Stanley: In a year like no other, we commit to better serving all the people of our city and state and improving our own staff diversity
George Stanley
In this year of pandemic and protests, we're seeing things we've never seen.
Black Lives Matter marches in Oconto, Waupaca, Beaver Dam and at least 42 additional towns across the state — places with no history of protests, not even in the 1960s. Black Lives Matter signs at the ends of long, rural Wisconsin driveways.
Our nation was founded on the promise that all are created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Our Constitution has been amended to uphold the rights of women and people once excluded by the tint of their skin. Additional laws passed in the wake of those '60s-era protests have encouraged equal justice.
But laws not written on hearts will get you only so far.
This has been a good year for introspection, for considering how we got here.
Our newsroom must do more to fully serve the varied communities in our city and state with relevant, trustworthy news that informs our democracy. We must do more to keep all of the people well informed about urgent news and events, health and safety, job opportunities, schools and education, how elected officials are serving public needs. Our parent company, Gannett, recognizes that it, too, must do more to serve all the communities in our USA Today Network.
"We will never achieve our quest for truth until our newsrooms fully reflect the communities we serve. Only then will we have diversity of perspectives to understand the facts we report in their full and proper context," said Maribel Perez Wadsworth, president of USA Today Network, in announcing a new diversity initiative for the Journal Sentinel and Gannett.
By 2025, our goal is that the newsroom staffs of the USA TODAY NETWORK will reflect the audiences they serve. Our Journal Sentinel newsroom will as well.
This means, for example, that we need to roughly double the number of Black journalists in our newsroom. They make up 8% of our staff today and about 16% of the metro population. We need more Latino journalists, who make up 7% of our newsroom and 11% of the people we aim to serve. We need more women journalists, who now represent less than 40% of our staff.
Only by listening can we learn. How do we better serve young adults of color? We ask about their most pressing news and information needs. We deliver relevant stories through mobile apps, text alerts and social platforms, in Spanish when helpful. We hire skilled journalists who understand their life experiences in ways we never could.
And that's how we find out that landlords and developers have been illegally dumping waste in Black neighborhoods. It's how we learn that Hispanic food plant workers didn't get sick pay and kept working, elbow to elbow without masks, during the first months of the coronavirus crisis. It's how we tell the stories of young community leaders who rise by helping others, and of much-loved elders lost to COVID-19. It's how we don't just report that people have drowned in the high waves and strong currents at McKinley Beach this summer — but that two of those victims were heroes who laid down their lives to save others.
We listen and we learn. Daily stories lead to more reporting. About how the trauma caused by lost jobs and broken homes can ripple from one neighborhood to another across generations. About how high unemployment, poverty and the ills attached to them correspond to neighborhoods shaded in red by our federal government in the 1930s because they were "deemed unworthy of economic investment" due to the race of their residents. About how federally insured banks used those red lines to reject home loans for Black families. About how even Black veterans returning home from defending us in war were rejected for mortgages backed by the G.I. Bill.
Add to these racial hurdles the flight of white families from neighborhoods and schools with Black children to suburbs with deed restrictions that banned home sales to families of color. The subsequent drop in home values for Black families who had overcome obstacles to buy a house. The disappearance of tens of thousands of family-sustaining jobs that had been within a short walk or bus ride from the neighborhoods where Black people were allowed to live — a loss so great that the unemployment rate for Black workers in Milwaukee leaped almost overnight in the 1980s to double the worst rate of the Great Depression.
I will never forget a phone call from a reader on the day we first reported that unemployment comparison years ago. He was a white World War II vet, from the south side of Milwaukee, who had come of age during the Depression. He had always blamed Black people for their poverty, he told me, for not picking themselves up.
Then he read that statistic in the story and recalled what had happened to his own family when jobs vanished in the 1930s. Families thrust suddenly into poverty often break.
He began to cry over the phone, this veteran from a generation that did not cry. "It's not their fault," he said, sobbing. "It's not their fault."
Whenever possible, as we report on challenges facing our community, we also search for potential solutions — best practices used here or elsewhere with proven evidence of success. This summer we began a new series, "Milwaukee's Promise." Reporter James Causey and photographer Angela Peterson are describing best practices for improving racial equity — from owning homes in safe neighborhoods with good schools, to building better pathways to family-sustaining jobs for people of color.
The project sprang from an earlier special report, "What Happened To Us?,'' in which Causey told the life stories of students from his 1978 third grade class at Samuel Clemens Elementary, 3600 W. Hope Ave.
At the time Causey started working on this latest project, employers had several hundred thousand unfilled jobs around the state. Taxpayer dollars were being used to buy recruitment ads in Illinois and elsewhere while Black unemployment remained high in Milwaukee.
Where might we, in Milwaukee and Wisconsin, find ourselves instead if our culture treated each person living here as a valuable asset, a treasure worth investing in, regardless of skin color? What might we accomplish if our public policies and private practices reflected those values so clearly that children of color could see it in our eyes?
This is Milwaukee's Promise.
We could not report this story, we could not see this story, without journalists who have the skills, experiences and insights of James Causey and Angela Peterson.
"Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 57 years ago next week. "Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. ... Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children."
We've waited long enough. Let's go.
Email Editor George Stanley at george.stanley@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @geostanley.