Author: Syndicated

Before the freeways came in, Bronzeville, on Milwaukee’s North Side, was a vibrant neighborhood known for its restaurants, bars and jazz scene. The area had been home to successive waves of immigrants and most recently had become the heart of the city’s Black community. But it suffered a major blow in the 1960s when large swaths of the neighborhood were razed to make way for elevated freeways, part of a nationwide highway construction boom. The new highways spurred a mass exodus of white residents to the suburbs — at the expense of Black communities like Bronzeville. “It became more...

Young voters made their voices heard during the recent midterms, turning out in relatively high numbers in an election that produced the first congressperson from Generation Z. But university students and voting rights advocates say voters on college campuses faced far too many difficulties trying to cast their ballots. Across the country, voting rights groups and collegiate get-out-the-vote organizers documented many cases of college students who struggled to decipher confusing voter ID requirements, waited in hours-long lines at polling places or never received their absentee ballots. In some cases, college voters were even denied federally protected provisional ballots. While...

As a young boy living in what was then Zaire, Bertine Bahige remembers watching refugees flee from the Rwandan genocide in 1994 by crossing a river that forms the two Central African nations’ border. Bahige’s harrowing refugee journey began when he was kidnapped and forced to become a child soldier when war broke out in his country, which became the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997. He escaped at age 15 to a Mozambique refugee camp, where he lived for five years until he arrived in Baltimore in 2004 through a refugee resettlement program. Bahige, now 42, said the way...

Around two days a week, Natalee Hartwig leaves her home in Madison, Wisconsin, before her son wakes up to travel across the border into Illinois. “Luckily it’s summer,” said Hartwig, a nurse midwife at Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. “For now, he can sleep in. But any getting ready that has to happen will be on my spouse.” She drives at least two hours each way, immersed in audiobooks and podcasts as she heads back and forth from a clinic in this northern Illinois suburb. She spends her days in the recovery room, caring for patients who have had abortions...