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“Go over, next to the door and stand there. Between the door and that window. Just stand there.” In those days, I did mostly what I was told to do, and didn’t ask a lot of questions. It’s not that there were no answers, but often the answers were in Spang-lish, a peculiar cross between Spanish and English a lot of guys from South Texas spoke. Other times, you didn’t want to know the answers, so why ask.

We were attending the funeral of one of our members who had died rather suddenly, at a church on the South Side of Milwaukee. The State had let the dead man’s son out of prison for the day, just for the funeral. Two police officers stood outside on the steps, enjoying the sun, smoking cigarettes, while the service was in progress.

This moment, I remember so viscerally, like many life changing moments adults have: the days your children were born (or with me, adopted), the day you were married, the day a parent died. It had that kind of importance because for many of us, community work was that important! It’s not that community work doesn’t mean as much today, or that the politics are less interesting, or the people associated with community based organizations less colorful. It appears to me that the stakes are not very high—yet our streets are still very deadly.

It was 1977, and I was working at Esperanza Unida (EU), the workers’ rights organization on the South Side. It wasn’t work exactly, in any conventional sense. It sure wasn’t a job. I hadn’t been paid in 18 months. None of us had. None of us, included Ted Uribe, the director, Rich Oulahan, and me. I was the organization’s secretary.

I had graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a master’s degree in industrial relations three years earlier. It was a strange time, the mid-70s, but this was stranger than I had bargained for. I had moved to Milwaukee from Madison to work for the teachers’ union here, MTEA, and hated every day of it. It wasn’t for me.

The union gave me a small severance after I quit, and my health insurance was covered for a while, so I started hanging out with friends who were involved in South Side community organizing. In those days, that meant Milwaukee’s Social Development Commission, the agency in town that was charged with distributing federal funds for anti-poverty programs. SDC ran a number of resident councils on the north and south sides of town. The struggle for control of these groups was really intense. Whoever had control of these councils controlled the money. And that control meant which community and social service agencies got funded and which did not.

Even after we organized over 700 residents in 1977 to come out to vote for our slate of candidates and took control of the resident council, SDC made sure none of its federal funds flowed to our organization. We were representing injured, mostly Hispanic, workers who had been injured in workplace accidents, usually fired and never compensated through workers compensation or unemployment. We fought for those rights in court, and through Unemployment Compensation and Workers Compensation hearings we won more often than lost against the biggest names in Milwaukee manufacturing.

The job was also weird. I’d get a phone call every morning, seven days a week, telling me at which Big Boy restaurant to meet the voice on other end of the phone. He would just say, “27th St” or “Van Buren,” and then hang up. The voice was Ted’s. He’d tell me where to go and I’d meet him there 30 minutes later. He always beat me to the Big Boy. He’d be in the back of the restaurant, facing the front of the room. My uncle, a union organizer with the International Ladies Garment Workers during the McCarthy Era in New York, told me this was an old organizer trick. Always know where the exits are, and NEVER sit with your back to the patrons in the restaurant.

“So here’s what we’re going to do today,” Ted would tell me. I would write eight or 10 things he wanted done, go back to the office and get to work. Mostly clerical work, since I was the only one who knew how to type. Weekends were always fun. I’d get to the Big Boy on Saturday morning at 6:30 and he’d say, “Go to Berta’s, and take out the refrigerator and go the junk yard in the Valley and get her another. Get a couple of guys to help you.” I’d go over to some address he gave me and pick up a truck with a few Mexican guys, go to Berta’s, haul out the fridge, get her another, deliver the fridge, return the truck and go back to the office. Some times he’d give me money to pay for a new fridge, other times it was taken care of. The next week it was tires or car parts for someone else. I got to know Milwaukee’s junk yards pretty well.

Some Saturdays he’d meet me at the office and tell me he wanted the files from one box removed and placed into another box. Usually, it was the same box I had moved the files from the week before. This went on every Saturday like clockwork.

I worked until midnight every day except Sunday. There were always people in the office, even late at night. Community control over low-income neighborhoods was a hot issue in Milwaukee and other cities around the country, but no more so than in Chicago.

Somehow we got involved with these very strange people from Chicago who claimed to be the “white arm” of the Black Panther Party. They sold their magazines on the streets, and lived in safe house collectives. They organized with us against SDC, and finally we wrestled control away from SDC and their hand-picked board of directors on the resident councils.

During these days, I met colorful and enduring characters, many of whom became respected leaders of the city years later. People like Tom Donegan, Mary Ann McNulty, Janice Ereth, Nick Topping (who brought the Beatles to Milwaukee in 1964), Nick’s brother Memo Topetzes, Nick Ballas, Rosemary Holley, Don Sykes, George Gerharz, Tony Maggorie, Tony Baez, Filberto Murgia, Lee Holloway, Tom “TJ” Jackson, Berta Zamudio, Lupe Martinez, Ernesto Chacon, the murdered activist Aurora Weir and the not-yet-beatified, Ted Seaver.

There were a few perks in my job. One night I picked up Angela Davis at someone’s apartment and took her to a speech she was giving and later to a party. Her Afro kept hitting the ceiling of my 1970 VW Beetle. I got fed at the office every night and never paid for a drink in South Side bars where people knew me.

Milwaukee was a wild place, politically. And threats of violence were not idle ones.

The husband of a member of EU’s board was found murdered, stuffed in a trash can next to the bar he owned. Aurora Weir was killed by Angel Santiago, gunned down in the Riverwest neighborhood in a struggle for power in the Puerto Rican community. Black Panther Party members were being killed by Chicago police in their apartments, so it wasn’t like we were completely paranoid. I was arrested in the conference room of SDC with about 60 other people for not leaving a meeting we demanded with Don Sykes, SDC’s executive director. Years later, he became a good friend and funding source for my organization, when he worked in the Clinton Administration in Washington.

Today, SDC has all but eliminated community election of their commissioners, much less resident councils. The last time such a citizen-oriented, democratic process existed was in the mid-1990s when the City of Milwaukee experimented for a year or so with resident-based strategic planning. When the citizens actually voted on how they wanted to see federal funds used, the City did away with the process. After all, citizens, armed with useful information and power, can be pretty dangerous.

When I see or hear about kids running the streets past midnight, like any parent, I say to myself, “Where are those kids’ parents?” I think of the usual answers: moms are working more than one job, there are no men in the community, women can’t control their teenage sons, dads are in jail. But nobody has yet said, “You know, when there were community groups, there was more control of the streets. What happened to all of those groups, anyway?” A great question, reader! Well, they’re mostly gone.

And it’s not like the aldermen, the bureaucrats and the former mayor of Milwaukee weren’t warned. No, they were warned, all right! We told them that they would lose their grip of the streets, that only thugs and police would be out at night, absent many of the community groups, block watches, neighborhood patrols, picnics in the park that established a layer of social control. Community organizing was the first thing cut when city block grant money was reduced. The City continued to fund its own operations but was willing to cut the funds that made the streets less dangerous. And don’t get me started with businesspeople and nonprofit consultant types who thought Milwaukee had too many nonprofits that needed to be more efficient, go away or be merged into bigger groups.

Was it just government funding cuts that has made inner city streets so deadly? Well, no, of course not. What is happening on our streets is a very new phenomenon. Let’s explore it a bit.

Times did change. Part of the problem with the “product” that many community groups sold to their neighborhood was that their “customers” were no longer buying.

Besides organizing, programs that community groups ran were designed to redress some inequity that was exposed during the civil rights era. Name it: housing, voting, education, job training, access to bank loans, redlining by insurance companies, whatever. The assumption always was that poor people wanted to become middle class.

Gaining these rights allowed for home ownership, bank loans, college educations, upward mobility in careers. All good things. But today, many younger people no longer want that. Home ownership or a college education is meaningless to to them. In effect, many poor residents in the inner city are rejecting middle class values. They are little impressed with programs designed to assist them to vote, buy a house, send their kids to college or participate in civil society. Not all mind you, but a majority of what we think of as the “underclass”.

It is my contention that in the worst parts of American cities, we have moved beyond the idea of “two Americas”. That concept presumes that but for disadvantage, there would be only one America. Programs redress disadvantage, so let’s fund programs so that disadvantage goes away. Its not that people consciously want to be poor, perpetually locked in a permanent “underclass”. But, it may be that many people, for the first time, are no longer willing to do what it takes to get out of the hole. That is, they no longer a buying the middle class hype.

So when the money and new ideas went away, many neighborhood and resident groups went the way of pterodactyls. And our urban streets became a bloody mess and kids were to be feared, not loved and taken care of.

As the pallbearers struggled down the church aisle with the coffin, surrounding the son and family members of the dead man, there was a small commotion by a side exit across from where I was standing. Quickly the door opened and the son was gone. The police outside never saw or heard a thing.

I am not sure whether the man got away from Milwaukee, whether he was caught and returned to prison or is living or dead down near the Mexican border. I only know the police learned a lesson that day, one we all knew. Never take your eye off the exits. I know many of former citizens of our city didn’t. They knew where the exits in Milwaukee were.

I don’t have many answers. But I know that many of the young people who are buying condos in Brewers Hill will be making tough choices in a few years when their children approach school age. Keeping them from leaving Milwaukee will depend on making our city a less dangerous place. Getting control of Milwaukee streets is not a cop issue. It’s an “us” issue. It always has been.