Steven M. Avella

Milwaukee Catholicism Intersects with Deindustrialization and White Flight, 1950–1990

Post-World War II Milwaukee remained America’s “machine shop,” with thousands of workers manufacturing specialized metal components for automobiles, heating plants, turbines, earth-moving equipment, and electrical controls. It was also a blue collar, union town with a dynamic history of European immigrants. After the war, a new migratory flow altered the city’s demographic balance as African Americans, some directly from the rural South and many transplants from other Northern industrial cities participated in the rich possibilities for employment in Milwaukee’s “metal-bending” industries. Milwaukee’s encounter with the Great Migration came later than other Northern cities such as Chicago and Detroit. At that same time, deindustrialization ate slowly at those same industrial jobs that made Milwaukee such a livable city. In the process of adjusting spatially to thousands of newcomers, large sections of formerly German-American neighborhoods north and northwest of the CBD were transformed from white to black districts. Racial tensions mounted with a population having only the weakest of experiences in living with a bi-racial population. Sizable relocations of both Caucasians and African Americans took place amid massive job reductions. Caught in transformations was the Catholic Church with its large, sophisticated network of local parishes and schools. Over several decades, the Church hierarchy strove to retain its presence and influence in these transitional neighborhoods, in particular pits presence through the old network of parochial schools. Ultimately, congregational statistics required difficult decisions, leading to parish closings and land sales.

The Road to Renewal: Victor Joseph Reed and Oklahoma Catholicism, 1905–1971 (review)

donations to the church buy the clergy’s approbation of his treatment of workers? George mentions that Al Capone was a parishioner, but he does not mention the church’s stand on organized crime that permeated Miami in the twenties and thirties. Although George mentions that Gesu was the mother church of Miami’s first black Catholic parish, he says nothing about the Catholic Church’s role in the dramatic civil rights struggle that went on in the city in the 1950s and 1960s.