“People are barely seen here,” Darrayal Jenkins, 40, said as he passed several burned buildings in July. “It’s like a ghost town.”
City officials have promised a renewed approach to Uptown, planning for apartment and business developments to bring this new life to life. If they go ahead it has become a testament to the city’s commitment to change after Blake’s shooting, and to what extent it will heal a neighborhood that is home to so many African American families who say they are still on the sidelines. of civic life to Kenosha.
“They’ll never rebuild it,” said Lonnie Stewart, 61, a former iron worker who lives in the neighborhood. He nodded toward a wall of empty, boarded-up shop windows. “All this time later, it still looks like that.”
“It shook the foundations”
Kenosha is not Minneapolis, nor Portland, Oregon, nor Chicago, larger cities with long, familiar stories of protest, activism, and street marches.
So it was a shock to much of the city, a former industrial and car-making center, mostly white, whose voters are democratic, when riots erupted on a Sunday last August. Police officers had arrived at an apartment in response to a domestic complaint and tried to arrest Mr. Blake, who is black. While Mr. Blake, who had a knife, was trying to get into an SUV, one of the officers, Rusten Sheskey, who is white, grabbed him and shot him seven times in the back, leaving him crumpled to the ground. The Americans, still shaken by the assassination of Mr. Floyd in Minneapolis, responded with horror after watching the video of the episode’s cell phone, captured from across the street.
Protesters gathered in the city for hundreds of people, and on the third day of the marches, a 17-year-old Illinois man, Kyle Rittenhouse, fatally shot two people during a fight, according to authorities; he is due to stand trial for murder in November.