a white man in a leather jacket who had been in the local paper a few months back for racking up hundreds of property violations, was joking with his young female assistant when a tenant approached. The tenant was a black woman, likely in her fifties. Her shoulders were uplifted under her worn overcoat. She reached into her purse and handed the landlord $700 in cash.
“I’m hoping—” she began.
The landlord cut her off. “Don’t hope. Write the check.”
“I can get you another six hundred in two weeks.”
The landlord asked her to sign a stipulation, which included a $55 late fee. She reached for his pen.3
Toward the front of the room, in a reserved space with tables and plenty of empty chairs, sat lawyers in pinstripe suits and power ties. They had been hired by landlords. Some sat with manila folders stacked in front of them, reading the paper or filling in the crossword. Others joked with the bailiff, who periodically broke conversation to tell a tenant to remove his hat or lower her voice. Everyone in the reserved space, the lawyers and bailiff, was white.
In front of the lawyers, a large wooden desk faced the crowd. Two women sat on either side of the desk, calling out the day’s cases and taking attendance. Most of the names flung into the air went unclaimed. Roughly 70 percent of tenants summoned to Milwaukee’s eviction court didn’t come. The same was true in other major cities. In some urban courts, only 1 tenant in 10 showed.4 Some tenants couldn’t miss work or couldn’t find child care or were confused by the whole process or couldn’t care less or would rather avoid the humiliation.5 When tenants did not show up and their landlord or a representative did, the caller applied three quick stamps to the file—indicating that the tenant had received a default eviction judgment—and placed it on top of a growing pile. The sound of eviction court was a soft hum of dozens of people sighing, coughing, murmuring, and whispering to children interspersed with the cadence of a name, a pause, and three loud thumps of the stamp.
Behind the front desk, framed between two grand wooden columns, hung a large painting of Moses descending Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments unbroken. He glared down at the Israelites in the desert, dancing around the golden calf. Doorways on either side of the callers’ desk led to commissioners’ offices, where the actual hearings took place. When their case was called, landlords and tenants walked through a side doorway, usually to emerge just a few minutes later.
A black woman whose hearing had just concluded stepped back into the room, holding her child’s hand. Her head was wrapped, and she had kept on her heavy blue winter coat. She continued down the middle aisle of Room 400, walking by an anemic white man with homemade tattoos, a white woman in a wheelchair wearing pajama pants and Crocs, a blind black man with a limp hat on his lap, a Hispanic man wearing work boots and a shirt that read PRAY FOR US—all waiting for their eviction cases. Tenants in eviction court were generally poor, and almost all of them (92 percent) had missed rent payments. The majority spent at least half their household income on rent. One-third devoted at least 80 percent to it.6 Of the tenants who did come to court and were evicted, only 1 in 6 had another place lined up: shelters or the apartments of friends or family. A few resigned themselves to the streets. Most simply did not know where they would go.7
The woman in the blue winter coat found the face of another black woman, sitting at the end of a pew. As she passed, she bent down and whispered, “Don’t worry. It only takes a minute, honey.” As usual, the courtroom was full of black women. In a typical month, 3 in 4 people in Milwaukee eviction court were black. Of those, 3 in 4 were women. The total number of black women in eviction court exceeded that of all other groups combined.8 Children of all ages encircled these women. A girl with a full box of barrettes in her hair sat quietly, swinging her legs under the pew. A dark-skinned boy in a collared shirt two sizes too big sat up straight and wore a hard face. His sister next to him tried to sleep, folding one arm over her eyes and clutching a stuffed dog in the other.
In
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