UN-PLANNED: RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES AND NEIGHBORHOOD ACTIVISM ON MILWAUKEE’S WEST SIDE

Abstract

This thesis examines the history of the Sherman Park Community Association (SPCA) during the 1970s. Formed in 1971, the SPCA transitioned during its first decade from a grassroots human relations organization to a grant-funded, staffed economic development nonprofit. Through analyzing archival records, oral histories, and spatial data, this thesis recovers the influence of the human relations movement on the contemporary urban nonprofit sector. Chapter 1 traces the origins of the SPCA to several endogenous spatial factors, including the neighborhood’s housing stock, socioeconomic and ethnoreligious makeup, and previous history of integration attempts. While it is commonly believed that the threat of the planned Park West freeway provided the impetus for neighborhood activism in Sherman Park, this thesis argues that changes in school redistricting served as the immediate cause for the incorporation of the SPCA. This chapter also shows how the SPCA’s founders quickly realized the drawbacks of a human relations-based strategy while trying to intervene in the neighborhood’s public schools and housing market and began to search for different modes of activism in order to obtain more effective results. Chapter 2 discusses the SPCA’s fight against the Park West Freeway and explores how the organization leveraged the threat of the Park West to advance several “place-frames” about Sherman Park in the public imagination, creating an idea of the neighborhood that continues to exist today. Through these “place-frames,” the SPCA successfully argued that it and similar organizations should have a greater say in the governance of their service areas, creating a role for “neighborhood nonprofits” within the city’s governing regime. Chapter 3 shows how the SPCA during the mid-to-late 1970s combined elements of the human relations and economic development nonprofit models in order to develop several influential housing programs focused on promoting individual behavior change in order to combat structural inequality, disinvestment, and housing discrimination. These programs allowed the SPCA to evolve from a grassroots organization to a grant-funded social service agency, better represent and serve the interests an increasingly diverse community of neighborhood residents, and achieve financial sustainability in a difficult fiscal environment. However, this came at the cost of the ability to oppose the policy agendas of the actors to whom the organization depended on for funding and to advocate for systemic change.