University Place

African American History in the Badger State

[Katie Schumacher, Wisconsin Historical Society]

Today we are pleased to introduce Michael Edmonds as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museums 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 Societys 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 Maga-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.

[applause]

[Michael Edmonds, Director of Programs and Outreach, Wisconsin Historical Society]

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 – the message is of todays talk, the – 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 –

[slide with a photo of the Wisconsin Historical Society building]

– Society headquarters, a mile away on U.W. campus, but its part of the Wisconsin Historical Society like this museum. We are a state agency like the D.N.R. and the D.O.T. About 60% of our resources come from your tax dollars, so make claims on us –

[Michael Edmonds]

– 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 –

[slide with a photo of a relief map of Wisconsin]

– 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 –

[Michael Edmonds]

– Ah! That’s what it’s all about.

Let’s leap back three centuries. The – the earliest evidence of African Americans in Wisconsin is a document from the year 1725 –

[slide titled, Fur Trade Era, 1720-1820 with an illustrated map of fur trade routes on the left and a photograph of an old Black man, Stephen Bonga on the right. Additionally, in the lower right is the information that the Black population of the Midwest in 1760 is around 500 and the total population of the Midwest in 1760 is around 5,000]

– 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 –

[Michael Edmonds]

– 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 –

[return to the Fur Trade Era slide]

– 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.

[Michael Edmonds]

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 –

[return to the Fur Trade Era slide]

– 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. And explorers from back East were always shocked and surprised to see an African American family there in a Chippewa village.

[Michael Edmonds]

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 –

[slide titled, Territorial Era, circa 1820-1848 with a painting of Henry Dodge on the left and an illustrated map of the Wisconsin Territory on the right. Additionally, at the bottom right it is noted that the Black population in Wisconsin in 1840 is 185 and the total population of Wisconsin is 30,945]

– southwestern Wisconsin, the area around Dodgeville named for Henry Dodge there, the territorial governor, and Platteville, and Galena. And 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 be-began –

[Michael Edmonds]

– to develop a kind of tension because some of them came North because they disapproved of slavery. And Southern abolitionists, Southern fundamental Christian, 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 – 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 – 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 –

[return to the Territorial Era slide]

– 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 –

[Michael Edmonds]

– 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 –

[return to the Territorial Era slide]

– 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 –

[Michael Edmonds]

– 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 they – 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 –

[slide titled, 1846-1848 Constitutions, with a photo of part of the 1846 Wisconsin Constitution as well as the vote totals for and against statehood in both 1847 and 1849 below it. Additionally, in the lower right corner it is noted that the Black population of Wisconsin in 1850 is 635 and the total population of Wisconsin is 305,391]

– you see there, would have allowed African Americans to vote. So, voting rights were part of the – 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, the – that constitution was rejected, and they went back to square one.

[Michael Edmonds]

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 –

[return to the 1846-48 Constitutions slide]

– 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. And so, from 1849 until suffrage is finally won in the courts 20 years later, African Americans were denied the right to vote.

[Michael Edmonds]

Now during those years, the 1840s and 50s before the Civil War, two rural communities of – of Black farmers were established in western Wisconsin. One was at –

[slide titled, Pleasant Ridge, with three photographs, one of the Black families of Pleasant Ridge, one a portrait of John Green and one of Isaac Sheppard and his three children, Ella, Eliza and Emily. Additionally, there is a Google map with the location of Pleasant Ridge identified]

– 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.

[Michael Edmonds]

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 cent – the 20th century, these kids in that photo on the left were – were growing up and they were moving to the cities. And so, these two rural communities are just matters of history now. There aren’t any buildings in either place and there – there are no people living who remember them.

Now both – oh –

[slide titled, Thomas Jeffersons Descendants. with three photos, one of an actors portrayal of Sally Hemings, one a newspaper clipping with a photo of Beverly Jefferson and one of John W. Jefferson]

– the -the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Hal – Sally Hemmings ended up staying in Madison – coming to Madison. Their – their son Eston Hemmings came in 1852, as you can see. And then his two sons, he – there was also a sister, a daughter who – who died early, came and settled in Madison. Now for many years the -the folks at Monticello did not want to acknowledge this relationship at all, but recent scholarship and D.N.A. 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 –

[Michael Edmonds]

– some of whom came to Madison. Eston Hemmings had siblings, and so some of them went elsewhere as well.

But Beverley Jefferson and – and John Jefferson, as you can see from the photo –

[return to the Thomas Jeffersons Descendants slide]

– 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 many people coming to Madison, legislators, businesspeople, would have known them –

[Michael Edmonds]

– 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.

[slide titled, Underground Railroad, with an illustrated map of the Underground Railroad in the Midwest and a photo of Caroline Quarles, a slave who escaped through Wisconsin in 1842]

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 –

[Michael Edmonds]

– 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.

[laughter]

And kept from being caught.

Now the abolitionists in – 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 –

[return to the Underground Railroad slide]

– all the way to Detroit and escaped to Canada. This is a photo of her in later years.

[new slide with the title, Joshua Glover, 1854, with an illustrated portrait of Joshua Glover on the left, a handbill for an anti-slave convention in Milwaukee in the middle and a copy of a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling on the Fugitive Slave Act on the right]

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 Glovers 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 – this slave being held in our city, in our jail, thats paid for with our tax dollars. And a – 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 –

[Michael Edmonds]

– 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 –

[return to the Joshua Glover, 1854 slide]

– that the federal Fugitive Slave Law was unconstitutional in Wisconsin. It would not be enforced because it violated our state’s constitution.

Thats a great thing except that thats also the argument, of course, that the Confederacy used for seceding from the United States government.

[Michael Edmonds]

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 theres 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 – 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 –

[slide with the title, Civil War, 1861-1865, with a photo of a Black soldier on the left, the roster of Company F of the 29th Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops in the middle and a photo of Peter Thomas on the right. Additionally, it is noted in the lower right that the Black population of Wisconsin in 1860 was 1,171 and the total population of Wisconsin was 775,881]

– 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 U.S. 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 – who adopted them and raised them to adulthood. And so, there was an increase in the African American population after the Civil War. You can see only about 1,000 people state-wide when the war breaks out.

[Michael Edmonds]

The fellow on the right, Peter Thomas, became –

[return to the Civil War, 1861-1865 slide]

– I believe its Kenosha or Racine, was elected to local county government offices and became a prominent member of the community.

[Michael Edmonds]

Well, at the end of the war the fellow on the left there, Ezekiel Gillespie –

[slide titled, Suffrage Won, 1866, with a photograph of Ezekiel Gillespie on the left and a photo of Sherman Booth & Byron Paine on the right]

– 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 Milwaukees 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 Paines 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 neigh-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 –

[Michael Edmonds]

– has been the case in Wisconsin ever since, although in later years as well it took great courage to exercise that right.

So, if theres 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, okay? 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 – the tradition of resistance is there as well.

In the later 19th century, Wisconsin becomes a Jim Crow state like the rest of America.

[slide titled, Later 19th Century, that features 6 photos of 19th century African American men, women and children and one newspaper clipping about the mother of Samuel Pierce]

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 – as an ethnic community.

Some of the people in this photograph – 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 – his business was diagonally across from where were sitting. And many of his customers were legislators, and so he was hired to work in the legislator as – in the legislature, in the Capitol, as a personal assistant. He later became a messenger, running messages around town for the – for the governor. And when the Historical Societys 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 – 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 states most powerful people, traveling between the two cities.

And – and in 1922, the governor of Wisconsin hired him to work in the Capitol as his, you might think –

[Michael Edmonds]

– 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 governors outer office. And nobody got to see the governor without getting by Sam. And there are wonderful –

[return to the Later 19th Century slide]

– funny stories about people who dont realize it until they’ve been very politely ush-ushered back out into the hallway that – that Sam had done his job so well.

Both of these people were leaders in Madisons 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.

[new slide titled, First Civil Rights Law, 1895, with a photograph of William Green on the left and a photograph of Orren T. Williams on the right. Additionally, it is noted in the lower right that the Black population of Wisconsin was 2,702 and the total population of Wisconsin was 1,315,497]

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 – 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 holders 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 governors office, and lived up to their promise and wrote a law.

[Michael Edmonds]

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.

[slide titled, Great Migration?, which features a map of the middle United States with arrows indicating the movement of Black people to the North. Additionally, there is a photo of three Black workers in the 1920s and a photo and illustration of segregated housing for Black workers in Beloit. Also noted is that the Black population of Wisconsin is 5,201 in 1920 and the total population of Wisconsin is 2,632,067]

It generally refers to the migration of African Americans in the 1920s after World War I into Northern cities. And a – a – 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 – 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 wouldnt 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.

Thats because Wisconsin – Milwaukee was then – did not have a large Black community to go to –

[Michael Edmonds]

– 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 –

[return to the Great Migration? Slide]

– and work in the factory. You see a picture at the bottom right there of 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?

[Michael Edmonds]

And 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 the, again, the great narrative arc is white people oppressed Black people. And its 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.

[slide titled, Between the Wars, featuring a photo of a Ku Klux Klan rally in Madison in 1924 and a photo of three Black children in a segregated school in Wisconsin in the 1920s. Additionally, the lower right of the slide indicates that the Black population of Wisconsin in 1930 is 10,739 and the total population of Wisconsin is 2,939,006]

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 – with the beginning of the Depression in 1929 and 1930, African American –

[Michael Edmonds]

– 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 –

[slide titled, Post-WW2 Migration, featuring three photos, one of Black men working in a factory, one of an all-Black graduating class and one of a mostly Black college classroom. Additionally it is noted in the lower right that the Black population of Wisconsin is 28,132 in 1950 while the total population of Wisconsin in 1950 is 3,434,575]

– 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 – a huge influx in the 1940s and 50s of African American people moving North –

[Michael Edmonds]

– from the Jim Crow South.

Most of them – 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 Wisconsins black families have come from.

Where did they come? Well, they came into a deeply segregated city. It didnt matter whether it was Madison or Beloit or Milwaukee.

[slide titled, Segregated Milwaukee, with a map of Milwaukee showing neighborhoods by race along with a photo of Black men meeting in front of a neighborhood store and the cover of a pamphlet of the Negro Business Directory. Also noted in the lower right is the fact that the Black population of Wisconsin in 1960 is 74,546 while the total population of Wisconsin is 3,951,777]

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 –

[Michael Edmonds]

– 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.

[return to the Segregated Milwaukee slide]

Similar things happened in other Wisconsin cities. In Madison, the historically Black neighborhood was just east of here, the downhill slope of –

[Michael Edmonds]

– the other side of the Isthmus from here, lets say Mifflin and Dayton, was where most Black families lived. At the turn of the century, in 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 – the problems there from overcrowding and segregation inspired Vel Phillips –

[slide titled, Vel Phillips & Fair Housing, featuring three photos, one of Vel Phillips U.W. Law School Graduation photo in 1953, one of Vel Phillips in the rotunda of the State Capitol in 1961 and one of Vel Phillip leading a fair housing march in Milwaukee in 1967]

– 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 U.W. Law School. She was the first Black woman to graduate from the U.W. 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, shes 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. And she – she joined the City Council, I think, in 56? And starting in 1962, instituted or – or tried to, introduced –

[Michael Edmonds]

– 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 –

[return to the Vel Phillips & Fair Housing slide]

– 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 N.A.A.C.P. 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.

[Michael Edmonds]

In 1967, August of 1967, a – 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 its 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.

[return to the Vel Phillips & Fair Housing slide]

On the second night of the marches, maybe Im getting that history wrong. At the beginning of the marches at some point they returned back to the north side neighborhood to find the N.A.A.C.P. Freedom House in flames.

So, this was not only happening in Mississippi, it was happening in Milwaukee.

Segregated housing –

[Michael Edmonds]

– 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.

And an attorney, Madison attorney Lloyd Barbee –

[slide titled, Lloyd Barbee & Desegregated Schools, featuring a three photos, one of Lloyd Barbee in front of the State Capitol, one of Lloyd Barbee at the head of Black protestors and one of a Black mother and her child picketing against segregated schools]

– decided to take this on as his personal cause. He had been elected head of the state N.A.A.C.P. in 1961, I believe, or 1960. He and Vel led a takeover of the Capitols 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 – 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 –

[Michael Edmonds]

– 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 citys 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 – 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.

[return to the Lloyd Barbee & Desegregated Schools slide]

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.

[Michael Edmonds]

Many of the products made in those factories are now made in other countries.

As I mentioned before, Father Groppi –

[slide titled, Fr. James Groppi, featuring three photos, one of Father Groppi talking to Black students at a protest, one of Milwaukee police officers in front of a burning house and one of Father Groppi and Black protesters leading a march in Milwaukee]

– was one of the allies of Vel Phillips and Lloyd Barbee.

[new slide with a map titled, Milwaukee Today, showing the ethnic concentrations in that city]

Now, 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. Its just kind of all inter-mixed. If you look at Washington. But Milwaukee looks like this for the – the reasons that we just talked about.

[Michael Edmonds]

That correlates with poverty. You can see on the upper map –

[slide titled, Document 2: New York Times Mapping Poverty in America, map of Milwaukee neighborhoods by poverty rate, 2014, that shows high concentration of poverty in Milwaukees Black neighborhoods. Additionally, there are two photos, one of the Crossing the Line exhibit by the State Historical Society and the second a photo of community interviewers who are doing oral histories in Milwaukee]

– there in blue. The darker the blue, the greater the incidence of poverty.

The bottom photos show two programs that we have tried to – 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 – a group of high school and college-aged interviewers. We raise some money from a – 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 – 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 –

[Michael Edmonds]

– more than 40 venues, schools who will get that curriculum guide that – 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.

[slide titled, Madison, featuring four photos, one of a bar graph of racial disparities in Dane County showing large gaps, one a photo of demonstrations at the State Capitol after the Tony Robinson shooting, one of Black women canvassers and one of interviews with Madisons Black residents by students]

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 citys Black neigh – Black communities changed since about eight, seven, get my centuries right, since the 1990s.

[Michael Edmonds]

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 citys 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?

[slide titled, The Future?, featuring a Black teacher helping a Black student]

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.

[Michael Edmonds]

So, there’s your – 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.

[applause]