This is the third entry in our 10th Annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest<\/em>,\u00a0\u201cRevolution.\u201d<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n By Maria Rose Francis<\/p>\n During a community-led walk through Milwaukee\u2019s Midtown neighborhood in the summer of 2023, Ms. Betty Glosson,<\/a> Ms. Talibah Mateen-Hooper<\/a>, and Prof. Portia Cobb<\/a> brought an earlier landscape back into view. At one corner, Ms. Betty recalled neighborhood efforts to stop stores from selling alcohol and cigarettes to children. At another, Ms. Talibah pointed to a community park and insisted, \u201cThe park is the people\u2019s.\u201d Their recollections linked Midtown\u2019s streets to the Community Media Project and to the often-unrecognized labor through which three women made care, creativity, and public expression possible for the neighborhood\u2019s children.1<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0<\/p>\n That history unfolded in a neighborhood reshaped by displacement. Freeway construction and urban renewal disrupted Bronzeville, Milwaukee\u2019s historic center of African American life, while expressway and Kilbourntown-3 clearances pushed African American and other minority residents into Midtown. Although the Midtown Conservation Project was presented as a conservation initiative, the plan submitted in 1965 proposed razing roughly 46 percent of the neighborhood\u2019s structures. By 1975, 1,700 housing units had been razed while only 340 new units had been built. Housing disinvestment continued into the 1990s. In the broader Fond du Lac and North planning area that included Midtown, the city linked declining property values and low rents to limited maintenance and continuing physical deterioration.2<\/a><\/sup> By the early 1990s, continued disinvestment shaped the physical and social conditions in which Midtown residents organized for their children.<\/p>\n In the early 1990s, Ms. Betty and Ms. Talibah were already working with Midtown\u2019s children. Ms. Betty had moved to Milwaukee from Arkansas and participated in open-housing and welfare-rights activism before becoming deeply involved in neighborhood organizing. Ms. Talibah, who had lived in Midtown since 1981, also organized around housing, community space, and the needs of young people. Ms. Betty recalled that many children had little to do outside school: they fought among themselves and had not yet formed friendships. She and Ms. Talibah responded by organizing a youth group, block parties, bus trips, camping excursions, and overnight activities. These gatherings fostered friendships and dependable relationships with adults. Ms. Betty later remembered becoming concerned about young people\u2019s access to alcohol and tobacco through neighborhood stores. That concern helped give the media project one of its central subjects.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n The Community Media Project<\/a> (CMP) extended this work through Professor Cobb\u2019s filmmaking practice. She came to the University of Wisconsin\u2013Milwaukee in 1992 after earning a BA in Communications from Mills College and an MA in Film Production from San Francisco State University. Her earlier film No Justice, No Peace! Young, Black, ImMEDIAte<\/em><\/a> had already used accessible video technology to center young Black perspectives.4<\/a><\/sup> Ms. Betty recalled that Ms. Talibah contacted Cobb about working with Midtown\u2019s children. Filmmaking offered a way to extend the activities the women had already created: the children would still gather within a dependable circle of adults, but they would also learn technical skills and investigate conditions around them. Cobb supplied filmmaking knowledge, equipment, and routes through which the children\u2019s work could reach audiences; Ms. Betty and Ms. Talibah brought relationships, organizing experience, and knowledge of the neighborhood.<\/p>\n The response from young people exceeded expectations. Professor Cobb remembered arriving prepared to accommodate ten participants. Approximately thirty children appeared. \u201cAnd if we were late,\u201d she recalled, \u201cthey were outside looking at their watches.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup> A 1993 profile registered the same purposefulness. The children, Professor Cobb told Jim Higgins, \u201cknew what they wanted from the beginning.\u201d Waiting outside showed their anticipation: the workshop had become a place they expected to return to.6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Their commitment was visible in what they did. The participants learned to operate cameras, develop scripts, conduct interviews, and decide what they wanted to document. Ms. Betty recalled that the adults fed the group every Saturday. She also remembered the children carrying cameras into the park, videotaping and talking to trees because they were so excited to use the equipment.7<\/a><\/sup> Food, play, instruction, and dependable adult presence existed alongside one another. Technical learning was therefore inseparable from being welcomed, watched over, and taken seriously.<\/p>\n One result was the 1994 documentary Enough Is Enough: Time Out for the Sell Out!<\/em><\/a>, created through the Community Media Project with the Midtown Neighborhood Association. The film begins with young people questioning cigarette and alcohol advertisements, then turns to investigation. A fourteen-year-old purchases cigarettes without being asked for identification. Later, a seventeen-year-old buys a forty-ounce bottle after disclosing his age; the clerk charges an extra dollar and tells him not to reveal the sale. The young filmmakers interview residents about licensing, picketing, churches, and collective action. Yet the film closes in another emotional register: \u201cI believe in love. I believe in me. I believe in my friends. I believe in my family. I believe in trust. I believe in peace.\u201d They were not only naming danger but imagining the relationships through which another future might be lived.8<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/themetropole.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/picture2.jpg\")
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