Milwaukee's black leaders say the enemy is within

MILWAUKEE - Two days before the oldest and best-known US civil rights group holds its yearly convention in Milwaukee, black leaders in the city say their community is being torn apart from the inside.

Civil rights leaders such as 57-year-old Prentice McKinney, who fought to free Milwaukee's blacks from the ghetto, say gangs, drugs and violence have left those who still live in the nation's urban cores in fear of the next generation.

"Back then, the enemy was clear, it was white racists, and racist police officers," said McKinney, who was a black teenage "commando" in the 1960s and now runs a tavern once frequented by fellow activists.

"It was a legalised system of segregation. And so, the challenge was between the white establishment and the African-American population.

"Today, the African-American population is being destroyed by its own youth ... an enemy from within."

He and others interviewed before the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People's six-day meeting beginning on Saturday see a changed city where a generation of blacks freed from the shackles of yesterday's legalised discrimination are held hostage by today's crime and poverty.

"You have a population of older African-Americans ... who are now afraid of the children in their neighbourhoods," McKinney said.

Milwaukee, with 583,624 residents, 37 per cent of whom are black, is the country's 22nd-largest city. It remains deeply segregated, civil rights activists say.

The passage of an open housing law in 1968 broke open the boundaries of the ghetto but it also led to black flight, and those who could afford it moved to more affluent areas.

"What was left behind was the poorest of the poor -- the drug pusher, the player, the pimp, the hustler ... and moral values became very different over time," McKinney said.

- REUTERS