- Today we are pleased to introduce Michael Edmonds
as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture series.
Michael Edmonds, author of
"Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer Reader,"
is Director of Programs and Outreach
at the Wisconsin Historical Society.
He holds degrees from Harvard University
and Simmons College and taught at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison
from 1986 to 2016
in addition to his work at the Historical Society.
Trained in rare book librarianship and archives management,
he led the Society's efforts to share its manuscripts,
rare books, and other unique documents on the Web.
He has also curated a nation-wide traveling exhibit
on Mississippi Freedom Summer
and authored a curriculum guide for secondary schools
on teaching about the Civil Rights Movement
in the South and in Milwaukee.
His work has won national awards from
the American Library Association,
the American Folklore Society,
and the American Association for State and Local History.
His article, "Bold (Not to Say Crazy):
"Collecting Civil Rights Manuscripts during the 1960s"
appeared in the Wisconsin Magazine of History in 2014.
Here today to present "Wisconsin's Hidden History:
"Three Centuries of African-American History
"in the Badger State."
Please join me in welcoming Michael Edmonds.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you, Katie.
Bruce asked me to please stay at the podium
rather than pace back and forth,
which is the way I like to do these things.
And I'll do my best to do that.
Thank you all for coming on another lovely day.
Nice to see some familiar faces here.
The message is of today's talk,
the big thing I'd like you to take away,
is to realize that African-Americans have been
in Wisconsin for nearly three centuries.
If you ask people about black history in Wisconsin,
they're very likely to say Father Groppi
or Vel Phillips or Lloyd Barbee.
But the truth is African-Americans have been
in Wisconsin longer than Germans or Norwegians,
longer than anyone spoke English in Wisconsin.
And that's the big picture I'd like to give you today.
It's going to be sort of like
the 30-Second Shakespeare Company.
You know, we're going to go very fast over 300 years.
You can wave at me and interrupt at any moment,
or we can hold questions till the end, whatever you like.
By way of background,
I work at the Society headquarters,
a mile away on UW campus,
but it's part of the Wisconsin Historical Society
like this museum.
We are a state agency like the DNR and the DOT.
About 60% of our resources come from your tax dollars,
so make claims on us, tell us what you want.
We will deliver.
We operate all over the state.
We have more than a hundred buildings,
historic sites, and other institutions
around the state where we're trying to connect
people with their past.
Probably the most fun aspect of that
is what's going on outside the doors,
to make a 10-year-old go, ah!
That's what it's all about.
Let's leap back three centuries.
The earliest evidence of African-Americans in Wisconsin
is a document from the year 1725
in which an Illinois Indian chief
protests to the French that the Indians
are being treated worse than another tribe
was when they killed a Negro slave
belonging to a French officer.
So we know that when the French came into
this part of the world,
some of them brought enslaved people with them.
Historians estimate that in the Upper Mississippi Valley,
which you see on the map on the left there,
during the fur-trade era through the 18th century
there was a non-Indian population of about 5000,
roughly 10% of which 500
were people of color,
apart from Indians.
In 1760 when the English
retrieved, conquered, beat the French
and took over the interior
of the continent, part of the peace settlement
was that the French settlers of Mackinac and Green Bay
and Prairie du Chien could keep their Negro slaves.
This was in a letter communicating the peace terms.
So we know that at the very earliest moments
when we have European settlement in Wisconsin,
African-Americans are part of the picture.
Some of them were freed.
Some of them who came as slaves were freed by their owners.
This person, Stephen Bonga,
is the grandson of two people who were enslaved
and brought by one of the English generals
who came to this part of the world in the late 18th century.
When he died he freed them.
They became the first hotel owners
at the head of the Great Lakes.
And their children and grandchildren spread out
across Lake Superior as far as Duluth,
working in the fur trade.
And Stephen Bonga, who dates you can see there,
1799 to 1884,
accompanied and led fur trade expeditions
as far west as the Rocky Mountains.
His family grew up right at Duluth-Superior
in the late-18th and early-19th centuries.
Explorers from back East were always shocked and surprised
to see an African-American family there
in a Chippewa village.
He used to like to claim, in his old age,
which you see there, that he was the first white child
born at the head of the Lakes
because he was the first non-Indian child
born at the head of the Lakes,
and he liked to play on the issue of race,
which has always been a central issue in Wisconsin history.
So, message one: African-American people
are here from day one.
In the early 19th century when white people flooded
into the state in much larger numbers than ever before,
the largest number of them came up the Mississippi Valley
and into southwestern Wisconsin,
the area around Dodgeville named for Henry Dodge there,
the territorial governor, and Platteville, and Galena.
They came up in order to mine lead.
Although slavery was illegal in the Northwestern Territory
and in Wisconsin Territory,
many of them who came up from the South
brought slaves with them.
Henry Dodge brought a couple dozen
African-American slaves with him,
not to work in the lead mines but to grow crops
to feed all the miners.
And as settlers came North,
there began to develop a kind of tension
because some of them came North
because they disapproved of slavery.
And Southern abolitionists, Southern fundamental,
fundamentalist Christian ministers,
came up in order to escape slavery.
Some brought slaves up and freed them,
and others brought slaves up
and maintained them in oppression.
So beginning in the 1830s and '40s,
there's this tension in Wisconsin between those who think
slavery is just fine and those who think
slavery is an abomination.
The country as a whole was, of course, split.
The Bible sanctioned slavery,
the media sanctioned slavery.
And so you had to be fairly eccentric in the 1830s
and even into the 1840s to think that
slavery should be abolished.
But to African-Americans who came North,
the slaves who came North, the issue was very clear-cut.
And in 1842 a slave in southwestern Wisconsin,
named John Paul Jones,
thought since he was in a free territory
he himself must be free,
and he sued his owner for wages, back wages.
Does that ring a bell with any of you?
The argument that Dred Scott made was:
I'm in a free state and therefore I must be free.
And in both cases, the local one in Wisconsin
and the national one,
those cases were lost by the African-Americans.
You can see by the population estimate there
that African-Americans make up a very small percentage
of the population during the Territorial Period,
but they're spread out throughout the state.
Today we think African-Americans in Wisconsin,
there's a big community in Milwaukee and then there are
smaller, distinct communities
and all the other major cities.
But in the 19th century there was not
a concentration like that.
Black families settled all over the state
during the 19th century and it's not uncommon,
if you look at the censuses,
to find that there were one or two black families
in Black River Falls or Fond du Lac.
And it's not until the later 19th century that
African-American communities,
with a couple exceptions I'll tell you about,
become the dominant mode of organization.
Now by 1846 Wisconsin had enough residents
so that it qualified to be a state,
and the people who lived here selected delegates
to come to Madison to write a constitution
so they could be a state.
In the 1846 constitution,
whose manuscript you see there,
would have allowed African-Americans to vote.
So voting rights were part of the constitution
that was drafted in 1846.
It had to be approved by voters, however.
And in 1847 voters rejected the constitution,
partly for the African-American suffrage article,
partly because it would have allowed women to own property.
Women would have been able to keep their own wages
instead of those wages being the property of their husband.
And partly because it outlawed private banks.
Only the state would have been able to operate banks.
So that constitution was rejected
and they went back to square one.
The 1848 constitution, the second one that passed,
said African-Americans could vote
if a referendum approved it.
And when that referendum was held in 1849,
the majority of voters said yes,
African-Americans can vote.
However, the referendum had multiple questions on it,
and the courts interpreted the results as
since those 5000 people who voted on that question
were not a majority who voted on all questions,
black people couldn't vote.
So from 1849 until suffrage is finally won
in the courts 20 years later,
African-Americans were denied the right to vote.
Now during those years,
the 1840s and '50s before the Civil War,
two rural communities of black farmers
were established in western Wisconsin.
One was at Pleasant Ridge,
where you can see the red A on the map there,
north of Dubuque.
The other was the Cheyenne Valley in Vernon County
just north of there.
And these were African-American families
who came up from the South and were either freed
by their owners if they came as slaves,
or they were escaped slaves,
or they were free blacks who came from
communities where that was possible.
In both cases, Cheyenne Valley and Pleasant Ridge,
there were dozens and dozens of people in the 1850s
who welcomed extended family members to join them.
In both cases they formed distinct communities
but overlapped with the white settlers around them.
The schools were integrated.
Families intermarried.
The churches were integrated.
And Pleasant Ridge lasted
until after World War I.
There were still old African-American people living there
where their grandparents had lived in the 1850s.
But generally, at the turn of the 20th century,
these kids in that photo on the left
were growing up and they were moving to the cities.
So these two rural communities
are just matters of history now.
There aren't any buildings in either place,
and there are no people living who remember them.
The descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings
ended up coming to Madison.
Their son Eston Hemmings came in 1852, as you can see.
And then his two sons, there was also a sister,
a daughter who died early, came and settled in Madison.
Now for many years the folks at Monticello
did not want to acknowledge this relationship at all,
but recent scholarship and DNA testing
has proved to the satisfaction of nearly all historians
that, in fact, Jefferson and Hemmings
did have a decades-long relationship
and that he fathered these children,
some of whom came to Madison.
Eston Hemmings had siblings,
and so some of them went elsewhere as well.
But Beverley Jefferson and John Jefferson,
as you can see from the photo on the lower right,
were very fair-complected and passed as white
in the records.
They both became officers in the Civil War
and they both managed hotels right here on the Square.
So that's many people coming to Madison,
legislators, business people, would have known them,
knew them well, and left memoirs of them.
During the 1840s and '50s as slavery
becomes an issue on the national scale,
escaping slaves find their way to and through Wisconsin.
The federal government passed a law saying that anyone
who assisted a fugitive slave could go to jail.
The Fugitive Slave Act.
And so no records were kept.
It's very hard to find any records about
fugitive slave transactions
or Underground Railroad incidents in Wisconsin.
Historians think there were about 100 slaves
who escaped through Wisconsin.
Caroline Quarles is the first of them.
She was a 16-year-old girl in St. Louis.
She had a white grandmother who gave her
a little bit of savings, and on July 4 of 1842,
a date that she chose on purpose,
she ran away from home, came upriver,
crossed Illinois overland, and ended up in Milwaukee.
Close on her heels were agents of her former owner,
trying to seize her and bring her back.
But Milwaukee had a fairly vocal and sizable
abolitionist community at the time,
and she was moved from house to house
in Milwaukee and surrounding area,
as far out as Waukesha,
which was a hotbed of liberal radicalism at the time.
(audience laughing)
And kept from being caught.
Now the abolitionists who came to Wisconsin
and helped in causes like this were generally
what today we would call born-again Christians.
They were fundamentalist Christians
for whom their conscience, connection to God
was much more important than the Fugitive Slave Law.
And these were the people who led the anti-slavery movement
in Wisconsin in the 1840s and '50s.
So Caroline Quarles was carried overland around Chicago,
all the way to Detroit,
and escaped to Canada.
This is a photo of her in later years.
A more famous case involved a formerly enslaved person
named Joshua Glover,
who was also from Missouri.
He had escaped slavery and come to Racine,
where he was at work one day when agents
of his owner showed up and demanded he be
arrested and returned.
This was after the Fugitive Slave Law had passed.
So the sheriff arrested him,
but the jail in Racine was not strong enough
to fend off a mob, an abolitionist mob,
or Glover's friends,
who had known him several years by then.
And so the night that he was arrested
the sheriff transferred him up to Milwaukee.
So he arrived in the jail in Milwaukee,
where there was an even bigger abolitionist movement.
And a newspaper editor from Waukesha, named Sherman Booth,
rode through the town saying
we need to rescue and liberate this slave
being held in our city, in our jail,
that's paid for with our tax dollars.
And a mob surrounded the jail.
Construction, a church was being constructed
across the street, and they seized an eight by eight beam,
ceiling beam, and just smashed in the doors
and took him away.
Now Sherman Booth was promptly arrested for violating
the Fugitive Slave Act, and sent to jail.
And it took several years before his case
was ultimately resolved.
But it went quickly to the Wisconsin Supreme Court,
who ruled in the document on the right,
the pamphlet on the right,
that the federal Fugitive Slave Law
was unconstitutional in Wisconsin.
It would not be enforced because it violated
our state's constitution.
That's a great thing
except that that's also the argument, of course,
that the Confederacy used for seceding
from the United States government.
Washington can't tell us what to do.
States' rights are more important than federal rights.
So there's a little irony in it as well.
Glover went by water from Milwaukee,
around Michigan, and to Detroit.
And there is a lovely book about him.
I think you probably have it in the gift shop? Yeah?
About what became of him.
No one has written a biography of Caroline Quarles
and what became of her.
She did write a letter in old age
back to people in Wisconsin.
And she raised a family and was a housewife
and had no more political activity.
She probably had enough.
Well, black soldiers from Wisconsin served in the Civil War
when it broke out in 1861.
Pleasant Ridge and Cheyenne Valley both sent
contingents of black adult men to fight.
About 350 soldiers were credited to Wisconsin from the war,
most of them were in Company F of the 29th Regiment
of US Colored Troops, whose roster is shown there.
Many of them actually lived in Chicago
but were credited to Wisconsin,
so it's a little hard to find out the precise number,
but around 300 or 350.
At the end of the war,
many orphaned former slaves' children
came North with Wisconsin soldiers
who adopted them and raised them to adulthood.
So there was an increase in the African-American population
after the Civil War.
You can see only about 1000 people state-wide
when the war breaks out.
The fellow on the right, Peter Thomas,
became, I believe it's Kenosha or Racine,
was elected to local county government offices
and became a prominent member of the community.
Well, at the end of the war
the fellow on the left there, Ezekiel Gillespie,
challenged the court ruling that he wouldn't be
allowed to vote because he was familiar,
he became familiar with that referendum back in 1849
and how it had been interpreted.
He was a small-businessman in Milwaukee's
African-American community.
And Sherman Booth, whom we just talked about
as an abolitionist leader,
underwrote the costs of his court case.
Byron Paine, who had been a colonel in the Civil War
who was demoted and incarcerated
for not making slaves in Louisiana go back to their owners,
took on his case as an attorney.
And it went immediately to the Wisconsin Supreme Court,
who believed Paine's argument that when 5000 people
had voted for African-American suffrage in 1849,
that was all that was required.
And that for 17 years black people had been denied the vote.
So the next election Gillespie and some of his braver
neighbors went down to vote in Milwaukee,
braving curses and objects thrown at them.
And did succeed in voting.
And, of course, African-American suffrage
has been the case in Wisconsin ever since,
although in later years as well
it took great courage to exercise that right.
If there's a theme here as we talk about the 19th century,
I hope you are seeing it.
Wisconsin was not that different from the rest of the country.
Black people were oppressed systematically
by the law and by public opinion,
and yet they resisted whether by suing their master
for wages or taking court officials to court themselves.
The tradition of resistance is there as well.
In the later 19th century
Wisconsin becomes a Jim Crow state like the rest of America.
People who came North during the 1850s
or as children during the '60s,
like the guy on the left there did,
settled into communities largely in Milwaukee and Madison
but also in other, being Beloit and Kenosha and Racine,
and set up institutions, formed their own churches,
and became, and coalesced into what we think of
today as an ethnic community.
Some of the people in these photographs:
on the left is a man named Benjamin Butts,
who came North at the end of the war, about 10 years old,
became a barber in Madison.
His business was diagonally across from where we're sitting.
His customers were legislators,
and so he was hired to work in the legislature,
in the capitol, as a personal assistant.
He later became a messenger,
running messages around town for the governor.
And when the Historical Society's Headquarters
was built in 1900, he was hired by us to be on our staff
to carry out similar duties.
So he worked in that building where many of you have been.
He lived until the 1930s.
Just below him, the fellow in the lovely suit
there at the desk, Sam Pierce,
was born in 1875 in Louisiana after slavery.
His mother, whom you see in the right,
that right-hand photo is him and his mother
on Willy Street here in Madison.
He became a Pullman Porter and got assigned to the route
between Chicago and Minneapolis,
which brought him right through Madison.
He was on the Milwaukee to Madison run every day.
And that put him in touch with many
of the state's most powerful people,
traveling between the two cities.
In 1922, the governor of Wisconsin
hired him to work in the Capitol as his,
you might think of it today as his appointment secretary.
Sam Pierce, who stood over six feet tall,
you can see how tall he is, always impeccably dressed,
according to the memoirs,
sat in the governor's outer office.
And nobody got to see the governor without getting by Sam.
And there are wonderful funny stories about people
who don't realize it until they've been very politely
ushered back out into the hallway
that Sam had done his job so well.
Both of these people were leaders in Madison's
African-American community at the turn of the 20th century.
In the 1920s and '30s Sam Pierce
lobbied the city for a cultural center
for the black neighborhood,
where adult education classes could be held
and entertainment could be held,
and led opposition to the segregation
of public accommodations.
African-American entertainers would come to town in Madison
and just be turned away from all the best hotels.
The first civil rights law in Wisconsin passes in 1895,
that's 70 years before the federal civil rights law passes,
because in Milwaukee an African-American resident
who bought a theater ticket was later denied his seat
in the theater as it filled up with white people.
And he decided to sue,
or the community said this was worth suing
the theater owner over.
William Green, on the left there,
was a young man at the time who had an interest
in the law and followed this closely,
helped to organize the protest meetings.
And when the court ruled in the ticket holder's favor,
the community said we need a law on the books.
And so William Green worked with the Republicans,
who were the liberal party at the time,
and had them agree to put into their platform
the need for a civil rights law.
In 1892 the Republicans swept the Capitol,
both houses and the governor's office,
and lived up to their promise and wrote a law.
The white guy on the right there
was the one who introduced it.
And so since 1895,
Wisconsin has said it is illegal to have segregated
public accommodations or schools or to discriminate
on the grounds of race for any reason.
The fact that it was illegal, of course,
did not make any difference at all.
It still continued unabated because someone
had to enforce the law,
and the only way to enforce the law was if a victim
of this violation carried the case forward into the courts,
which was not always possible.
If you know anything about black history generally,
you're familiar with the phrase on the top of this slide:
The Great Migration.
It generally refers to the migration of African-Americans
in the 1920s after World War I into Northern cities.
One of the main reasons that America looks the way
it does today is because of this huge event.
Well, it didn't happen in Wisconsin,
it didn't happen after World War I.
The standard narrative is that black soldiers in World War I
saw that the rural South was not the way the world
had to be, and when they came back they wouldn't put up
with it anymore and they moved to Northern cities.
They did not come to Wisconsin, by and large.
They went to Chicago and places to the east.
That's because Milwaukee was then--
did not have a large black community to go to,
compared to those other cities.
One exception to this general rule was Beloit,
where the Fairbanks Morse company
set up segregated housing for African-American workers,
and deliberately went to the South and recruited them
to come North and work in the factory.
You see a picture at the bottom right there
are some of the housing.
And I was asked on Saturday night when giving this talk
to a different audience why that was the case.
Who at Fairbanks Morse came up with this idea?
Why did they do it?
And I don't know the answer to that.
But someone in the audience had grown up here.
And she said that looking back on it the way
historians talk about it,
it looks like a brutal exploitative segregated community.
But she said we didn't know we were poor.
We had strong families, we had strong churches,
everybody was poor, and it was, we thought of it,
she remembered it today as a thriving community.
So, again, the great narrative arc is
white people oppressed black people.
And it's true, but it's much more nuanced than that,
as she pointed out on Saturday night.
Well, between the wars,
African-Americans in Wisconsin
suffered the same outrages that happened everywhere.
The Klan in the 1920s was big nation-wide.
Here in Wisconsin African-Americans
were not its main target.
It was anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic,
its platform, more than it was anti-African-American.
Perhaps because, you can see,
there were so many fewer African-Americans
in the state than there would have been Catholics.
With the beginning of the Depression
in 1929 and 1930,
African-American residents in Wisconsin cities
suffered much more than the white population.
In Milwaukee in 1940 at the end of 10 years of Depression,
45% of African-American men of working age were unemployed,
compared to 13% of white men in the city.
But the war opened up jobs, factory jobs.
It lifted the country out of the Depression,
and Milwaukee already had industry
that was making heavy equipment.
And so during the war many African-American men
came up to work in those factories,
like in foundries like you see in the upper left.
And when the war was over they sent back to the South
for their families and friends.
And so the Great Migration happens in Wisconsin
after World War II, not after World War I.
In 1940 there were 10,000 African-Americans in the state.
10 years later the number has tripled.
By 1960 it's over 70,000.
So there's a huge influx in the 1940s and '50s
of African-American people moving North
from the Jim Crow South.
Most of the families who came North
came from the Mississippi Valley states.
Relatively few came from the Carolinas
or Virginia or Georgia.
It's mostly Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama,
Missouri, that Wisconsin's black families have come from.
Where did they come?
Well, they came into a deeply segregated city.
It didn't matter whether it was Madison
or Beloit or Milwaukee.
In Milwaukee 95% of the neighborhoods,
I'm going to step over here, Bruce,
95% of the neighborhoods,
when laid out by real estate developers,
included a covenant,
a deed covenant, a deed restriction,
that said no black people could be allowed
to rent or purchase property in this subdivision.
95% since 1895.
The only area where African-Americans
coming North from the South could settle
was that pink area on the near north side of the city.
And that had historically been
the African-American neighborhood,
and so they moved into an area that was welcoming,
with flourishing businesses.
You can see the business directly there.
The local name for it was Bronzeville.
You'll see that sometimes in the literature.
But you can't go from 10,000 residents
to 70,000 residents in a short time
without causing associated
sociological problems.
Overcrowding led to unemployment.
There were not enough jobs for everyone.
It led to deterioration in the housing stock.
The housing was already 50 or 80 years old.
And now instead of one family in the house
you have four or five families in the house
because they are not permitted to live anywhere else
in the city, which created very harsh living conditions
after World War II in Milwaukee.
Similar things happened in other Wisconsin cities.
In Madison the historically black neighborhood
was just east of here,
the downhill slope of
the other side of the Isthmus from here,
let's say Mifflin and Dayton,
was where most black families lived.
At the turn of the century, 1900,
there were only about 150 African-Americans in Madison,
and that's generally where they lived.
It grew during the 20th century of course.
So they moved into,
African-Americans coming North moved into
a very segregated city.
And the problems there from overcrowding
and segregation inspired Vel Phillips
to try to correct the situation.
She was a Milwaukee native.
Her parents had owned a small business
or small businesses in the black community.
They were middle-class.
She went to Howard University, was college educated.
And then she and her husband came, went to UW Law School.
She was the first black woman to graduate
from the UW Law School.
And then they went back to Milwaukee,
where part of her work in her first job
was to canvass door-to-door.
And she discovered first-hand how desperate
the conditions were.
So she decided to run for office.
And she ran for Milwaukee City Council,
was elected.
And she tells the story, she's still alive,
she tells the story about how they deliberately chose
to leave all photographs off the campaign literature
the first time so people wouldn't know her race
because she needed white votes as well.
She joined the City Council, I think, in '56?
And starting in 1962,
instituted or tried to,
introduced a fair-housing ordinance every year
to the Milwaukee City Council.
It was perfectly legal to have segregated housing in 1962.
There was no law against it.
And every year from 1962
until the Fair Housing Law passed in '68,
hers was the only vote in favor of it.
She became closely identified with fair housing.
One of the allies who joined her in that
was Father James Groppi,
whom you see in the right-hand photo.
He was a priest in Milwaukee who had worked in the South
with Dr. Martin Luther King and came North
to protest the same kinds of conditions.
In fact, this is the two of them, this is Vel here,
surrounded by NAACP Youth Commandos.
They needed the Commandos because when they would march
into white neighborhoods they were met with violence
just like African-American protesters
in the South were met with.
In 1967, August of 1967,
a group of about 300 mostly African-American
fair housing demonstrators marched across from
the north side across the 16th Street Bridge
into the south side, which was then entirely Polish,
today it's Latino,
and they were met with curses, bottles,
objects thrown at them.
The police had to be called out to quell
the riot by 5000 white residents.
She received death threats and hate mail.
On the second night of the marches,
maybe I'm getting that history wrong.
At the beginning of the marches at some point
they returned back to the north side neighborhood
to find the NAACP Freedom House in flames.
So this was not only happening in Mississippi,
it was happening in Milwaukee.
Segregated housing, of course,
leads to segregated schools because schools
are neighborhood schools.
And in the mid-'60s a survey found that
over 90% of the students in inner-city schools
were African-American.
All the other schools in the cities
were overwhelmingly white.
An attorney, Madison attorney Lloyd Barbee,
decided to take this on as his personal cause.
He had been elected head of the state NAACP in 1961,
I believe, or 1960.
He and Vel led a takeover of the Capitol's rotunda
for a sit-down protest in 1961
to talk about segregation in Wisconsin.
And in 1964 he organized a group to try to reform
the public school system in Milwaukee.
They held a school boycott,
and the kids and families in those predominantly
segregated schools did not go for a long period of time.
They set up Freedom Schools instead.
Now, the Supreme Court had ruled back in 1954
that segregated schools were unconstitutional.
He's doing this 10 years later.
So in 10 years nothing has happened.
And it takes another 15 years
before Milwaukee schools agree to desegregate.
It's not 'til 1979
that there's a desegregation plan
because the city's leaders
dug in their heels on this issue.
During those years in the '60s and '70s,
other things are going on that create
the Milwaukee we have today.
One has to do with plant closings.
The jobs that brought thousands,
tens of thousands of African-Americans north to the city
in the '50s and '60s were in factories
that had themselves been built in the 1850s or '60s or '70s.
And those hundred-year-old factories were not efficient
and could not compete.
And so the owners of those companies
built new factories out in the suburbs.
And the public transportation did not connect
the inner-city with the suburbs.
It was physically impossible for people living
in the center city of Milwaukee to go take a job
in Brown Deer or Oak Creek.
And so as businesses throughout the 1960s and '70s
left Milwaukee, that near north side neighborhood
became very deteriorated.
More than 70,000 jobs left the city of Milwaukee
between 1979 and '82, if I remember right.
So it was a mass exodus of jobs that created the poverty
and desperation that you see today.
If you get off the highway at 27th Street and drive north,
you know, you start driving down the side streets
through neighborhoods,
and there are uninhabited houses and storefronts boarded up.
And when these pictures were taken,
those were thriving neighborhoods.
People loved their houses and took care of them
because they had jobs at factories they could walk to.
But today that has all evaporated.
The second influence, of course,
economically was globalization.
Many of the products made in those factories are
now made in other countries.
As I mentioned before,
Father Groppi was one of the allies
of Vel Phillips and Lloyd Barbee.
Today if you look at this map
based on 2010 census data,
you see why Milwaukee is considered one of the most
segregated cities in the nation.
The green-colored area
represents African-American households,
the golden-colored area is Hispanic or Latino households,
blue is white.
And if you look at Los Angeles,
there's no great concentration of any color.
It's just kind of all inter-mixed.
If you look at Washington.
But Milwaukee looks like this for the reasons
that we just talked about.
That correlates with poverty.
You can see on the upper map there in blue.
The darker the blue, the greater the incidence of poverty.
The bottom photos show two programs
that we have initiated
in the last couple years to try to
tell the story of African-Americans in Milwaukee.
On the right is a group of high school
and college-aged interviewers.
We raise some money from a private donor in Milwaukee
to conduct oral history interviews
with elderly residents in the north side of Milwaukee
to ask them how they coped when all the jobs went away.
And those people are still living there,
the ones who came north to take the jobs,
and then the jobs went away.
So we thought up the idea of having young people
interview their grandparents about what their own
neighborhood used to be like and to create
a record of that based on people's memories.
So here are the interviewers and three of their supervisors
outside a foundry in Milwaukee.
Those interviews will go online this spring.
No, wait, they're already online.
Those are the ones Paul put on first, I think.
Yeah, yeah, those have just gone online.
On the left is an exhibit that we created this winter
called Crossing the Line that tells the story
of fair-housing marches that I just walked you
through very quickly.
The person who curated that is Tanika Apaloo,
who's here in the second row.
And our archivists in Milwaukee and Madison
also helped select and interpret the content there.
We printed two copies of the banners you see there.
And they're going to travel around the state
for the next two years.
They'll be booked into more than 40 venues,
schools who will get that curriculum guide
that Katie mentioned as well,
but public libraries and museums
and community centers as well.
Madison, of course,
is not that much different than Milwaukee.
The racial disparities here are huge.
We have multiple African-American neighborhoods
here in Madison as opposed to one predominant one,
but that doesn't mean that if you look at income
or education or other factors this situation is much better.
We ran a similar project,
the lower two photos show it,
where we had high school kids interview
older African-American residents last year
about how the city's black communities changed
since about eight, seven, get my centuries right,
since the 1990s.
Because if you've lived in Madison all your life
you can remember when the African-American community
was very small.
I started at the Historical Society in the early 1980s,
and if a black person walked into our library reading room
everybody stopped what they were doing and looked up
because it was a pretty rare occasion.
Today, of course, African-American residents
have a very visible and fruitful role in the city's culture.
And we wanted to interview long-time residents
about how that happened and how the city changed.
And those interviews will be going online soon.
Those are the ones that are not online yet.
And what does the future hold?
I have no idea. I don't know.
But I know that the young people who were
doing those interviews and who will be looking at
that exhibit in their classrooms are the ones
who will make it happen.
So there's your 30,000-foot view
of African-American history in Wisconsin.
Just remember that it is not a recent phenomenon,
that long before anyone spoke English in Wisconsin
there were African-Americans here, shaping our history.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)