This year, Milwaukee is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Black History Month.
The origins of the annual celebration date back to 1915 when Dr. Carter G Woodson, a historian and author, founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now known as the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History.) Woodson was inspired to do this after being blocked from attending American Historical Association conferences, despite being a member. He believed that the white-dominated profession overlooked, ignored and suppressed African American contributions to history.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Woodson used his organization to initiate the first Negro History Week in 1926, from Feb. 7-14, which included the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. The week became an annual tradition and spread across the United States over the next 40 years. Then, in 1976, ASALH expanded Negro History Week to Black History Month, which is now also known as African American History Month.
That same year, President Ford issued a national statement honoring the observance of Black History Month. In 1986, Congress passed Public Law 99-244, designating February 1986 as the first “National Black (Afro-American) History Month.”
Celebrating Black History in Wisconsin
Wisconsin history is full of remarkable achievements by African Americans. Here are just a few:
One notable figure is Bernice Lindsay, who Milwaukee’s Lindsay Heights neighborhood is named after. “She started the Mary Church Terrell Creative Center,” says Clayborn Benson III, founder of the Wisconsin Black Historical Society and Museum. “It’s a delegation of African American people to the Congo [that] meet the president of Congo for economic development.” Lindsay also was a member of the National Women’s Association and was invited to the White House to talk to President Kennedy to address women’s issues. In the early 1950s, when the city was reluctant to build public housing, she developed a public housing complex on Fourth Street.
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams completed secondary school and started his medical career as a physician’s apprentice in Janesville. In 1891, he founded the first Black-owned hospital in the country, Chicago’s Provident Hospital and Training School. It was one of the first interracial hospitals in the nation, with “race-blind” policies. Two years after founding Provident, Williams performed the first successful open-heart surgery.
When Joshua Glover escaped slavery in St. Louis in 1854, he became a powerful figure of resistance. He was arrested and taken to Milwaukee under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and was famously freed from a Milwaukee jail by abolitionists, eventually reaching freedom in Canada.
Born in 1895 in Milwaukee, Mabel Raimey went on to become the first African American woman to obtain a bachelor’s degree from UW-Madison in 1918. She was also the first African American woman to attend Marquette University Law School. In 1949, she chartered the Epsilon Kappa Omega Chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority in Milwaukee. She helped start the Northside YMCA (now known as the Vel Phillips Center.), and was a board member for 25 years for the Milwaukee Urban League.
Benson lauds the achievement of Milwaukee’s Black Cross Nurses during 1920s. When deadly tuberculosis menaced the city, the Milwaukee chapter of the international network served patients who often had difficulty finding care. “White doctors and nurses were reluctant to go into people’s homes for fear of catching tuberculosis – although they weren’t the only ones,” says Benson. “So the Black Cross Nurses did it, washed dishes, took care of the children, cleaned the house up, and treated them.”
Vel Phillips, who was born in Milwaukee in the 1920’s, got her law degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and became the first African American and first woman elected to Milwaukee’s Common Council. She introduced the Phillips Housing Ordinance, which was a bill that outlawed housing discrimination, eventually joining forces with the Milwaukee NAACP Youth council to rally for the passage of an open housing bill. In 1971, she was appointed to the Milwaukee County Circuit Court, making her Wisconsin’s first African American judge. She was also the first African American to be elected as secretary of state.
After graduating from Waukesha High School in 1939, Alfred Gorham joined the Army Air Force with the goal of becoming a Tuskegee Airman, a member of the first African American military pilot group in the U.S. And that is exactly what he became – Gorham was the only Wisconsinite Tuskegee pilot. A recipient of the Purple Heart, the POW medal and a Congressional Gold Medal honoring the Tuskegee Airmen, Gorham now has a display recognizing his achievements at the Milwaukee Airport.
These are just a few of the many accomplishments by African Americans in Wisconsin. Benson urges anyone interested in learning more about African American history to visit the Wisconsin Black Historical Society and Museum (2620 W. Center St.), which aims to document, preserve and disseminate materials related to the African-American experience in Wisconsin.
For more celebrations of Black History Month, check out America’s Black Holocaust Museum’s list of events, or participate in the the Milwaukee Public Library’s Black History Month challenges.
