Milwaukee’s Black history has been neglected for too long. Let’s change that.

The optics, I realize, may be a little perplexing, even problematic. In the last several months, I, a 77-year-old white male, have stood multiple times in front of Black or racially mixed audiences in traditionally Black venues telling the story of Black Milwaukee with the aid of historic photographs of Black Milwaukeeans. I’ve presented at the Wisconsin Black Historical Museum (invited by my friend and fellow historian Clayborn Benson), America’s Black Holocaust Museum, public high school classrooms, and Milwaukee Public Library branches in predominantly Black neighborhoods, where I’ve shared the podium with Clayborn. So what’s an old white guy doing up there talking about Black Milwaukee? That’s the elephant in the room, and I’ve addressed the question at the beginning of every talk. The answer is pretty simple. I’ve been studying Milwaukee’s history for more than five decades and talking about it for almost that long. At my pre-pandemic peak, I was giving more than fifty talks and tours a year — about one a week — and my audiences were always overwhelmingly, often exclusively, white. Opinion:County Executive David Crowley quietly returned to UWM. Now, he’s graduating. There’s something profoundly wrong with that picture. Not only does it demonstrate the...