Our sister station, 101.7 The Truth, embraces Milwaukee’s Black community. As it begins its third broadcast year, midday host Sherwin Hughes shares his thoughts on why people should listen to The Truth with WTMJ’S Libby Collins.
Listen in the player above.
A partial transcript is provided below, courtesy of eCourt Reporters.
LIBBY COLLINS: What can that, as you refer to it, Caucasian audience learn from listening to you or listening to The Truth?
SHERWIN HUGHES: There are different perspectives to just about everything, and, for the most part, I think people are the same, it’s just our circumstances are different, and there are way more similarities that we have than differences. But in a city like Milwaukee where no one can figure out what we can do with all this crime and all these homicide rates — and it almost seems to be like a callousness, right, if you’re not familiar with what happens in urban areas.
And here’s the thing, I could have lived anywhere, but I purchased a house 18 years ago in a very much central city north side neighborhood where a lot of my friends and family told me it was a terrible mistake — best decision I ever did, because it keeps me connected to the community that I love so very much. And what kind of hypocrite would I be if I always talk about what’s happening in the central city but I’m paying my property taxes somewhere else?
So, I want to be much more part of the solution than the problem. But what I want people to know, what I think they can learn is that African-Americans are just as, if not more, concerned about crime and car thefts and reckless driving than anybody else is. And I don’t want folks to think that we don’t care about these things or that we are just letting them persist. It is a daily battle that we have internally with one another to
try and combat these problems at the same time not criminalizing our own friends, family members, sisters, brothers, etcetera.
