Civil Rights Activism in Milwaukee: South Side Struggles in the '60s and '70s

By Paul H. Geenen

In the early 1960s, as members of Milwaukee's growing African American population looked beyond their segregated community for better jobs and housing, they faced bitter opposition from the real estate industry and union leadership. In an era marked by the friction of racial tension, the south side of Milwaukee earned a reputation as a flashpoint for prejudice, but it also served as a staging ground for cooperative activism between members of Father Groppi's parish, representatives from the NAACP Youth Council, students at Alverno College and a group of Latino families. Paul Geenen chronicles the challenges faced by this coalition in the fight for open housing and better working conditions for Milwaukee's minority community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Feb 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781625849069

Paul H. Geenen

Paul H. Geenen is a community activist in Milwaukee who, after hearing some of the stories told by people who lived through the Milwaukee Bronzeville era, believes these stories should be kept and shared through the photographs collected in this book. Each page gives a glimpse into that special time and place in Milwaukee that ended mid-century with urban renewal and the construction of a freeway through its heart.

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INTRODUCTION

The idea for this book originated with a phone call from a longtime civil rights activist who worried that the people who lived on the South Side of Milwaukee in the 1960s and ’70s were seen as isolated and prejudiced. This impression grew from the 13,000 angry South Siders who screamed epithets and threw garbage at Father James Groppi and his 250 young men from the NAACP Youth Council at the south end of the Sixteenth Street Bridge in August 1967.

The South Side of Milwaukee has always been a good place for immigrants to settle, find jobs and support their families. The residents live in a densely populated neighborhood that does not look anything like the farms from which they came. Germans started arriving in 1835 and came in large numbers in the 1880s, pushed off their farms by industrialization. The Poles left their small farms in Eastern Europe in large numbers in the 1890s, fleeing oppression. Starting in the 1920s, Mexicans were recruited from small farming villages to staff Milwaukee’s foundries and railroads. Migrant workers in the 1960s who lost their jobs through strikes or mechanization moved to Milwaukee’s South Side to find new jobs.

The South Side had a good supply of inexpensive homes that provided these waves of immigrants with affordable housing. There were plenty of corner bars and Catholic parishes to accommodate the social and religious needs of the residents. Hispanics’ entrepreneurial spirit and their willingness to work jobs that were spurned by others added stability to the neighborhood.

Poverty in the South Side was higher than in the city of Milwaukee as a whole. Large Hispanic families struggling to make ends meet maintained strong ties to siblings, grandparents, cousins and godparents, creating a vibrant community. Family gatherings were important. Church holidays and ethnic festivals were times to get together and socialize.

People worked their entire lives to pay for their homes and had tremendous pride in them. The homeowners were concerned about the declining housing values they were seeing on the North Side due to the construction of the freeways and segregated real estate practices.

Pope John Paul XXIII brought together the cardinals of the Catholic Church in Rome in 1962, at a gathering called Vatican II, and after three years of deliberations, the Ecumenical Council issued findings asking the broad membership of the Catholic Church to more directly address the world’s problems. The nuns at Alverno College, a small women’s college on the South Side of Milwaukee, felt there were other things that needed to be done outside of teaching children in the city’s Catholic schools.

Alverno nuns taught their students to be concerned about public policy, as well as meeting the basic needs of the community, and they worked in the Greater Milwaukee community themselves. This activism both brought new resources to the community and changed the lives of its students forever.

Two Alverno students traveled to the South during one summer in the 1960s, Maria Varela to teach African Americans how to pass the voter tests and Margaret (Peggy) Rozga to register African Americans to vote. Locals targeted these women from the North, and the two became adept at blending.

Alverno invited South Side neighbors to its Racism-Reason-Response college institute in 1964, offering residents a chance to discuss the advantages of open housing. The next year, the college offered an institute titled Poverty: American Paradox, offering residents films on migrant workers and poverty in our country’s central cities. In 1967, Alverno hosted the controversial documentary play In White America, by Herbert Randall, which educated residents about the violence African Americans were experiencing in the South.

Nuns from the college reached out to Milwaukee’s African American community, opening a neighborhood library, offering art and music classes and helping parents negotiate with their children’s neighborhood schools.

On August 15, 1966, Jesús Salas, a twenty-two-year-old college student, led a march from Wautoma to Madison to call the state’s attention to the plight of the migrant farmworkers who toiled nearby. This was one of three farmworker marches held throughout the country at the time. The national press picked up the stories of these marches, bringing to the country’s attention the plight of these farmworkers for the first time. The March to Madison was the beginning of the local migrant union movement in Wisconsin and sparked the formation of an independent union called Obreros Unidos (OU).

Salas organized the successful grape boycott in Wisconsin, including Milwaukee and the Fox Cities, supporting César Chávez and his United Farmworkers of America union. People gave up eating grapes for years to put pressure on the growers in California to meet the demands of United Farmworkers of America (UFWA) members.

Hispanics were successful in replacing the key staff and board members of the Council for the Spanish Speaking, Inc., and later the United Migrant Opportunity Service (UMOS) with people from the community. This takeover became a model for structuring management and staff in other nonprofits providing services to the Hispanic community.

The Welfare Mothers March on Madison in 1969 ended with students and demonstrators taking over the Assembly Chambers in Wisconsin’s state capitol. Father James Groppi, Jesús Salas and others were arrested, and Governor Knowles ordered the National Guard to surround the state capitol.

Salas and a group of demonstrators took over the chancellor’s office at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1970. After a month of round-the-clock demonstrations, including camping outside the chancellor’s office and hunger strikes, the demonstrators broke into the chancellor’s office and took it over for a second time, forcing the administration to agree to the demonstrators’ terms calling for active recruiting of Hispanic students.

Tony Báez and grass-roots organizers successfully fought for bilingual schools in the Milwaukee public school system, navigating a complex set of issues around the 1976 school desegregation suit. They negotiated with the courts, the school board, the African American community, the teachers’ union and parents to attain their goal of a robust bilingual school for all Hispanic students.

The Milwaukee job market was strong in the 1960s and ’70s. The year 1976 was the high-water mark for African American employment in Milwaukee. Yet both African Americans and Hispanics were living in overcrowded, segregated housing and being denied access to jobs, and their children were being given an inadequate education in the city’s schools. A young Catholic priest, just a few years out of the seminary; an eighteen-year-old day-care worker; a young summer construction worker; a twenty-three-year-old Vietnam veteran; a junior high school student active in his church’s Catholic Youth Organization (CYO); a sophomore at a small women’s college; and a group of feisty young nuns would begin to rectify these injustices.

CHAPTER 1

MILWAUKEE’S SOUTH SIDE

John Gurda, in his paper The Latin Community on Milwaukee’s Near South Side, used the 1970 census and people’s individual estimates to approximate that the Latin population on the South Side was somewhere between eight and ten thousand in 1970. Gurda uses Latins to indicate Spanish-speaking people. Many of them were less educated than other Milwaukee residents, as in 1970 only 12.3 percent over age twenty-five were high school graduates compared to 49.2 percent of all Milwaukee residents. Spanish-speaking families were larger than the overall size of Milwaukee families, with 5.01 family members versus 1.96.

The area called Walkers Point, named after George Walker, a fur trader who set up a trading post in 1834, was host to a series of immigrants. German immigrants, who migrated to preserve their Lutheran religion, started arriving in 1835, notes Gurda in Separate Settlement. They were followed by a new group of middle-class Germans who were fleeing the