When Gwen Moore walked into Milwaukee’s North Division High School in September 1965, she was terrified.
“North was seen as this jungle,” she explains more than 40 years later. “All black, segregated, inferior.”
Moore had wanted to attend West Division high School, a “white” school closer to home. When she tried to register at West, school officials told her she had to go to North Division. (It would be another decade before the federal courts would order the desegregation of Milwaukee’s schools.)
“My mom was in Texas at a Baptist convention, and I talked to her and said, ‘Mom, they wouldn’t let me go to West,’ ” Moore remembers.
“Gerrymandering,” her mom muttered.
“Gerry who?” Moore asked.
Much more on vouchers, here.