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- A traveling exhibit created in 2014
by Appleton's History Museum at the Castle
revealed some of the hidden and often forgotten
Black History of Appleton and other Fox Cities.
- Sabrina Robins: As we just find out what life looked like,
we feel that the Black contributions deserves
to be part of the regional history and the local histories.
- Nick Hoffman: The idea for this project first started
when I started to learn a little bit more
about some of the early Black community members
that lived in Appleton and so.
- Historian Nick Hoffman's desire
to learn more about Appleton's Black history
led him to team up with Dr. Sabrina Robbins
of Appleton's African Heritage, Incorporated.
- Sabrina Robins: We really felt compelled to contribute
and help with this project
to be able to participate
in chronicling the experience
of Blacks and African Americans in the region.
The project uncovered important records of Black settlement
of the area from its earliest days.
It's not just Europeans alone who are settling in this region.
Since that immediate time, Black men, women, and children
have lived along the Fox River.
People have hopes that this could be their long-standing home.
[cannon fire]
- The Civil War became a turning point
for Appleton's Black History.
In 1863, President Lincoln signed
the Emancipation Proclamation,
which declared that Black people held as slaves
in the Confederate states were freed.
The document also declared
the acceptance of Black soldiers in the Union Army,
whose numbers would grow to almost 200,000.
Horace Artis served
in the 31st United States Colored Troops Regiment
during the Civil War and fought in several battles.
He also witnessed the surrender of General Robert E. Lee.
After the war,
Horace and his wife Bercina moved to Appleton,
joining a growing Black population moving North.
- Sabrina Robins: North, within the African American tradition,
represents Canaan:
freedom and a paradise.
Canaan represents the promised land,
and so naturally, Wisconsin would represent
almost the apex of what Canaan means.
[military drumroll]
- As thousands of Wisconsin Civil War volunteers
returned to the state,
they were joined by a growing number of Black residents.
- Nick Hoffman: For northern states
that supported the Union effort during the Civil War,
people really had a wide variety of beliefs
about what equality could look like after the war.
And so, that really sets up a really big conversation
in Appleton and Wisconsin when there's larger numbers
of African Americans moving and settling in the region.
- As more Black people settled in Appleton,
they were often met with hostility.
Despite his status as a veteran and owning land in the city,
Horace Artis was once arrested for vagrancy
and spent a night in jail.
To keep Black people out of the city,
real estate contracts began including racial covenants,
which blocked Black buyers from becoming property owners.
- Nick Hoffman: Appleton, very quickly from 1910 to 1920,
is going to go
from having a growing Black population to zero.
[people shouting]
- After World War I, a growing Ku Klux Klan movement
further intimidated Black people in Wisconsin
and kept communities like Appleton all white.
Appleton became known as a "sundown town,"
one of many in the area with unwritten rules
requiring Black people and other minorities
to leave town before sunset.
- Sabrina Robins: That sundown town mentality and mindset
is really about controlling Black bodies.
If a majority of the Black population
has been pretty much targeted to Milwaukee
and a little bit of Madison.
And as you move north,
the population numbers significantly stop.
That is not by accident or happenstance.
It is by design.
[gospel music]
- In the 1950s, a growing civil rights movement
began demanding equal rights and freedom under the law.
By 1961, Appleton native Jim Zwerg
joined a growing civil rights movement
traveling the south with the Freedom Riders
in an attempt to desegregate bus station terminals.
The severe beating of Zwerg and several others by a violent mob
made national news and brought the civil rights debate
home to Appleton.
The debate continued
when a famous segregationist came to town.
- Nick Hoffman: In March 1964, George Wallace was governor of Alabama,
and one of the major national leaders in favor of segregation,
was invited to speak in Appleton, Wisconsin.
In response to Wallace's invitation to come to Appleton,
students at Lawrence University started to organize.
Students led a civil rights week.
They started to bring in major national civil rights leaders
to help them organize and also to help challenge the city.
[blues music]
- At the same time, Lawrence began recruiting Black students
who would face widespread discrimination
both on and off the campus.
- Joe Patterson: I matriculated
to Lawrence's campus in the fall of 1965.
I'd heard about Lawrence as the Harvard of the Midwest,
and that phrase stuck with me.
I was very attracted to that.
Well, it was a shock to me, first of all,
to be in a region
where the closest African-American community
was 120 miles away.
The first day of class,
the biochemistry professor told me straight up,
I didn't belong there, and in fact,
if you stay in my class, your A, your A equivalent, is a C minus.
and if you don't like it, yeah, then, you know, leave.
- To create community and support
and push for needed changes,
Black students came together
to form the African American Association on campus,
known as AAA.
- Joe Patterson: I became its first--
its inaugural president.
And the idea there
was to, again, make the campus more viable for the,
in effect, life and times of African American students.
Not a separatist movement,
and we were talking about inclusion.
I tried to create an environment that basically
would not allow other African American students
to face, basically, the same plight that I did.
- The Students of the AAA presented a list of demands
to Lawrence President Curtis Tarr
that would create a more welcoming culture
of fairness and inclusion.
Most importantly, they demanded the school
increase the number of Black students.
- Joe Patterson: Through the Association of African Americans,
we were able to get some clarity
and get some of these things remedied,
but nothing's perfect,
and it's always a work in progress.
But I think while I was there,
I think I made a difference.
- Robert Currie: The kind of exploration
that a Liberal Arts College
allows you to do.
I first arrived in Appleton in 1970.
It wasn't long after being here when we had all been subjected
to some of the racism, in town mainly,
of folks calling out to us when we walked downtown.
That bonded us in a way that we, very early in our tenure here,
said we're going to work to change some things here.
By my sophomore year, I assume the presidency of AAA.
And I said we need to do something
that will catch the attention of the entire campus
by shutting down the business operation.
And so, in the dead of night
on that particular day in March 1972,
we occupied the administration building.
People just started showing up with the signs and the placards
and the yelling and marching in front of the building
and everything.
- The next day, President Smith met with members of the AAA.
He agreed to bring 35 new Black students to campus,
hire more Black faculty,
offer more diverse academic subjects
and better academic support.
Black students at Lawrence
challenged the local community's mindset and beliefs around race.
And in the 1970s,
Appleton's sundown practice came to an end.
- Robert Currie: We had to focus on the similarities
and not the differences that we may have.
That there are ways to bridge those differences.
I left here with that
as one of the things on my personal mission and journey
that I wanted to be able
to practice, espouse, and articulate
for the rest of my life.
And Lawrence forced me to do that.
- Joe Patterson: The word diversity really applies to Lawrence now.
- I present to you Lori A. Carter, our 17th president.
[cheers and applause]
- Joe Patterson: I think, with President Carter,
this is something that's unprecedented;
to have an African American, who happens to be female,
to be president.
So, it's a different place,
as Appleton is a different place.
John Kennedy, he says,
"We all live on this small planet called Earth.
"We all breathe the same air.
"We all wish the best for our progeny,
"our children, and our grandchildren,
"and we're all mortal.
We gotta find a way to get along, period."