MILWAUKEE >> Their daughter was sick and they needed family around to help care for her, so JoAnne and Maanaan Sabir took an unexpected detour.

They had spent years blowing past mileposts: earning advanced degrees and six-figure incomes, buying a 2,500-square-foot Victorian with hardwood floors. Yet here they were, both 37, moving to a corner of town pocked by empty lots, cramming into an apartment above JoAnne Sabir’s mother, in the very duplex that Sabir’s grandparents had bought six decades earlier.

Their new dwelling was in a part of the Lindsay Heights neighborhood where more than one in three families lives in poverty; gunshots were too often a part of the nighttime soundtrack. They planned to leave once their daughter, Ameera, was healthy.

But then, reminding them of why they feel at home in communities like this one, their new neighbors started frequently checking on Ameera and their son, Taj. Maanaan Sabir’s car stalled in the middle of the street one night, and it was the young men too often stereotyped as suspicious who helped him push it home.

“It felt like that’s where we should be,” JoAnne Sabir said.

Now, two years later, Ameera, 14, is healthy. And the Sabirs have not left. They have, in fact, only strengthened their resolve to stay after a fatal police shooting last weekend led to fiery unrest that was also fueled by frustrations over race and segregation. Rooted where they are, the Sabirs point to a broad yet little explored fact of American segregation: Affluent black families, freed from the restrictions of low income, often end up living in poor and segregated communities anyway.

It is a national phenomenon challenging the popular assumption that segregation is more about class than about race, that when black families earn more money, some ideal of post-racial integration will inevitably be reached.

In fact, a New York Times analysis of 2014 census figures shows that income alone cannot explain, nor would it likely end, the segregation that has defined U.S. cities and suburbs for generations.

The choices that black families make today are inevitably constrained by a legacy of racism that prevented their ancestors from buying quality housing and then passing down wealth that might have allowed today’s generation to move into more stable communities. And even when black households try to cross color boundaries, they are not always met with open arms: Studies have shown that white people prefer to live in communities where there are fewer black people, regardless of their income.

The result: Nationally, black and white families of similar incomes still live in separate worlds.

In many of America’s largest metropolitan areas, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, black families making $100,000 or more are more likely to live in poorer neighborhoods than even white households making less than $25,000. This is particularly true in areas with a long history of residential segregation, like metropolitan Milwaukee.

Decades of Hostility

The burning cars and buildings, the people throwing rocks and bottles at police officers in riot gear — it was all happening last Saturday as Maanaan and JoAnne Sabir were settling in for the night just a few miles down the road.

The 23-year-old man who had been shot by a black officer had ignored orders to drop a gun as he fled on foot after being pulled over in his car, police said.

As his wife flicked through accounts of the raucous uprising on social media, Sabir could not help but think that the public response was years in the making. It was Milwaukee’s — America’s — history and maintenance of racist policies, through housing discrimination, divestment of black communities, and policing, all coming to a head.

“You’re asking us to do the impossible, which is to tolerate a systemic demoralization of our own livelihood,” Maanaan Sabir said.

Black families in Milwaukee have been confronting hostility for decades. Zeddie Quitman Hyler directly challenged housing segregation in 1955 when he began laying the foundation for a house on an open patch of land in the white western suburb of Wauwatosa.

A postal worker and World War II veteran from rural Mississippi, Hyler was the first black man to try to build there, and his efforts were not appreciated. He returned to his construction site one day to find the frame damaged. He fixed it, but when he came back again, it had burned.

So he enlisted several friends to camp out with him at the construction site one evening, rifles in hand, ready to turn away intruders. The vandals never returned, and Hyler finished building his house, which he lived in for nearly half a century until his death in 2004.

The census tract where JoAnne Sabir’s grandparents settled was entirely white in 1950 except for the two people that the census listed as black and the six listed as “other.” By 1960, however, 2,344 black people called the area home, accounting for 65 percent of its population.

Within a few years, Milwaukee’s economy would start tanking. Tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the city were eliminated. Property values fell, while housing policies made it nearly impossible for black families to obtain loans and move to the suburbs, where many jobs were being relocated.

As recently as 2006, a city government report found that affluent, nonwhite Milwaukeeans were 2.7 times likelier to be denied home loans than white people with similar incomes.

Few people around here are surprised, then, that only 11.1 percent of African-Americans in the region live in the suburbs, the lowest rate of black suburbanization among the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the country, according to a soon-to-be released study by Marc V. Levine, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Milwaukee itself, which is nearly two-thirds nonwhite, has never elected a black mayor.As for Wauwatosa, the suburb that Hyler changed a generation ago, it is still 90 percent white.

JoAnne and Maanaan Sabir bet on their neighborhood by opening the Juice Kitchen in October, often rising before 6 a.m. because they want to be a beacon of black success and help prevent drugs, alcohol and poverty from consuming the community.

Tuesday morning, after a weekend of destructive protests, JoAnne Sabir posted a message on the cafe’s Facebook page, encouraging a collective black uplift.

“Strategically available to love and nurture,” she wrote.

A few hours later, she herded her children into her SUV and slowly rolled past the remnants of the two nights of clashes between protesters and police. Past the BP gas station, melted into an ashy heap. “It’s horrible,” Taj said. Past the people barbecuing on a grassy knoll. “That’s the young man’s brother over there that was killed,” JoAnne Sabir said. Past a boarded-up bank. “They broke in this bank and then set it on fire,” she said.

“My initial thought,” JoAnne Sabir told her children, “was that on this evening, all these young people were so powerful.” But imagine, she added, if they could channel that anger in a positive direction, “if we took that power and that energy and put it toward our greater good.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company