A friend asked me to take her today to the Division of Motor Vehicle (DMV) to get license plates for a car her family had just purchased. I headed to the nearest DMV office which is downtown. It is there I got my license when I was 16 and had been there many times with family, friends and myself for car matters. She had her doubts about going there and she was right. This DMV office no longer offers license plates. The closest office was on the far South Side so we headed there. My friend had got a list of DMV offices and sadly,to no surprise, there was no office in North Central Milwaukee, the most racially segregated, poorest area in Milwaukee (See M.A.P.S.).

Driving a car is a challenge for low income persons but not having a DMV office there just increases the challenge for these citizens to drive. This is one more example of the racism that is rampart in Milwaukee.

Later in the day I attended a symposium at Marquette University that billed itself as the history of Marquette’s Educational Opportunity Program (E.O.P.), a program started after student protest in 1968 on ‘institutional racism’ at Marquette, the low number of African American students. The promotion of the program had been so historically inaccurate, saying the protest was a student response to Martin Luther King’s death, not mentioning the group that spearheading the protest and calling a fellow Jesuit scholastic at the time as an “60′s activist” made me go over the Marquette University Library to get a copy of the official 100 history: “Milwaukee Jesuit University Marquette 1881–1981.” I was prepared for a revisionist history.

As is the custom these days with panels or speakers on controversial subjects like racism there was no time for comments or questions. However, my concern for historical accuracy was not important since three of the panelist were people I knew at that time and they told the story like it was. I talked with two of them afterwards to say hello and expressed my concern that the number of students from North Central Milwaukee in the program has declined over the years. They were both aware of this fact and had made subtle hints about this in their talks. Is this another example of an institution going backwards in the civil rights struggle?

Marquette’s new president was present as the panelist talked about the university being a place for free exchange of ideas. The other big struggle of 67–69 at Marquette was the resistance to military training at Marquette University. We lost that struggle in a big way as Marquette is now the regional training center for Department of Defense for Army, Navy/Marines and Air Force. We have been trying to get a ‘dialog’ for years at Marquette about presence of military departments on campus for Southeastern Wisconsin. Maybe now is the time to ask again.

However, dialog of issues of peace and social justice are not in vogue today. Just like with our struggle with racism of local St. Vincent de Paul our views are tolerated, not debated, and just ignored or marginalized, the message and the messenger. However, I need not give in to despair but continue to hope that we can once again talk about Gospel values and how to practice them in our lives. If someone can show me how it is okay for Marquette to teach war and killing without conscience I would need to change my mind. If someone in St. Vincent de Paul could show me how spending millions of dollars of poor person’s monies in the suburbs helps the poor in North Central Milwaukee than, in conscience, I would need to accept it.

The values I was raised on, including 13 years of Jesuit education, tells me these two things, teaching killing and ignoring the poor are wrong and without a dialog we must struggle for the truth.

One of my friends active in civil rights asked a group at a meeting of St. Vincent de Paul: “How far do you need to drive African Americans back into slavery?”

Comments

Please send any comments on this post to . Let us know which day’s post your comments pertain to. If the comments are appropriate we will post them here for you.