In 1973, Hercules and Vivian Brown used their savings from their manufacturing jobs to buy a brick ranch-style house in the 4400 block of N. 39th St.

Fellowship in Public Service Journalism Reporting on this project is supported by a fellowship in public service journalism sponsored by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, which aims to inform and foster civic engagement around building healthier communities. The Foundation has no involvement in the reporting, editing or presentation of this project by the Journal Sentinel.

The house, with four bedrooms and one-and-a-half baths, was one of the biggest on the block. As a welcome gift, a neighbor gave Vivian a flower planter converted from an old tire. It still sits in the front yard. When the flowers begin to bloom, winter is finally over.

The Browns moved to Milwaukee from Mississippi with a simple desire shared by most young African-Americans: They hoped to find work, buy a house and provide their children a better, safer future than they could ever hope to find under the suffocating racial caste system of the Jim Crow South.

It was a dream shared by nearly 6 million blacks who moved north from the former Confederacy during the Great Migration of the last century.

For the Browns and many other African-American families in Milwaukee, that better future for their children dissipated before their eyes — along with the family-supporting jobs once available to anyone who had a high school education and wanted to work.

My family made the same journey as the Browns, from the same southern state to the same north side Milwaukee neighborhood.

I first met Desiree Brown nearly 40 years ago, in 1978, when we were students in Ms. Marilyn Spicuzza's third-grade class at Samuel Clemens Elementary School, 3600 W. Hope Ave.

Desiree Brown, 48 Address then: 4425 N. 39th St.

Today: 7300 block of W. Silver Spring Drive.

Education: Bachelor's degree from Upper Iowa University, 2015

Job: Served from 1991-1992 in the U.S. Army

Family: Single, two children

It was a neighborhood school then, in a middle class part of town. Tom Barrett attended Clemens before growing up to become a congressman and then the mayor. Nearly all of us walked to school. Many of us shared similar family stories.

When the school year started, at the end of summer, the classrooms were nearly as hot as the metal slide at recess.

Picture day always came during those hot early weeks. For us, it meant girls in pretty dresses and boys in checkered suits with wide collars. My suit was lime-green polyester, and I must have been proud of it as I sat in the middle of the front row.

In the picture, I'm holding a pencil in one hand, because I loved to write, and a small comb in the other. The photographer had told the boys to share the comb, but it didn't do any good because most of us had Afros.

Urban legend says prison officials use third-grade reading scores to predict how many cells they’ll need in the future. While untrue, third grade is an important watershed for kids.

Fellowship in Public Service Journalism Reporting on this project is supported by a fellowship in public service journalism sponsored by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, which aims to inform and foster civic engagement around building healthier communities. The Foundation has no involvement in the reporting, editing or presentation of this project by the Journal Sentinel.

Students who read poorly by the end of third grade are four times as likely to drop out before graduating from high school as proficient young readers, according to 2011 research by sociologist Donald Hernandez for the Brookings Institution Press.

And children who finish high school, work full time and marry before having children are “virtually guaranteed a place in the middle class,” according to research published by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill in the 2009 book “Creating an Opportunity Society.” In fact, just 2% of folks who do those three things end up in poverty, they found, as opposed to 75% of those who have done none of those things.

Looking back at our class, more than half of us lived in homes owned by our parents. They were investing in the American Dream — a home that would build equity; a first step up into a future that finally would lift us into a stable middle class lifestyle.

Desiree and I didn't know it, but in 1978, the jobs were already leaving our part of town. In the shadows, at the hard edges of our neighborhood, the shoots of an illegal economy were sprouting up to replace them.

White people were leaving our neighborhood, too. It hadn't taken effect yet, but the previous year a federal judge had ordered Milwaukee Public Schools to use mandatory busing to integrate schools.

The judge's simple solution did not have its desired effect in our complicated world. Instead of making Clemens more diverse, the opposite occurred. There were six white or biracial kids in my third-grade class. By sixth grade, there were only two.

Desiree remembers feeling safe in that house on N. 39th St.

"As a little girl, seeing how hard my parents worked to provide for us, I was raised to think that owning a home was just something that everyone was supposed to do," she said.

In 2015, Desiree was finally able to buy a home of her own.

In third grade, Desiree was the bravest, tallest and strongest girl. When we took the Presidential Physical Fitness Test in school, she outran, out-jumped and out-pull-upped all the girls and most of the boys. She defended smaller kids from bullies (including me once).

Who would've dreamed then that her journey to homeownership would be so hard?

***

In 1970, four in 10 African-American adults in Milwaukee worked in manufacturing — the highest percentage in the nation, according to a 2007 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study.

Hercules Brown was a machinist at Rexnord Corp., and Vivian Brown was a machine operator for Briggs & Stratton — jobs they held until they retired in the 1990s.

Hercules Brown, 82, has watched the economic changes.

Gone are the times when a person could get hired, receive training and work in a job for 20 to 30 years with a high school education.

“You can make it, but you have to catch some breaks, and you need the degrees to go along with it,” Brown said. “We didn’t need that back then.”

He arrived in Milwaukee in 1964, just out of high school. He remembers blacks facing discrimination, but in time that improved to the point where a worker of any race could quit a job on a Monday and have another by the end of the week.

At its peak, A.O. Smith Corp. — less than a mile away from Clemens — was the largest manufacturer of automobile and truck frames in the nation, producing 10,000 frames per day. In 1970, the company had 8,000 employees. It was the biggest industrial site in the city.

I was raised to think that owning a home was just something that everyone was supposed to do. Desiree Brown

On Sunday mornings, as our family headed to church, I remember riding in my father's denim blue Buick Electra, passing stacks of frames that seemed to me to reach the clouds.

In 1970, more than 85% of black men between 25 and 54 in the Milwaukee metro area had jobs. That wasn't as high as the 95% of white men of prime working age who had jobs, according to University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor Marc Levine's analysis of U.S. census data, but it was a historic high point.

Shortly after our third-grade year, rising fuel prices helped drive the country into a recession. Compounding the problem for Milwaukee, a major supplier to Detroit, inexpensive Japanese imports boasting better gas mileage leaped in popularity. They achieved the better mileage, in part, by getting rid of heavy welded frames.

U.S. auto sales sank to their lowest levels in two decades. At A.O. Smith, workers were laid off and the vehicle frames stacked outside dwindled until they disappeared.

So did the mortgage-paying jobs that came with them. When A.O. Smith was sold to Tower Automotive in 1997, only about 2,000 employees remained. The last 65 workers were laid off by 2006.

As the legal economy withered, drugs, crime and despair moved in. Many of the people who could afford to sell their homes left the city.

From 1970 to 1990, the white population in Milwaukee declined by a third, falling from more than 600,000 to just under 400,000. In some areas on the north side, including neighborhoods once served by Samuel Clemens school, the number of white residents fell by more than 90%. Many moved to the suburbs of Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee counties where the population grew more than 30% in that 20-year span.

Many African-American workers, who had only recently purchased their homes, saw them fall in value to below what they owed on the mortgage loans. The homes were not building equity, which might be used for home improvements and repairs, or to get through a difficult time, or to help the kids through college. The owners couldn't afford to sell them.

And as they lost their jobs, fewer could afford to stay — at least not in houses with their names on the titles.

By 2010, at the end of the Great Recession, fewer than 53% of the Milwaukee metro area's black men between 25 and 54 had jobs, the UWM study found. The percentage of employed white men had fallen to 85%, the same level for African-Americans 30 years earlier. Still, the gap between white and black employment rates was the largest among the nation's large metro areas.

“When they lost their jobs, they lost their homes,” Hercules Brown said. “Most of the time, we lost our neighborhoods.”

***

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Milwaukee's open housing marches, which focused attention on a knot of persistent urban problems. This project is part of an ongoing series of stories, videos and other special features that will examine how far Milwaukee has come – and the work that remains to be done.

The Browns bought their house six years after the violent summer of 1967. In Milwaukee, three nights of riots were followed by more than 200 days of open housing marches led by Father James Groppi and the NAACP Youth Council.

When the protests ended, the city passed fair housing laws. Even so, Milwaukee continued to grow more segregated.

Desiree Brown, 48, remembers her parents talking about getting “that look” when they moved in.

“It was a ‘there goes the neighborhood’ look,” she said. “It hurt. But my father wasn’t having it. He made sure our yard looked just as good — if not better — as everyone else on the block, and we picked up all the litter right away when it was in our yard.”

In 1979, Judge John Reynolds Jr. approved the Milwaukee Public School board's busing plan to carry out his order to desegregate schools. Our classes at Clemens went in the opposite direction, as the white students disappeared. Third grade turned out to be our most integrated class.

White flight in Milwaukee How have the demographics of Milwaukee changed from 1970 to 2010? Click to begin From 1970 to 2010, Milwaukee lost over half of its white residents. In the area around the Samuel Clemens Elementary the white population decreased by 95%. Many left for the suburbs. In Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee counties, the white population rose 64%. HoverTap to see how an area's demographics changed over time. 1 2 3 Explore Next Restart Data source: Minnesota Population Center. See bottom of story or more detail.

“You could see it and feel it,” Desiree said. “Everything shifted, and it wasn’t for the better.”

One of the white students who left was Dawn Schmitt.

Dawn Schmitt-Wojciuk, 47 Address then: 4144 N. 36th St.

Today: Lives in Wauwatosa

Education: Certificate in human resources, Milwaukee Area Technical College

Job: Human resources director for Food Services, Inc., which runs college cafeterias

Family: Married, two children

She lived across the street from Clemens and had attended since kindergarten. Her parents sold their home when she was in fourth grade because her father felt the neighborhood was declining, she said.

She remembers missing friends at Clemens, but there was little she could do.

"There were a lot of break-ins and the neighborhood started to feel unsafe," she said. “My parents wanted me to be in a better school with less crime, and they also wanted a bigger house.”

***

For most middle class families, a home is their most valuable asset. They can count on it growing in value over time and, if sold, the money can help finance retirement.

But the same has not proved true for African-Americans.

Across the country, the black homeownership rate of 41.7% in 2016 was lower than the national homeownership rate during the Great Depression, according to the National Association of Real Estate Brokers. It was the lowest of any ethnic group, and nearly 30 percentage points lower than the 71.5% rate for white Americans.

In the Milwaukee metro area, the gap is worse still: 68% of whites own their homes compared to 29% of blacks.

The city’s hyper-segregation deserves much of the blame, said Brian Sonderman, executive director of Milwaukee Habitat for Humanity.

Black homeownership lags behind In 2010, 32% of black householders in Milwaukee County owned their home. For most of the other northern industrial cities the homeownership rate remained largely flat, leaving Milwaukee County at the bottom. Data source: Minnesota Population Center. See bottom of story or more detail.

"Black homeownership has never been above 50% in the city, and that's a tragedy," he said.

The vast majority of blacks live in Milwaukee’s inner city, he said, and banks are reluctant to lend to people there. Inflation-adjusted home values have declined in the central city since the 1980s, a Journal Sentinel analysis found.

In the 53206 ZIP code, the poorest in Milwaukee, home values have fallen 34% since 1975 when adjusted for inflation. In my Lincoln Creek neighborhood, they were flat.

By contrast, home values in 53226, which covers much of Wauwatosa, rose 29%, even when inflation is taken into account. In 53211, on Milwaukee's North Shore, values rose 34%.

Compounding the problem in recent years: student debt.