cc >> Good evening.
I'm Jon Miskowski, from Wisconsin Public Television.
We haven't officially started yet.
Otherwise, they wouldn't let me speak if we had started.
I'm supposed to ask you to turn off your cell phones.
Part of the reason we want to do that, aside from the immediate
embarrassment if your phone went off, we're recording tonight's
conversation, so not only would you embarrass yourself with this
group, but with a statewide audience, as well, so an extra
incentive to be good. We are recording this for
Wisconsin Public Television. We're recording this for our
Wisconsin Channel, for a series called University Place.
If you don't know about it, I hope that you'll go online
and look for it or watch it on Wisconsin Public Television's
Wisconsin Channel. It's a series of lectures,
symposium forums, from universities across this state.
This documentary we're going to see a clip from is going to be
broadcast nationwide on May 16, on Public Television.
Mark Samels will tell you more about that.
But I'm supposed to ask you to behave.
( laughter ) I think that's all.
Actually, this is a story about not behaving,
so that's a bad place to start. I think this is a really
inspiring part of the story. We'll start in a minute.
And I think Paula Bonner, of the Illinois Association, is going
to welcome you officially.
Thank you very much, Jon. Good evening, everyone.
I encourage really uncontrollable behavior.
(laughter) I definitely do.
It's wonderful to be here tonight.
Thank you all for coming. It's a tremendous pleasure for
the Wisconsin Alumni Association to partner with Wisconsin Public
Television and their incredible staff as we take opportunities
like we have tonight. We've done similar kinds of
programs in other parts of the state.
It's a great partnership. You know, I was thinking,
in fact, I asked Helene whether the date of tonight's program
happened to have been deliberately chosen.
She looked puzzled and she said, "No."
I said, well, I find it really kind of interesting to think
that April 12, 1861, was the 150th anniversary.
Today is the 150th anniversary of the start of the
American Civil War. It's very interesting
for us right now at the Alumni Association
to also think about that. And to go 75 days after April
12, to June 26, 1861, the 13 original graduates of the
University of Wisconsin, led by a grad named Charles Wakeley,
came together, put a dollar in a hat, and formed
and founded the Wisconsin Alumni Association.
So, we are in the midst of beginning a grand celebration
for our 150th year. Our mission statement, they
founded themselves because they were concerned about the support
from the state legislature to take good care--
This is true. This is true.
I'm not making this up. To take care of their
13-year-old, because that's how old our university was at that
point, to take care of our 13-year-old university.
As alums, they needed to come together to support and promote
the university and each other. So here we are, 150 years later,
still very involved in advocacy and many other things, as well.
100 chapters around the world, three award-winning
publications, "On, Wisconsin," "Badger Insider,"
"Forward Under 40," international travel and
especially a point of pride is the development of a lifelong
learning program now, over 100 activities, either on campus,
online, around the state, or around the nation.
Tonight, you are participating in one of those.
I'm just delighted to see you all here.
Do come out for some of our celebration activities.
June 23, in fact, we will have the Civil War Band, a special
new flavor of Babcock ice cream called Mad Grad, a medley.
So come down for some free ice cream, that'll be great,
and look for other activities. I am very pleased to welcome and
turn the mic over to a great friend, James Steinbach, who has
been the director of Wisconsin Public Television.
They cover a six station area. He's an amazing man and a good
friend, please welcome James. ( applause )
I'll be brief, because I know you're here
for important things. But I do want to say,
what happened 50 years ago, was important.
This evening is a small part of a conversation recalling that.
But what people did, often young people, did 50 years ago,
made a difference. And the fact that you're here to
participate in this conversation does make a difference.
It's important too. That's what Public Television
hopes to do, is to be able to help us tell the stories, so we
remember, so we share them with each other, so that we remember
what's important. I want to thank you for your
support of Public Television, and Radio, and for coming
this evening. I'm going to introduce
Mark Samels, because if you're talking about history, and
American history, you can't use those words without talking
about American Experience, which is the longest running
and finest storytelling program on television anywhere.
Mark is the executive producer of American Experience.
I've known him for, hmm, maybe 25 years.
That's long enough to actually believe that he is as good as it
gets. He's a terrific executive
director and producer. One of the things that it said
in the notes that you get, you know, when they send out notes--
I'm not going to tell you all the notes, but one of the notes
said that among other things, what he's done is to bring in
the personal voice into the programs that they do.
Some stories can only be told that way.
There are stories that we can take a step back, and we can
really take three steps back, and really think it through and
analyze it, and some have to be really told by people who were
there. This program you're about to see
is really extraordinary in that way, I think.
I want to thank Mark for bringing all of us in Public
Television, and all of us-- This program, and all the work
that you do, so Mark, you're up. ( applause )
Thanks. Thank you.
Thanks for coming down. It's always great to come back
to Madison. It's great to come back and work
with Wisconsin Public Television, and now the Alumni
Association. My envelope is in the mail,
I promise. Anyway, it's great to be here.
This has been a long and really wonderful journey with this
program. It began three years ago,
actually, when I was talking to my daughter who was in college,
not here, a bit to the south in Chicago.
She said, "I'm just taking this awesome class from
this teacher." An amazing class,
amazing book, dad. She said, "You know, sometimes
the way you pick shows to make for your series, I just
have to wonder about, but this one is a show, dad.
You should really make this into a film."
So, I read the book, and we got the rights to the book and
decided to make it into a film, because she was right.
It had all the elements of an amazing story.
It had incredible characters. It was an important moment.
But what really struck me was that after I'd read the book,
you know, I thought this is going to appeal to my
generation. It's going to appeal to boomers,
because they lived through it. This is their story.
But I thought, wow, you know, it also appeals to my 22-year-old,
you know, what is it about this story that appeals to her?
The more we got into the making of the film, that became
apparent. You'll see some of that tonight.
This is three years ago. I intentionally then
commissioned the film with an amazing filmmaker in New York.
We worked with Stanley Nelson, who made a film for us on the
murder of Emmett Till, which caused the Justice Department to
re-open the investigation of that murder.
We picked the best filmmaker in the country to make this story.
We wanted to get it done in time to actually have it travel
around the country. We premiered it in January,
2010, at the Sundance Film Festival.
In the 15 months since then, we've been screening it around
the country at festivals, at forums like this.
We've had a traveling exhibit that has traveled to 25 cities,
including to Milwaukee. I was there in February.
It's traveling around the country.
We've developed a curriculum for high schools all around
the Freedom Rides. It's being distributed
nationally starting this spring, and certainly in the fall.
Perhaps most excitingly for me, we decided about a year ago that
we were going to recreate a freedom ride.
So we asked for applicants. We wanted the same age as many
of the participants in this. We asked for college students to
apply. We got 1,000 applications from
around the country. Beginning May 6, we are taking
40 college students on an all expenses paid trip from
Washington, DC, all the way to New Orleans.
They're going to be on a bus with the original
Freedom Riders, having a cross-generational discussion
about, really, all about one question,
"Could you get on the bus?" And on the bus, figuratively,
means, could you make a commitment, can you put it
on the line? What gets you excited
to make a commitment? What will it take?
You don't have to put your life on the line, necessarily.
But what is it that makes you, you know, energized enough,
today? In 1961, it was what we refer to
now as an analog time. You put your body on a bus
and traveled through the south, you know.
Now we live in a digital time. It's invisible, social media.
And how can we tell when something's coalescing?
Last month, you could tell when something was coalescing here.
That was an analog event, very much so, at the Capitol.
We're going to have that conversation.
It's really exciting. I could talk about it more about
that later, but that's a really exciting moment.
We're going to watch the first half-hour of the film.
I just want to say, one of the universals that came out of the
story when I first became interested in it, is that
I think it really hones in on something that I think is really
misunderstood about history. And Will, I'm interested in his
viewpoint on this. He knows a lot more about
history than I do. But what I learned is that
history is anything but inevitable.
It's made up of twists and turns that depend upon individual
choices. Looking backward, it looks
inevitable. It looks like everything had to
go, one thing to the other. We had to come apart, almost,
as a country 150 years ago. We had to have a Civil War, and
we had to have the Depression for a number of reasons.
It looks inevitable. It's not.
In 1961, our leadership in Washington, and quite frankly,
the leadership at that time of civil rights organizations,
was behind the curve on this particular story.
What was ahead of the curve, riding the wave, to use another
metaphor, were 18- to 25-year-olds, who said, we are
going to take the reigns of history in our hands, and we're
not going to let go. That's a really inspiring and
exciting story. Heaven knows we're in a
leadership gap these days, across the board.
We need that kind of responsibility of each and every
citizen, I think is really critical.
I think that's the enduring story.
That's why this story leaps across 50 years.
Fifty years ago next month is when this all began.
It leaps across it. Let's look at the first
half-hour, and then we're going to come back, okay?
Thanks.
We're going to have a conversation now.
This program is on Wisconsin Public Television on Monday,
May 16, at 8:00pm. This is the first half-hour
of a two-hour program, an extraordinary program.
I want to introduce the moderator of tonight's
conversation, Professor William Jones, from the university,
Madison campus, Department of History.
He's a graduate of Northwestern, and a PhD from the University
of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Will's work focuses on
20th century US history, with a particular interest
in race, class and work. In his book, "The Tribe of Black
Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South"
was published in 2005. He's currently working on
a book on race in the service sector after World War II.
Professor Jones. ( applause )
Thanks, James.
It's hard to follow that clip from the film.
I've seen the whole film, and it's really--
The rest is even more powerful, so I urge you to see it.
I want to underline Mark's point about the importance of this
moment as a moment of the emergence of a new generation
of leadership. In some ways, the degree to
which this event represents a constellation or a coherence
between an earlier generation of leadership and the new
generation that really came to emerge in the early 1960s.
The idea of the Freedom Rides was actually an old idea that
was first proposed during the second World War by Bayard
Rustin, who was one of the founders of CORE, the Congress
on Racial Equality, who had founded CORE with James Farmer,
who's a prominent figure in the film we just saw.
Rustin was probably the most prominent advocate of
non-violent civil disobedience in the United States, based on
his understanding of what had happened in the independence
movement in India, led by Mathatma Gandhi.
He was sort of advocating the application of these strategies
into the United States. He actually got the idea
to organize CORE during the second World War.
And as an organizer, started traveling by bus
through the south on his own. This was actually the origin
of this strategy of Freedom Rides where he would
actually just as an individual start resisting segregation.
He'd be on a bus in his way to the south, people would tell him
to move into the black section, and he would say no.
He, during this, was really brutally beaten,
as you can imagine. One particular incident in
Nashville, Tennessee, where he was arrested, the police came
onto the bus and started beating him right on the bus.
Rustin got a kind of peculiar conclusion from this.
He sort of suffered this beating, but then he said he was
really impressed by the reaction of the other people on the bus.
The white people on the bus actually started to object
to this and told the police to stop, because he was being
beaten right in front of them. He said, well, this really shows
the power of non-violence. You'll get beaten, but it will
have an impact. So he started to advocate a
larger campaign in 1946, which was after the Morgan decision,
which is referenced in the film. The Supreme Court ruled that
interstate transportation, segregation on interstate
transportation violated the Constitution.
Now, this was a Supreme Court ruling that was largely ignored
by transportation companies and by local authorities in the
south. So in many ways, this was
actually similar to, and was a precursor to these 1961 riots.
They were initiated by CORE, by Rustin and James Farmer.
It was an inter-racial group, mostly of northerners, some of
whom were from North Carolina, but most of them were from
northern cities. They started in Washington,
so like the 1961 riot. There were a couple of important
differences. One is that they didn't try to
enter into the deep south. Their idea was actually to ride
from Washington to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and not go
farther into the south. They thought that this would
avoid really overt violence and intense violence.
In some ways this worked. The ride actually made it
to Chapel Hill. There were a few arrests.
There were some threats of violence, but they actually made
it all the way to Chapel Hill. A couple of other differences,
the riders were all adult men. This was a conscious decision
there were actually a number of women , Ella Baker, Pauli
Murray, really experienced civil rights activists who were
involved in planning this event. They actually didn't participate
the idea was to keep it all men, to avoid that tension of having
particularly black men and white women on these rides.
It also reflected a conservatism of the earlier movement.
Which I think would become particularly important if you
watch the rest of the film you'll see the really central
role that Diane Nash and other young women play in the Freedom
Rides that I think shows perhaps it was a miscalculation in the
really important role that they played in the 1960s.
Probably the most important difference was the reaction of
civil rights leaders. There were a few civil rights--
There were actually two major civil rights leaders
who supported this. A. Philip Randolph, who was
a union leader, who probably was the most prominent civil rights
activist at the time. Roy Wilkins, who would later
actually be the head of the NAACP.
At the time he was the second in command of the NAACP.
And as Bayard Rustin said, every Negro leader I talked to except
for Randolph and Wilkins thought we were absolutely insane.
He said, Thurgood Marshall, who was an attorney for the NAACP
said, you know, "Rustin you are insane to try this, just dumb."
The reaction was, this is just totally insane.
To even suggest this is suicidal.
Many people thought that Rustin was suicidal that he was just
trying do this to get himself killed.
One thing is what changed between 1946 and 1961
that didn't create a completely different situation, but I think
created some really important dynamics.
The most important was the emergence of a mass based civil
rights movement in the South. That played a really important
role. Northern activists had been
trying to do this for decades. They were sometimes joined
by a few activists mostly from southern cities, but the degree
to which these Freedom Rides depended on support from Black
southerners who were willing to join them and support them was
really the critical difference. They remained extremely isolated
as you've seen, subjected to horrific violence,
but their ability to withstand that, and continue to move
through the south really depended on the support they got
from southern activists. That ground swell of support
from southern activists started to appear in the late 1950s
partially as a result of the Brown decision which outlawed
racial segregation in public schools.
It, in a sense, like the Morgan decision, it sort of put a moral
weight behind civil rights activism.
The Brown decision created mass movements on both sides.
I think we saw in the film both the movement to defend
segregation at the local level led by white citizens' councils,
the Ku Klux Klan, and evident really in the horrific violence
that we saw in the film inflicted against the Freedom
Riders and mobilized in reaction to the Brown decision.
In some respects the sort of lack of attention that the
earlier Freedom Ride gained would've been impossible in the
wake of the Brown decision, it heightened this issue
on both sides and really created tensions on both sides.
Civil rights activists also mobilized in the south on behalf
of implementing the Brown decision.
The most famous of these examples is the Montgomery bus
boycott, which emerged right after the Brown decision.
It was a really incredibly well organized boycott of public
transportation in the city of Montgomery, it lasted a year and
ended with the ending of legal segregation in public
transportation in the city of Montgomery.
The effect of this was to legitimize nonviolent civil
disobedience as a strategy. I think most importantly in the
eyes of civil rights activists. Leadership in civil rights
organizations saw this as a strategy that could actually
work. It also created a new generation
of Black leadership in the south.
We saw the role that Martin Luther King, who emerged
out of the Montgomery movement would play in supporting
the Freedom Rides-- Actually in the part you didn't
see, he plays a much more prominent role in supporting
these Freedom Rides. Probably most importantly and
this gets to Mark's point, Black college students, we see
the role that Diane Nash plays. She's a student at Fisk
University in Tennessee. The role that John Lewis
a student at American Baptist College also in Tennessee plays.
To a smaller extent, white students many of them from
the north, the most prominent figure in this would again come
later in the story is Jim Zwerg, who was a white student
actually from Wisconsin. He was attending school at
Beloit College, participated in an exchange program that took
him to Fisk University for a year.
He thought he was just going down to go to college, he got
involved in the Freedom Rides while he was down there.
I think these students and this sort of broader cohort of
southern activists played a really critical role in the
continuation of the ride. The effect of the violence that
we saw in Anniston that would continue in Birmingham and then
in Montgomery had the effect of actually stalling
the original ride. These students came down from
Tennessee and picked up the rides and continued them down to
New Orleans. We can understand this moment
in 1961 as part of the really important, really critical
transformation in the broader civil rights movement.
A movement that had largely been very isolated, carried on by
professional activists who many of them were in the north.
Or if they were in the south, in very large cities,
to one that had a mass base across the south.
Bayard Rustin would later identify this as what he called
a moment in which you started to see what he called a transition
from protest to politics, in which civil rights activists
could start to think about actually shaping policy both at
the local level and even at the national level.
This united northern and southern civil rights activists
and also coupled this strategy of nonviolent civil
disobedience with broader political strategy that I think
we would see it evident on a national level in the
March on Washington in 1963, just a few years later.
As Bayard Rustin pointed out this actually allowed the civil
rights movement to talk about a broad arrange of issues that
were related to voting rights and segregation in the south,
but also access to housing, housing discrimination,
job discrimination, and improving conditions
of employment. He argued that this sort of
opened up a much broader range of issues related to economic
justice that would become really central to the civil rights
movement as the 1960s went on. We're going to talk a little bit
about the impact of that movement in Milwaukee and I
think you can see the emergence of a connection between southern
activism around segregation and voting rights and the way in
which it very quickly became a national movement that was aimed
at not just addressing Jim Crowe in the south, but racial
inequality more broadly and nationally.
Perhaps just to end, I think importantly was the impact that
this sort of sustained movement that had sort of a local base of
support was able to put pressure on a federal government that,
it becomes clear in the film also, is very strongly resisting
moving this, and sort of put the Kennedy administration in
a position where they really couldn't ignore what was
happening. Again it's something that is
captured really beautifully in the broader movie that I hope
you'll take time to see. I guess I'll stop there.
We have time for a discussion. I'll call up, we have three
participants in this panel that I'll introduce.
The first one is Mark. Mark Samels is
the executive producer of PBS American experience.
He's a native of Wisconsin, a graduate of UW-Madison.
He's also the executive producer of "Freedom Riders,"
the film that you've just seen. Vel would you like to come up?
Vel Phillips is a distinguished professor at Marquette
School of Law. She's currently writing a memoir
based on her leadership in the civil rights movement
in Milwaukee. In 1956, she was elected,
the first woman-- the first African American
and the first woman on the City Council of Milwaukee.
Finally we have Chris Hexter, who is an attorney in St. Louis.
He's a graduate of UW-Madison, and has been a civil rights
activist since 1960. He was involved in CORE
in St. Louis, the Congress on Racial Equality,
and also participated in Freedom Summer, which was
a program aimed at recruiting college students from northern
universities to go to Mississippi and participate
in a voting rights campaign in Mississippi in 1964.
( applause )
I'll start out with some questions, and then we can move
to questions from the audience, because I'm sure you all have
some questions also. I guess I wanted to give Mark a
chance to talk. You introduced the film.
But to say a few words about why are we telling this story now?
In addition to it being the 50th anniversary, what can we learn
about the story? >> Well, anniversaries are
always good in history, so that's a big reason.
What you basically saw in this clip is really sort of the
context and the lay of the land that sets up a pretty dramatic
change that happens right after the lights came on, which is
that CORE decides to call off the Freedom Rides.
The Freedom Rides are over. They're dead.
They're done. Because what happens in
Birmingham, which we didn't see, is that that other bus is just
dramatically attacked, and really beaten.
What's beginning to happen is that the national media are
starting to cover this. So some of these images are
starting to come out, so they called it off.
Word trickles up to Nashville, and a group of students led by
Diane Nash, decides to take over and say, you know what,
we're not going to stop. They immediately, that night,
have a meeting. They sign their Last Wills and
Testaments, and they decide they're going to get on this bus
and go. They get on two buses.
They leave the next morning at 5:30 in the morning, headed for
Birmingham, and they continue. They actually never do get as
far as New Orleans, because they end up in Parchman Prison in
Mississippi, the most feared prison in the country.
That part of the story, which you have to have the grounding
to understand where this came from, that part of the story,
I think is enormously relevant right now, because what we're--
And this certainly was not intentional three years ago.
I mean, what are we seeing right now playing out in the Middle
East, but a very grassroots, chaotic, ordinary people led
series of revolutions, freedom movements, liberation moments.
It's sporadic. It's chaotic, just like the
Freedom Rides were. Also, really led by,
not exclusively, but a large number of young people,
18 to 25 years old, like many of the 400-some Freedom Riders
in 1961 were. I think it's a very--
You saw the darkest part, well, actually not the darkest part.
But you saw all dark, I guess. It gets very inspiring at the
end. I think that's the answer.
Thanks. Vel, I wonder if you could just
tell us a little bit about, I think is some ways, we're more
familiar with the history of the civil rights movement in the
south than we are with the one that happened here in our own
backyard. I wonder if you could tell a
little bit about your story, about what was happening here.
Well, first of all, there was a lot of discrimination in
housing in Milwaukee at the time.
I lived on Walnut Street, because that's where we could
afford to live. We actually had a big house,
a nine-room house that my parents--
They wanted us to live with them.
My husband didn't think it was a good idea.
( laughter ) He was right about that.
My mother was a very strong person, and she would've been
really running the show. So I lived above a drug store
on Walnut Street, or we lived. As a matter of fact, a woman for
instance, I saw your middle baby going up some steps on Walnut
Street, where was she going? And so, my mother said,
oh, I don't know. These young people.
I said mother, you should've told her that's where I lived,
you know. But anyway, I was in that area.
And when I tried to move out, at that time, the real estate
people could say, well, we don't rent to coloreds; we don't sell
to coloreds. You know, they were just flat
out. They had not reapportioned in
Wisconsin for three decades. Thirty years.
And the Secretary of State at that time refused to okay an
election unless we had reapportionment.
Now, it's taken for granted, every ten years,
you reapportion. That's how I knew about the
Secretary of State, because he said that the people in the
northern part of Wisconsin were counting the trees and the cows.
( laughter ) In order to keep their
representation. So I joined the League of Women
Voters. The Journal and the Sentinel,
which were separate at the time, were both advocating
reapportionment. I went door to door for
reapportionment. I guess that was really the
first thing. I saw so much poverty.
Because we were living in the area, I was working in my area.
I saw all this, you know, space heaters, where it would be hot
in one room and then you'd go into the kitchen, and they'd
say, well, come in. And the oven would be on, and
the door would be open to heat the kitchen, which is very
dangerous for children, for anyone.
I was introduced to that. I thought this shouldn't be,
so I asked my husband to run for alderman.
I said, you know, I would explain to the people in the
NAACP, you guys should be interested in this
reapportionment, and they just sort of treated me like I had
just gotten out of college and I was way up in the air somewhere,
and they ignored it. Anyway, my husband promised that
he would run if they would redistrict.
But then he chickened out. ( laughter )
He said, I just want to practice law and make some money.
But he said, "You have the same credentials that I have,
why don't you do it?" So his insistence was not really
so high minded, it was just he didn't want me to bother him
about it, you know. ( laughter )
Then that's when I learned. We had a -- in the green sheet,
that most of you probably don't remember the green sheet.
But the green sheet had run a story that we were the first man
and wife law team to be admitted to the Eastern District of the
Federal Bar. Doyle Getter, who wrote at that
time a little column called "All Things Considered" in the
Journal, interviewed us, and I got to know him.
He's the one that said, well, to run.
Actually, when I think about it, I was elected in 1956.
Between '56 and '60, of course my election, I snuck in.
They really didn't know. I had no pictures, nothing.
My name was Vel, which is short for a longer name.
They didn't know that I was a woman.
They didn't know that. ( laughter )
And they didn't know that I was African American.
So, it was very sneaky, really. ( laughter and applause )
But it worked. Anyway, the thing I really
wanted to say was that I got so involved in this whole thing.
The City Council of course treated me, they were just,
first of all, I found out after nine years, almost ten years of
marriage that I was pregnant. So they got a woman and a half,
really, you know. ( laughter )
It was rough, being on the City Council, because I
decided for the first four years I wouldn't do anything,
I would just listen and learn. And I had two babies.
Michael, who is here. Stand up and wave at everyone.
I decided I would just listen and learn, and I did.
But I knew I wanted to work on fair housing, because I had been
treated so badly by the real estate people, that that was
really in the back of my mind. In any event, when I'd go door
to door for reapportionment, people would say, honey, I just
can't vote today, I don't feel well, I'll go tomorrow.
And I'd have to tell them that you have to go today, you know.
In any event, it was an exciting time.
My career, which was really very small, really, in comparison,
but I got to know three presidents on a very personal
basis, JFK, LBJ and Jimmy Carter.
Martin Luther King, he called me, and I'd leave him hanging on
the phone if Michael was crying, or something.
( laughter ) I'd say I'll call you back, and
he'd say, no, I'm going to stay on the phone, because you're not
going to call me back. I think about that, because we
all knew he was very special. Very, very special.
But we didn't, at least I didn't at the time, think of him in
terms of who he is now, you know, Martin Luther King now.
The funniest thing, when I go to schools and talk about Martin
Luther King, the teacher introduces me and says, she was
a friend of Martin Luther King. Young people don't, age is--
They think of Martin Luther King like we would think of George
Washington or Abraham Lincoln. ( laughter )
So as soon as the question period would come, the children
would ask, "How old are you?" ( laughter )
It was so easy. Roy Wilkens called us personally
and asked us to come to the March on Washington.
It was just, oh, that was an experience.
I thanked him later. We didn't go on the bus.
We just took the airplane. We spent the money.
He said it would be so important if we were there, because we
were a couple, and there weren't many law couples.
Martin Luther King-- I took down some names.
I wondered why that you didn't call John Lewis.
He was so exciting. He's such a good speaker.
I got to know him very well. He's such a good speaker.
And well, of course, Thurgood is gone, but he was just
the dearest man. He and my husband,
they both liked -- or something like that.
I think that's the name of the drink, isn't it?
( laughter ) You don't know either?
( laughter ) But I think all these people
like Gloster Current, who was with the NAACP.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, and to be contributing.
When the City Council, they treated me--
They didn't want me. It was in the newspaper that
I was using the men's bathroom. My mother was mortified.
( laughter ) Gosh, she just couldn't dream.
She didn't even want me to go. The first time,
see I introduced, started on the fair housing.
Five years, I worked introducing it, you know, before Groppi
called me and said, could he join my cause.
Many people think that Groppi was the main one, but I had been
doing it for five years. But I must admit that until
he joined, I didn't get any attention, really.
They just sort of, you know, she's doing it again, and vote
it down again, and that was it, you know.
But when Groppi joined my cause, really, it was just kind of
fascinating, this white priest and these black, kind of ghetto
kids, it was too much like Bob Flannigan in Boystown.
( laughter ) And they just loved it.
Groppi was a lot of fun. He was very, very earnest.
Even though he enjoyed the attention, he never tried to
steal the show from me. Reporters would come up and say
when is the housing bill going to be introduced, and he said,
we're just here supporting Vel. She's the leader here.
We're here to support her. So he never tried to take credit
for anything. The papers sort of played him up
a lot, which I can understand, because nothing really happened
during those five years. When he joined the cause, is
when things started happening. Lloyd Barbee, who was in the
legislature at the time would call me and say Vel, why are you
letting Groppi get all the credit, and I'd say, I'm not
worried about credit. I just want a bill.
The federal government passed the Fair Housing Law,
and that did it. That really was the thing that
did it. But along the way, I have stayed
active. I'm now writing a book.
And I did bring a book that I wanted you to see.
This young white student who got his dissertation.
I'll hold the microphone, you hold the book.
Okay. I helped him with his
dissertation. We met every Saturday at the
Chocolate Factory. ( laughter )
For about a year. And I guess since it was all
free, he decided he'd put me on the cover of his book.
I looked at this picture and I think, god Vel, were you
ever that young? ( laughter )
I wanted you to see it. It's in depth on housing.
Let me see, what else? I wrote a few notes.
Well, you have questions. Why don't I just pass it on
and let you have questions. Is that all right?
We're going to take a few more questions, and then we're
going to turn it to the audience.
We also have a film clip from Milwaukee that we'll share
in a few minutes. >> Oh, really?
It's a surprise. ( audio feedback )
Chris, I wanted to ask you, a white student from St. Louis,
how do you end up in Mississippi in 1964?
First of all, I want to thank the Alumni Association
for this event. It's wonderful to come back
to campus. I've spent two wonderful days
here. I'm just very fond of this
place. I was a student here from 1963
off and on for nine years, till 1972.
I'm a double Badger. I went to law school here
as well. When I arrived here, candidly,
I was a faculty brat. My father taught at
Queens College in New York. Then I'd come out
to Washington U in 1957. St. Louis was a segregated city.
It was legally segregated. In 1963, I had been raised,
I knew about Brown v. Board of Education.
My father saw the history of Montgomery, so he said,
Martin Luther King, that's a guy who's going to go somewhere.
So, I was pretty aware of that stuff.
A friend of mine got me involved in Congress of Racial Equality
in St. Louis in the summer of 1963, between my senior year
in high school and coming up here.
Two days after the March on Washington, we had a major
sit-in at a St. Louis bank, which held the deposits for all
the city employees. The reason that happened is
there were no African American employees above a custodial
level. And of course, in 1963, there
was no law to compel that, because they hadn't had
Title VII yet. So I came to Wisconsin.
When we sat in at the bank in St. Louis, we violated
a court injunction, so it was serious history.
If anybody knows, there was a congressman named William Clay,
many people spent months in prison because of that.
It was sort of a cause célèbre in St. Louis.
I came up to Madison. I was sort of--
And shortly after that was the bombing at the 16th Street
church in Alabama. That was first demonstration.
We had a demonstration down at the state capitol,
sort of a commemoration, a memorial service.
That summer, I read a lot about civil rights.
I read a book called "Mississippi, The Closed
Society," by a professor named James Silver, who had been
thrown out of Mississippi. Literally had to run from
Mississippi because he had befriended--
He was the only white professor on that campus who befriended
James Meredith. He had been there for 27 years,
but that didn't count when he had done that.
He had to escape. He ended up a visiting professor
at Notre Dame. Long story short, the connection
to Madison is they had a speaker's program in Madison
that year. It was sort of like politics in
the United States, and among the other speakers they had George
Wallace, who was supposed to be the liberal after James
Patterson, who you saw on the screen.
I mean, George Wallace ran as the liberal candidate, which
tells you something about the politics in Alabama.
James Silver was one of the persons on that program.
You could apply to a colloquium, and I did.
As I say, I'd read his book so I was fascinated by Mississippi.
I'd read "Mind of the South," so I was into that.
As he was speaking, I took out a napkin, a paper napkin, and I
wrote, "Dear Professor Silver, I'd love to go to Mississippi.
I'm fascinated by the state. I'm fascinated
by the problems it has." And he took the napkin.
I gave it to him, anyway. I said, "Could you read that?"
He took it. I didn't think I'd hear from
him. I mean, that's a pretty unusual
thing to do. I got a letter from him a month
later, saying that he had contacted two white students at
Ole Miss who were working in the civil rights movement
underground. You clearly couldn't do it
publicly, or they would've been chased out of Mississippi.
They gave my name to people who were organizing the Mississippi
Summer Project, including John Lewis.
Another connection to Madison, sort of two things I would say.
I ended up applying. Long story short, I applied and
I worked in Ruleville and Indianola in Sunflower County.
Indianola is home of the White Citizens Council.
It's where it was founded the day after
Brown v. Board of Education. Ruleville is the home of a woman
who's an icon in the civil rights movement,
Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. I guarded her house at night
during the summers, along with other volunteers.
I became very close with her. In fact, in 1975, I traveled
down to Mississippi with my kids.
My wife and I have five children, none of them are
related, and I have an African American daughter.
I brought her down. I have this picture of my son
and my daughter with Mrs. Hamer. She's a great woman.
But I was thinking about this movie, because I was thinking
about Julian Bond, and his statements about the conflict in
civil rights about wanting to do a good act, and the conflict
between doing that and bringing on violence.
That was what the Mississippi Summer Project was.
It was the toughest. It was the tough nut to crack in
the south. Everybody knew it.
They were struggling. So the idea was to bring down
1,000 white kids from the north, with the idea that, they didn't
want it, but they kind of predicted that if that happened,
the eyes of the north would go down to the south, and that
there would inevitably be violence.
But that violence would be exposed, and that people in the
north would then see what Mississippi was all about.
That's what Julian Bond said about this conflict, because we
were all trained. Frankly, I think people learned
from the bus Freedom Rides about how to prepare people better
for what was going on. In fact, we had a lawyer in
Mississippi talk to us in our training session who said,
"Young folk, when y'all get arrested down in Mississippi
at night, do not argue with the State Highway Patrol
about the finer points of constitutional law.
He is not interested in your high brow discussion
of constitutional law. But we went down there and
frankly, the violence did break out.
Within the first day, three people were killed.
Then I was arrested the day the bodies were found.
I was arrested in Indianola. The condition I set with my
parents was that I'd never get arrested, but that, I couldn't
avoid it. But anyway, the connection with
Wisconsin. I though oh, well, I'm listening
to that about Roy Wilkens being a hero and being a big supporter
of the Freedom Rides. By the time I was at Wisconsin,
he was considered old hat. The transitions in the movement
were interesting. And Bayard Rustin, who was
famous, one of the gutsiest people around, and he was also
the instigator behind the March on Washington.
He was the brains behind the March on Washington in 1963.
But Bayard Rustin became persona non grata to the more left of
the movement when he opposed Martin Luther King coming out
against the war in Vietnam. There were civil rights leaders
who implored King not to come out.
Among them was Bayard Rustin. It's just the transition.
I was involved in plays in Wisconsin, doing plays with
"lefty liberals," whatever you want to call it, criticizing.
We literally coined Roy Wilkens "Boy Wilkens," I mean, it was so
presumptuous in a way, you know. I mean, here us white guys,
doing it. That was sort of the Zeitgeist
in Madison, you know, at the time.
It was a wonderful campus. I was here at the most exciting
times. It was inspiring all around.
I don't know if that answers your question.
Yeah, thank you. Could we watch that clip?
This is a clip that is from the end of a film that was produced
in 1968, on urban redevelopment in Milwaukee.
We don't have no where to move.
You won't give us open housing. Your shack, yourself--
When you have to live in a rat infested--
See your kids denied having everything that the kids have.
Then you would understand... >> We feel that there is a
great problem. And that nothing is being done
about it. We all feel frustrated.
We are tired. We marched for pretty much
200 days, and our demands went unanswered.
We feel that if the black man don't get his rights, the
peaceful demonstration, which we have proven to the nation, that
he has a right to violence, even if he has to lose at all costs.
But we do feel that it has been effective in some ways.
But the main ways this here non-violence has not been
effective. Because the young kids are the
one that are most frustrated, and they'll go off, I'll say
half-cocked, and do something. Then quite naturally, it's going
to involve the rest of the black community, because we're not
going to sit around and watch all the kids get shot down and
fight a war, and we don't take part.
We know how, and we can think out and act out accordingly, and
wait for our chance. The kids are not doing that.
And that puts us right in the middle.
America don't have time. She has to do in the next couple
of months what she didn't do in 400 years previously.
Because as you notice here, I notice this year, we haven't
even had much snow or anything, and it's going to get hot
quicker than it did last year. It's only going to take one
incident to set it off. I think Milwaukee is in more
trouble than any city around this country, because it has
greater problems that it's not dealing with, but is ignoring
it. I think on something where I
heard people say about Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown, and
they used me as an example once, saying I was advocating
violence. I do not advocate violence, but
I do say this. The real advocates of violence
are those that sit behind a desk and deny people their God-given
right, not Stokely, not Rap. But people make laws just to get
elected, and laws that only benefit one people and not the
other one. Those are the advocates of
violence.
( applause )
I have one more question for Miss Phillips, and then we can
turn to the audience. I guess, just watching
that film, the story of the Freedom Riders
is so much about going, sort of the increasing danger and the
increasing tension of going further and further into the
south. And here we are, in this film,
seven years later, where this statement, "America don't have
time," we've been trying to struggle--
Why is the focus so far north? And the focus is so far north,
right? This isn't the deep south,
right? I wondered if you could talk a
little bit about that. The book that Vel Phillips
referred to is "Selma of the North," by Patrick Jones.
You knew about the book? >> I do.
He was a graduate student in the history program
here at UW-Madison. >> You have it?
I do have the book, yes. It's a wonderful book
It tells the story of the civil rights movement in Milwaukee.
I guess, one question, to sort of end my questions on, is why
Milwaukee? And why is it such a hard nut to
crack?
At the time, Milwaukee had been used by other
manufacturers, people who wanted to test a product and see how it
would go, I mean, just anything. Spices, and different foods, and
stuff, they would send it to Milwaukee, because Milwaukee
they said had such a mix of different nationalities and all,
that it was a good-- If it would go in Milwaukee,
then it would go, you know, just about anywhere.
That's why I think-- See, Milwaukee was very, very--
The reasons people would say just flat out well no, I don't
sell to you people, you know, you coloreds and all.
They were very open with their discrimination.
That was a big thing for me. I had not--
My mother, because she thought it was not ladylike.
She says, you're going on that? It's not ladylike to be running
up and down the street shouting and hollering, you know.
So I said, well, mom, we won't be doing that.
We'll just be singing. Singing freedom songs, and all.
She thought it was just outrageous, really.
But she was definitely, definitely against
discrimination. She didn't like the Packers,
and of course, my children and I love the Packers.
She didn't like them at all because this Curly Lambeau, is
that the man, had said that he would never hire any black
people at all as a football player.
I went to Howard University, and my friend was a Redskin--
He had season tickets, my boyfriend at the time.
And my mother said, you go to those games?
Don't you know that the Redskins are the only ones that are worse
than the Packers? Actually, I don't know how many
people know this, but it took an act of Congress for the Redskins
to hire black football players. They passed an act of Congress.
That's a true story. My mother said, don't you know
it took an act of Congress for the Redskins?
The only ones worse than the Redskins are the Packers,
you know. So once, my two boys heard me
telling this story to a friend of mine on the phone.
She said, oh, are you going to watch the Packer game?
And I said, oh, no, and I told the story.
And I heard, I don't know if it was Michael or Dale, I heard him
say, Dad, would you tell mom not to tell that story about Green
Bay, something that happened in B.C.
( laughter ) But Milwaukee was a good testing
ground. They had a lot of prejudice at
the time. I didn't know what I was really
coming up against when I started out, because I was really very
innocent in a way. All I wanted, I didn't care who
got the credit, I just wanted a bill.
And I mean to tell, every time they'd bring it up, I would
lose. My husband once told me, because
I had a little phrase, I'd say, well, every time I lose, I win a
little. My husband said you've said that
at least 15 times, don't say it anymore.
Find something else, you know. But it was true.
It was tough going in the council.
Not only for that, but for everything for women.
They didn't want me in the bathroom.
They redecorated and had two in every office.
No one in the office with me, because I was black and I was a
woman. And -- and I got to be very good
friends. So she said to me once, we were
kind of in back. I made the statement that both
of us were first-- You know, I was the first black
woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin
Law School. And I didn't even think that was
a big deal, because there were only about 12 women in the whole
school. ( laughter )
So being the first black was not a big deal.
I never used it. I hate to say when I graduated
law school, because it makes me, you know, very, very old.
B.C.? >> Yeah, B.C.!
( laughter ) But I graduated in 1951.
I was the first African American woman to graduate
from the law school. ( applause )
My husband was a year ahead of me, and believe it or not,
they'd say when they'd see the two of us, oh, wow, gee, Dale,
you're really lucky to have a built-in secretary.
This is what they'd say. My husband would kick me,
so I wouldn't take off on 'em. He'd say "shh," all like that.
I'd say, well, he might be my secretary!
What are you talking about? But anyway, I graduated, and
I never used that, that first, because it was just an accident
that I was the first. The black woman who was from
Africa was supposed to graduate, but since her husband
was an abuser-- she was from Britain--
Well, from Africa, but Britain had colonized this particular
place. And she said, you know, Vel,
I'm staying on to get my masters in law, because if I become
a barrister before my husband becomes a barrister,
that she was separated from, he will beat me, and everything.
So I would say to her, don't let him dictate your agenda.
You graduate. By her not graduating,
I became the first woman. I never used it until
I got on the council. And as I told you, I did
sneak on the council. I just got in there before
they knew that I was black and female.
( laughter ) Then I did not introduce
anything for four years. I just wanted to, as I said,
listen and everything. But the thing that I thought was
interesting is when Roy Wilkens called us and asked us to go.
Oh, when I was at Howard University, the president of
NAACP was, I thought, a white man.
His name was Walter White. Do you remember him?
He was just a white man. I had been chosen to go.
I was only 17 years old, you could tell.
I was very young. When I saw this man--
It was a panel. We had panels in the morning,
then lunch, then panels in the afternoon.
I said to Walter White, I shouldn't have said it, I said,
I didn't know there was a white man that was the president of
the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People. And so he said, oh, you didn't?
Then he turned to the woman who was in charge and said, I'd like
this young lady to sit next to me at lunch, and can we arrange
that. So the woman said, well, yes.
So I thought, I wondered why he'd want to sit next to me.
So I sat next to him, and he said, I noticed that you think
I'm a white man. He said I'm not a white man.
I said well, you look like-- I wanted to say, you're the
whitest looking black man I ever saw in my life.
( laughter ) Because you couldn't tell!
I didn't say that, of course. I just said, well, no one would
know it. And he taught me this.
He said, let me just give you a hint, have you ever heard the
term "a little drop will do it"? ( laughter )
And I had never heard that. I said, what does it mean?
It means, in this America, if you're just a little bit,
if you go way back and you're a little bit black, anywhere in
the line, you were black. >> The musical "Showboat."
Yes. >> The percentage that the
woman, the lead actress in "Showboat" was a percentage
black, and that was what caused all the problems.
Absolutely right. But I didn't think of that
at the time. I just thought--
And I learned that, as my first lesson.
When I went back to Howard University, I joined the NAACP,
and I'm still a life member today, and my husband, too.
Milwaukee was an interesting city.
My husband absolutely adored Milwaukee.
Of course, he was from Omaha, and if you're from Omaha,
Nebraska, you would adore Milwaukee.
( laughter ) ( applause )
You would adore it. In their commercials were
Johnson's Hog Feet. I said, god, and there was
a little pond, almost, and he said, we're going to the lake.
A little pond. So he loved Milwaukee,
the parks, Lake Michigan, and all that.
So that's how I got stuck in Milwaukee.
But it's been good to me. It really has.
Did I answer your question? >> You did.
( laughter and applause )