayor agreed.
By that summer, the battle was in the streets. One day Dale took me to a rally where Father Groppi was shouting from the podium. He was flanked by the Commandoes of the NAACP Youth Council, young black men standing straight, black berets tilted over one eye. The Commandoes, Dale told me, ran the street demonstrations with discipline. They were unarmed, but Dale said, "Nobody messes with them." Sometimes even the police would back down from a confrontation. Other times, the cops wielded their long billy clubs.
On the stage, Father Groppi was enraged, roaring into the microphone, going on about black power and the need to fight whitey. I looked at my skin and at the skin of the man on the podium. I felt strange; wasn't Groppi himself a white man? Wasn't his father an Italian grocer? "He's white, but he's black," Dale told me. "I mean, the dude's white, but he's black." But who, I wondered, was whitey? Was whitey the bigot on the south side who wouldn't let the black man live in his neighborhood? Or was I, this eleven-year-old kid from the east side, was I whitey, too?
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