Wauwatosa

Basic Information

Type of Place

Independent City or Town

Metro Area

Politics c. 1860?

Don’t Know

Unions, Organized Labor?

Don’t Know

Sundown Town Status

Sundown Town in the Past?

Possible

Was there an ordinance?

Don't Know

Sign?

Don’t Know

Year of Greatest Interest

Still Sundown?

Surely Not

Census Information

The available census data from 1860 to the present

	Total	White	Black	Asian	Native	Hispanic	Other	BHshld
1860	3415		0
1870	3689		8
1880
1890
1900	2842		0
1910	3346		1
1920	5818		7
1930	21194		6
1940	27769		54
1950	33324		5
1960	56923		240
1970	58676		397
1980	51308		346
1990	49366	48042	612					101
2000	47,271	44,422	865					297
2010
2020

Method of Exclusion

• Unknown

Main Ethnic Group(s)

• Unknown

Group(s) Excluded

• Black

Comments

“National Guard deployed for antidiscrimination protests, 1966.” Implies there had been charges of [suburban?] housing discrimination.
[WI Cartographers’ Guild, WI’s Past and Present (Madison: U WI P, 1998), 26.]

Known informally as “White-a-tosa” acc. to Canoe Base staffer, 8/2004.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online jsonline.com
BRUCE MURPHY, “A generation ago, bias was written on deed,” Posted: 2/21/2004
“For decades, any minority seeking to move into the Washington Highlands subdivision, one of the elite areas of Wauwatosa, would encounter this legal restriction: “At no time shall the land included in Washington Highlands, or any part thereof, or any building thereon be purchased, owned, leased or occupied by any person other than of white race.”
“I thought it was in the interest of the overall metropolitan area’s well being to have an integrated society.” Gerald Schwerm, Brown Deer village manager from 1966 to 1978
This restriction was in effect from 1920 until the 1970s, when the subdivision’s covenant deleted this clause, a notation at the Wauwatosa Historical Society suggests.
Lois Quinn, who served as executive director of the now disbanded Metropolitan Integration Research Center, researched such deed restrictions, and found examples of them in 16 of 18 Milwaukee County suburbs. There were also subdivisions in the City of Milwaukee with such covenants, she said.
Quinn paid particular attention to suburbs such as Wauwatosa and Brown Deer, areas adjoining the north and west sides of Milwaukee, where most blacks reside. In Wauwatosa, she found that in the past, 51 subdivisions encompassing one third of all residential land prohibited non whites from renting or owning homes.
Well into the 1950s, even after the Supreme Court in 1948 ended judicial enforcement of such covenants, they continued to be recorded in Milwaukee County. Places such as Wauwatosa also found other ways to discourage integration.
News stories show that in 1955, an African American, Zeddie Q. Hyler, bought a new home in Wauwatosa, only to be met with a deluge of hate phone calls and vandalism. The city’s Common Council then passed a 30 day moratorium on building permits in the area.
In 1956, William Kelley, the black director of the Milwaukee Urban League, was refused permission to build a home in Wauwatosa. In 1959, two officials on the city’s building board suggested that potential black homeowners should be required to meet more stringent aesthetic standards than whites.
Vel Phillips, a champion of open housing who served as a Milwaukee alderman at the time, says today that Wauwatosa “was absolutely closed to black people” back then.
*Progressive leaders*
Brown Deer and Glendale, both incorporated in the 1950s, offered a marked contrast to an older city like Wauwatosa, created in the the 1890s. Quinn found not one example of a restrictive covenant in Brown Deer but can remember finding at least one in Glendale.
“Brown Deer was more open, with lots of farmland,” said Phillips, and that kind of fluidity made it less resistant to change, she added.
Brown Deer also had some progressive leaders. Gerald Schwerm, Brown Deer village manager from 1966 to 1978, was a leader in pushing for low and moderate income housing in the suburbs. He chaired a subcommittee of the League of Suburban Municipalities that recommended suburbs should be open to low and moderate income housing, which inevitably would bring in minority residents.
Schwerm and the Brown Deer Village Board soon created such housing in their city.
“I thought it was in the interest of the overall metropolitan area’s well being to have an integrated society,” Schwerm said in a recent interview.
By 1976, when Milwaukee’s city schools were desegregated, Brown Deer’s population was 4% black, which made it 200 times more integrated than Wauwatosa, which was 0.02% black at the time.
Brown Deer also became a leader in embracing city suburban student exchanges of Chapter 220, the state law promoting integration.
There was a “comfort level” with the idea, said former Brown Deer superintendent of schools Ken Moe, partly because the village had “some experience of success of people of different backgrounds living together.”
By the 2000 census, Brown Deer was 12.5% black, and Glendale was 8%. Wauwatosa lagged far behind at around 2%.
Affordability may help explain some of the difference. The median price of a Wauwatosa home is $187,000, compared with around $165,000 in Glendale and $130,000 in Brown Deer. Surveys also show that most African Americans would prefer to live in neighborhoods with a representative population of blacks.
As for the old idea that home values will decline because of the presence of blacks, the statistics for Brown Deer don’t support this. The median value of homes owned by African Americans there is $144,000, compared with $116,400 for whites.
When asked about Wauwatosa’s receptivity to homeowners of color, Mayor Theresa Estness said, “Certainly, that’s something I speak about, that we need to be a welcoming place for all people. Can any community do better? Well, of course.”
Vincent Lyles, an investment banker with Baird & Co., is African American and lives on the northwest side of Wauwatosa, in the Sheraton Lawns subdivision. Lyles said he was “pretty impressed” with the neighborhood, and has been welcomed by neighbors. “I would bet Wauwatosa is a little more sophisticated today,” Lyles said.

According to a former resident, “We were one of three African-American families to buy and live there. Apparently, although I’ve never seen the evidence of this, my father got a Jewish man to buy the land and then sell it to him, in order to subvert what I think was a defacto real estate policy of not selling to blacks. Our ‘neighbors’ were mostly unfriendly (a few stand out as being accepting). One of our immediate neighbors immediately planted a thorny hedge between our properties and never spoke to us. I was the only black child at my elementary school and many of the kids were racist. Looking back, I had one and only one white friend throughout elementary school. I’m fascinated that according to your statistics, there were 200-300 blacks in Wauwatosa in the 1960s. I find this hard to believe and wonder where they were. There was a huge institutional complex – including a mental illness asylum and an orphanage – perhaps there were black inmates? Alternatively, there was an old section of Wauwatosa where people were very wealthy – perhaps some of them had live-in black workers.”