Editor’s note: Have something on your mind? “Community Voices” is the place to let Milwaukee hear what you have to say. To be considered, we need your name, email address and phone number for verification. Please email your submissions to [email protected]. Frank Schneiger, the founder and president of Frank Schneiger and Associates., a planning and change management company serving the nonprofit and public service sectors, discusses how a job on a playground 60 years ago awakened his views on race. William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The unfolding events surrounding the killing of George Floyd brought that quote to mind in a very specific way. As a white kid growing up in all-white Milwaukee neighborhoods in the1940s and ’50s, I was a product of the “colored are treated good here” era in the city’s history. Eight decades later, the legacy of that universally held white belief haunts the city to this day. Do you have feedback on Milwaukee NNS's reporting? Take our survey to let us know how we're doing! In my mostly Catholic South Side neighborhood, racial bigotry was kind of low on the hierarchy of “isms.” At the top of the list was anti-Protestantism, fueled by regular Sunday sermons on the Protestant “deformation.” Then there was anti-Semitism, a result of the virus brought to our country by mostly East European immigrants, despite the fact that there were no Jews living anywhere near 26 Street and National Avenue. And, finally, there was reflexive homophobia, evidenced by the widespread knowledge that teenagers would travel downtown to the Mint Bar on Saturday nights to “beat up some queers,” an activity that no one seemed compelled to condemn or stop. Black Milwaukeeans were barely on the radar screen at that time, partially because it was beyond anyone’s imagination that there could ever be Black people living on the South Side; but also because, at that time, the Black image in the white mind was still one of silly but harmless people who weren’t very bright, and who, mostly as part of the Great Migration, must be so thankful to have arrived in Milwaukee. That would all change with the advent of the civil rights and Black power movements when the current menacing image would take hold. In those seemingly more innocent times, white people would swear that they had seen Black Milwaukeeans driving pink Cadillacs to pick up their welfare checks. The fact that welfare checks came in the mail, and that no one had ever seen one of these pink Cadillacs, except for Elvis Presley’s, did little to dent this firmly held belief — “I mean, I swear to God.” Underpinning this whole set of attitudes was the fundamental assumption of white goodness and innocence. Logically, if “the colored are treated good here,” there was no need to feel either guilty about or responsible for anything, including rampant discrimination in housing, employment, education and criminal justice. And, equally logically, if there were any problems, they were their own fault: “They” needed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In our immigrant family, where a basic value was to be on the side of the underdogs, mostly people like us, Black people didn’t make the cut. Exactly 60 years ago, June of 1960, that changed for me, and it was a version of the George Floyd story that produced the change, albeit quite by accident. My friends and I grew up on Milwaukee’s public school playgrounds, artifacts of the city’s glorious socialist past. We were what could be called street urchins, and, for a brief period, delinquents. Our operational base was 37 Street School and its playground. In the summer of 1956, we – a group of dopey 13 and 14-year-olds – made a vow. It was that no director of the 37 Street playground would survive the summer. We were wildly successful. The first of our victims made the mistake of driving one of the early Volkswagen Beetles imported into the country. We didn’t exactly steal it. We simply picked it up, carried it away and hid it under a tarp in a backyard on Sarnow Street. He quit and spent the rest of the summer looking for his car. Others were to follow. All of this was watched in horror and disgust by the district supervisor, a man who had known us and treated us with kindness ever since we were little kids. Summer ended, and we started high school, mostly at all-white Washington High, where Mrs. Porter, the American History teacher, taught that the wrong side had won the Civil War. Troublemaking and social disruption were replaced by sports, or in a couple of rare cases, reading a book. The summer of playground terror was soon forgotten. Flash forward four years. After my freshman year at UW-Milwaukee, the summer factory and construction job market were not looking promising.