Loss of manufacturing jobs hits Milwaukee's Black community hard

The loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the last couple of decades has hurt this city harder than nearly any other, causing a racial rift and a growing gap between rich and poor, a newspaper's analysis found. A generation ago, Milwaukee offered hope, opportunity and jobs to people of all races. But since then, the city has turned from a place of unrivaled opportunity for blacks into a locus of downward mobility without equal among other big U.S. cities, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Sunday. The newspaper said Milwaukee's working-age black men have suffered almost twice the drop in employment that the nation endured in the Depression, plummeting by 21 percentage points from 1970 to the most recent census in 2000. The paper said black residents were downsized more than any other demographic because they relied more on low-skill labor than blacks in any other American city. Many had come north from a Southern agricultural society, and many hadn't finished high school. [more]