In December of 2014, Milwaukee was called the worst city in the nation for African-Americans. That designation wasn't based on opinion, but a deep analysis of “household income, the percentage of people without health insurance, educational attainment, homeownership, unemployment, incarceration rates, and mortality among infants as well as other age groups.”

In March of 2015, Kenya Downs, who grew up in the city, wrote a powerful piece for NPR asking the question, “Why is Milwaukee so bad for black people?” There she shows how virtually metric imaginable — from education, to economics, to incarceration, to home ownership, and everything in between make Milwaukee a place of deep pain and misery for so many African-Americans.

In the October of 2015, NBA player John Henson, who had just signed a $44 million contract extension with the Milwaukee Bucks, went to a local store there to buy his first Rolex watch. Upon seeing him, store employees got so deathly afraid of him that they locked the doors, pretended like the store was closed, and called the police on him.

Just this past January Milwaukee was called “the most segregated city in America” and one man said he felt like living there was “going back in time 60 years.”