Protesters made their way toward UW-Madison’s campus chanting “Black Lives Matter” and “Jacob Blake.” They briefly held up traffic on Johnson Street, where they shouted “all cops are bad cops” at a handful of police officers watching from the curb.
Let’s be honest. Madison has always struggled to expand or even maintain its ranks of professionals of color. I’ve witnessed firsthand the turmoil felt by Blacks about the price their families pay to live in a city where their numbers are so few and their sense of being scrutinized so constant. Which makes the perspective of Patrick Sims so relevant. Sims came through Chicago’s troubled public schools to graduate from Yale University and earn a master’s degree in the professional theater program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Nathan Haimowitz says this primary is his first time as poll worker. The 20-year-old UW-Madison student has said he is enjoying watching the voting process unfold.
An already-battered Madison hospitality industry could take another hit worth tens of millions of dollars if the Big Ten Conference ultimately decides to cancel the fall football season because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Service will increase by approximately 300 bus hours a day, from 700 to approximately 1,000, not including UW-Madison campus circulators or service for the Madison School District, Metro planning manager Drew Beck said. The pre-COVID-19 level was about 1,300 bus hours a day.
The Wisconsin Black Market is an Instagram page that showcases Black business owners in Wisconsin. The creators, Nalah Shea and Jalia Labre, hope this page will foster a prosperous Black market in Wisconsin.
Shortly after finding out about the money from the county, Mt. Zion lead pastor Rev. Marcus Allen called University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Gloria Ladson-Billings about getting something started. “Like this,” he said while snapping his fingers, “she had a whole acronym and everything ready to go.” Ladson-Billings said she’s “been thinking about questions of summer slide for a while,” and this was a good opportunity to put some of those thoughts into practice.
Kathy Cramer, who leads the BadgersVote committee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that group’s activities have shifted to virtual engagement and absentee voting education.
Students from UW-Madison are teaming with non-profit group WISPIRG in an effort to register 1,000 new voters ahead of the fall election.
“Two summers ago, we became aware of some research that had been done that had been commissioned by Chancellor Blank at UW-Madison looking into the KKK’s presence at the university,” said Adam Zingsheim, principal of Philip H. Falk Elementary. Zingsheim says that research found Philip Falk — a former Madison superintendent — had also been a member of a KKK student group.
Noted: Before that, on Thursday, Aug. 6, there will be a virtual program entitled “Black Male Suffrage in Early Wisconsin,” presented by Dr. Christy Clark Pujara, assistant professor of history, Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It will tell the story of Ezekiel Gillespie, a Black Milwaukee resident, who asked that his name be added to the list of eligible voters on Oct. 31, 1865.
The state Department of Health Services is partnering with UW-Madison’s Survey of the Health of Wisconsin to embark on a study of the prevalence of COVID-19 antibodies throughout the state. Past SHOW participants, from 10 randomly selected counties and the city of Milwaukee, will receive antibody testing quarterly over the next year.
Shiva Bidar, UW Health chief diversity officer and a Madison City Council member, confirmed that Wisconsin residents can come to their health facilities and receive care, no questions asked. “We’ll make sure they go where they need care and nobody’s asking them to pay up front for anything,” Bidar said. “We will figure out on the back end what we need to do to make sure that their bills are covered.”
Equipped with a laptop, legal pad and smartphone, Merta Maaneb de Macedo this week called a UW-Madison student whose roommate recently tested positive for COVID-19.
The additional $70,000 brings total pandemic-related aid to $705,000 for the year, including assistance to front-line health care workers and vaccine-related endeavors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Face masks will be required indoors except at home in Dane County starting Monday, officials said Tuesday, announcing Wisconsin’s first mask mandate in response to a recent increase in COVID-19 cases especially among young adults and those who have attended large gatherings.
In a guest column for the Wisconsin State Journal, UW-Madison emeritus history professor John Sharpless wrote that protesters who pulled down the Heg statue “were essentially spitting on his grave.”
As an 18-year-old rising sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, District 8 alder Max Prestigiacomo is already pushing for change after being elected to the City Council in April. He introduced a bill on June 16 to remove funding for less lethal weapons for the Madison Police Department, and it passed unanimously.
Madison East graduate and UW-Madison senior Sirena Flores has started a higher education GoFundMe for Tony Robinson’s youngest brother, Malik Robinson, a recent graduate of Madison La Follette High School who is pursuing higher education.
Last month UW officials released their “Smart Restart” plan for opening campus in the fall. It allows in-person teaching with precautions and with instruction moving completely online after Thanksgiving. But officials made clear that if COVID-19 cases spike early in the semester, that shift could happen earlier.
Phillips was the first African American women to graduate from UW-Madison’s law school, first woman elected to Milwaukee’s City Council and first African American judge to be appointed in Wisconsin.
Orrantia previously served as the Director of Community Relations for UW-Madison’s Chancellor and worked as Assistant Director for the Wisconsin Collaborative Education Research Network and as a caseworker in Madison outside the university.
When Fannie Lou Hamer spoke to a predominantly white audience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1971, the civil rights icon spoke of the time when she was 13 and asked her mother a seemingly innocent question.
“How come we wasn’t born white?”
It was the question of a young teenager growing up in the heart of the South, when ruthless racism was the norm.
Shiloah Symone Coley, 21, just graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison this spring when she was asked to paint a mural on State Street. She’d done a few pieces of public art before on campus, but this was her first community piece. Her mural depicts Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley Jones, who was killed at the age of 7 when she was mistakenly shot by a SWAT team member in Detroit, and Cameron Tillman, who was killed at the age of 14 by a deputy in Houma, Louisiana.
The business owners who remain on one of Madison’s most iconic streets — stretching from the State Capitol to UW-Madison — are trying to move forward with respect and purpose.
Quoted: UW-Health Doctor Tiffany Green studies the causes and consequences of racial disparities in health.
“We see across the country that Black Americans are dying disproportionately relative to our share of our population, and that is especially true here in Wisconsin unfortunately,” Green said.
“Currently we’re talking about what can we do about the police, but the police are not the only issue, every other social system was built on the same inequities,” Alvin Thomas, UW-Madison Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Human Development and Family Studies, said.
The noise and the colorful glow sticks lighting up the crowd were intentional, according to youth organizer and University of Wisconsin sophomore Ayomi Obuseh. “This is not just for show, we are trying to be loud, we are trying to be disruptive,” Obuseh said.
Members of the newly formed Campus Neighborhood Association met Thursday night to begin reviewing proposed bylaws and plans for the group, which include securing a larger role in development projects of Madison neighborhoods with large concentrations of students.
The rally starts at 10 a.m. on Saturday, June 13 at the Madison state Capitol and is led by the UW-School of Medicine and Public Health, Student National Medical Association (UWSMPH).
Three demands are community control, Breonna’s Law, Hands Up Act.
Noted: I read this past week an article in the New York University Review of Law and Social Change by McKenna Kohlenberg, a Milwaukee area native who is in the home stretch of getting both her law degree and a master’s degree in educational leadership and policy analysis from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It uses Madison as a case study in what Kohlenberg calls the “illiteracy-to-incarceration pipeline.” She cites research that 70% of adults who are incarcerated and 85% of juveniles who have been involved with the juvenile justice system are functionally illiterate.
“Literacy strongly correlates with myriad social and economic outcomes, and children who are not proficient by the fourth grade are much more likely than their proficient peers to face a series of accumulating negative consequences,” Kohlenberg writes.
Quoted: “We found substantial variation across communities in the proportion of people who had these risk factors for severe complications,” said Maureen Smith, a physician and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. “That finding suggests that matching community with the right resources needs to take into account that communities are different.”
The information compiled by UW researchers can help identify potential hot spots, said Jessica Bonham-Werling, director of the Neighborhood Health Partnership Program, which prepared the reports, at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. That in turn can help public health and other officials make decisions on where to allocate resources, from testing and contact tracing to community services, such as delivering groceries.
Sirena Flores, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is Afro-Latina, is finishing up two murals next to Jackson’s on the 100 block of State Street in front of the Vom Fass oil and vinegar shop.
Since Friday, the group of previously unaffiliated youth activists organizing the protests officially created an organization, which they’re calling Impact Demand. Impact Demand will help organize future protests and work with other community organizations to create policy change in Madison, Co-Creator and University of Wisconsin rising sophomore Ayomi Obuseh said.
Here are some possible themes we could cover: Huge questions confront higher education. How will the University of Wisconsin-Madison reassert itself as a world-class research institution? Will its current financial challenges become crippling, or will a newfound respect for scientific research usher in a new golden age?
Noted: Last spring, Milwaukee teenagers Dana Sharqawi and Sumaya Abdi organized protests after mass shootings at mosques in New Zealand.
On Wednesday, they brought people together again at the Islamic Society of Milwaukee — this time to remember George Floyd and to protest police violence. They said they were guided by their Muslim faith.
“Our religion tells us that if one part of your body’s in pain, then the whole body’s in pain,” said Abdi, now 19 and a student at UW-Madison. “So if our black brothers and sisters are in pain, we’re in pain, too.”
According to data gathered by Armando Ibarra, a UW-Madison associate professor who studies Latino working communities, 34% of the Latino population in Dane County lives below the poverty line, and nearly half lack health insurance.
The City of Madison Common Council moved to not allow public comment on a resolution that would serve a new role in independently assessing the Madison Police Department in their virtual meeting tonight.
Protesters shut down a six-lane state highway that feeds into downtown Madison for a second day on Tuesday, as Gov. Tony Evers called for the Legislature to pass a law to reduce the use of police force and urged a united battle against racism.
The recent protests in Madison demonstrated pent-up frustration with broken, white-dominated systems that have perpetually — and disgustingly — violated Black bodies, souls and freedoms. The presence of COVID-19 has only pushed the injustice further as more and more Black lives are taken daily.
Urban Triage, Party for Socialism and Liberation and Freedom Inc. held a press conference discussing the protests surrounding the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, Monday afternoon.
Video: Boys and Girls Club of Dane County President and CEO Michael Johnson is calling for peace.
Protests resumed across Wisconsin for a third straight day Monday, with marchers stopping traffic in downtown Madison after a night of violence in the capital city that resulted in 15 arrests, more damages to businesses and the spraying of tear gas by police.
Madison will be under curfew for the next two nights, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway announced Monday on the third day of protesting over police brutality.
For the second day, a Madison protest against police violence against black people led to tense confrontations between activists and officers downtown. After a lengthy march, protesters engaged in a game of cat-and-mouse with authorities that stretched past midnight.
For the second time in as many days, clashes between law enforcement and demonstrators erupted as protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody earlier this week wound down.
Later Saturday and into Sunday morning, there were also reports of people targeting other places in the city, including East Towne Mall, where Best Buy appeared to have been broken into and the doors to the mall food court had been smashed. Just before 1 a.m., police were stationed at mall entrances.
It was not until early Saturday evening, after hours of peaceful protest over the death of George Floyd, that things turned ugly in downtown Madison.
It was supposed to be a peaceful protest. And, for about six hours, it was — and then it was not.
Ahead of the town hall meeting, organized by the online news site Madison365 and the Boys & Girls Club of Dane County, UW-Madison Police Chief Kristen Roman, president of the Dane County Chiefs of Police Association, called the death of George Floyd heinous and unacceptable. “Nothing can justify the actions or inactions of these officers,” Roman said of the officer who knelt on the back of Floyd’s neck for several minutes and three other officers who failed to intervene or render aid.
A West High School and UW-Madison graduate who has served as a president of the Arbor Hills Neighborhood Association and South Metropolitan Planning Council, Carter and Ald. Barbara Harrington McKinney were the first African American women elected to the City Council when they took office in 2015.
Other museums in the community, including the Chazen Museum of Art, the Wisconsin Veterans Museum and the University of Wisconsin System’s UW Geology and Physics Ingersoll museums, also remain closed to the public.
Asian Americans around Wisconsin shared testimonies of being targeted in coronavirus-related discrimination in Tuesday’s virtual town hall.
This year, those students lost the opportunity for the annual performance at “Africa Night” amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The program, part of the UW Community Arts Collaboratory, or Arts Collab, will instead try to bring the arts community together with several virtual performances.
UW Health, UnityPoint Health-Meriter and SSM Health said Tuesday they are offering antibody testing, which they said is covered by insurance.
Rebalanced-Life Wellness Association, has hosted virtual support group meetings during the pandemic. The groups have included Alvin Thomas of UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology, Logan Edwards from UW-Madison’s Department of Kinesiology, Dr. Jonas Lee from the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and Darryl Davidson of the city of Milwaukee’s Health Department.
The grant is part of a $2.2 million round of funding from the Wisconsin Partnership Program at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. Eleven of the grants went to community-led initiatives, and 10 went toward research partnerships.
The effort, led by the Madison Food Policy Council with partners including the Dane County Food Council and UW-Madison Division of Extension along with broad community input, could tap into city funding, attract outside dollars, and use city land and facilities.
Photo caption: One of the highlights of the drive to school for Anna Mullen’s son, Ryan, was looking for food delivery robots on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. In the second week of quarantine, they went on a socially-distanced outing to see robots up close on the library mall. Photo courtesy of Anna Mullen
Virtual health assessments at a Madison homeless shelter, support for students with medical conditions at Madison schools and research on ways to better test and track COVID-19 are among 21 projects receiving $2.2 million from a COVID-19 Response Grant Program at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
