On June 23, 2020, 29 days into this country’s summer of protests against the police murder of George Floyd, demonstrators in Madison embraced a tactic that had gained popularity throughout the country: They tore down statues that honored white people and that ignored people of color.
In the South, the toppled statues centered on symbols of the Confederacy. In Madison, the vandalized statues were of Forward, a female embodiment of the state motto; and of Hans Christian Heg, a Norwegian American abolitionist and Civil War officer.
Throughout Wisconsin, and across the political spectrum, people were horrified.
Michael Johnson, head of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Dane County, decided to talk to the protesters. He found that, beneath the anger, they had a clear message: why weren’t there statues of people of color at the Capitol? Why didn’t the people’s house represent all the people?
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“They were right,” Johnson recalls, so he started a campaign to right that wrong
Four years later, the campaign has resulted in a sculpture of Vel Phillips, the most renowned African American woman in Wisconsin history, joining the other reinstalled statues. The sculpture is also the first of a Black woman on the grounds of any state capitol.
It’s not just symbolism. About 79,000 people toured the Wisconsin Capitol last year, many of them in school groups. Future tours will now learn of Vel Phillips. “I always go back to my roots as a teacher,” Gov. Tony Evers said at the unveiling this July. “And this sculpture is going to make a difference in kids’ lives. … They are going to know that representation matters.”
Milwaukee, meanwhile, celebrated its own tribute to this towering trailblazer: the Vel R. Phillips Plaza, a multiuse public space along Wisconsin Avenue that had a grand opening in late June.
The Madison and Milwaukee projects reflect growing awareness of Vel Phillips’ importance. More than any other Wisconsinite, with the possible exception of “Fighting Bob” La Follette, she has shaped essential moments in local, state and national politics – from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s to the 2024 presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris.
VELVALEA “VEL” HORTENSE RODGERS PHILLIPS was born in Milwaukee 100 years ago, the second of three daughters, and died in 2018 at the age of 94. In line with Vel’s extraordinary ability to connect with people, she never much needed a last name. Even her paperboy called her Vel.
Vel’s father was a small-business owner, and her parents were established members of Milwaukee’s growing African American community. Vel’s mother was the major influence on her life and always encouraged her to “dream big.” When Vel graduated from North Division High School, she won a national oratory contest that led to a scholarship at Howard University, sometimes called the Harvard of historically black colleges.
Vel initially gained political prominence when, at the age of 32, she became the first Black person and the first woman on the Milwaukee Common Council. But her list of firsts also spans the state (the first African American elected to statewide office in Wisconsin); and the nation (the first Black person elected to the Democratic Party’s national committee).
From the perspective of 2024, it might be hard to appreciate the momentous courage and tenacity it took for Vel to succeed as an African American and as a woman.
‘Dream Big’
1951: First Black woman to receive a law degree from UW-Madison. Vel and Dale Phillips become the first husband-wife team of any race admitted to the federal bar in Milwaukee.
1956: First African American and first woman elected to the Milwaukee Common Council. It would be 12 years before a second African American is elected and 16 years for a second woman.
1958: First African American in the country elected to the National Committee of either major party, serving for the Democratic Party. She knew three presidents on a first-name basis: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jimmy Carter.
1970: First woman at City Hall to wear a pantsuit to work.
1971: First African American to become a Wisconsin judge, appointed to the Milwaukee Circuit Court by Gov. Patrick Lucey.
1978: First African American to win statewide office, as secretary of state. It took 40 years for the second, when Mandela Barnes was elected lieutenant governor.
2024: The first sculpture of a person of color at the Wisconsin State Capitol – and the first of a Black woman on the grounds of any state capitol.
In 1956, when she was first elected to the Milwaukee Common Council, the United States was still recovering from World War II. Women were expected to stay home and make babies. The Food and Drug Administration did not approve the oral contraceptive until 1960. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique wasn’t published until 1963. And it wasn’t until 1974 that federal law mandated that women could open a bank account on their own.
During her decade-and-a-half on the council, Vel was the only woman and, until 1968, was the only African American. Her colleagues sometimes disagreed over substantive matters, but some spats were juvenile.
From the first day Vel took office, for instance, aldermen criticized her “invasion” of the aldermanic washroom at the rear of the chambers. (The women’s room was down the hall, Vel was pregnant, and she didn’t want to miss important discussions.) It took a decision by the city attorney to rule there was nothing on the books preventing a woman from using a men’s restroom.
A story Vel told about then Mayor Henry Maier is particularly revealing about that era’s gender politics. Maier liked Vel; he had even sold his home on Booth Street in Riverwest to her and her husband, Dale, in the early 1960s. But he was angry at Vel over her support for open housing legislation. “Henry felt I had let him down,” Vel recollected. “He’d call me into his office and read the riot act and swear like a sailor. … I’d sit there and listen and then tell him, ‘If all you are going to do is get mad at me, don’t call me in anymore.’ That’s when he’d say, ‘You are sassy, and Dale ought to give you a good beating.’”
Vel understood intersectionality long before that word entered the sociopolitical lexicon to describe the combination of gender, race and other attributes that compound discrimination. And, as with most issues, she had a strong opinion on it.
It’s not that being African American didn’t present as many obstacles, Vel told Milwaukee Magazine years ago. But after the obstacles were overcome – after she was admitted to law school or elected to the Common Council – she felt the stereotypes of her gender more strongly.
“We are a very racist country, unfortunately,” Vel said. “But once you’re there, they [whites] will realize you’re just like everybody else. But the men never forget that you are a woman. Never ever ever.”
Although misogyny was an ever-present undercurrent, it never led to physical threats.
Not so with white animosity toward her open housing legislation.
OPEN HOUSING WAS MILWAUKEE’S most prominent struggle in the nationwide Civil Rights Movement that overthrew Jim Crow and forever changed U.S. culture and politics. In Milwaukee, open housing legislation to prohibit discrimination in buying or renting a home was first introduced by Vel in 1962. Vel introduced the legislation every year, for five years, and each time hers was the sole voice to say “aye.”
In June of 1967, Vel threw her support behind a tactic championed by Father James Groppi and the local NAACP Youth Council: public demonstrations. In late July, urban unrest exploded in more than 150 cities in what is called the “long, hot summer of 1967.” In Newark, some 26 people were killed and 700 injured. In Detroit, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in Army troops equipped with machine guns and tanks.
NAACP at a march, 1967. Vel’s efforts led to Milwaukee’s 1968 open housing legislation. Photo courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society.
In Milwaukee, the angry demonstrations, arson and gunshots terrified much of the community. On July 31, Mayor Maier called out the National Guard and the city was put on lockdown – mail delivery was suspended and only emergency and medical personnel were to leave their homes. Armored cars with .50-caliber machine guns patrolled empty freeways and streets. The city never experienced anything like it – before or since.
That August, the open housing marches resumed. Whites on the South Side greeted the protesters by hurling rocks, bodily fluids and racial epithets. Vel began receiving hate-filled phone calls and letters, and bags of trash were dumped on her yard. One night, a shot was fired into her home; the family found a note that read, “Go Back to Africa.” With this escalation, from threats to bullets, Vel worried for the safety of her two children. She sent them for an extended stay with her mother in California.
Vel and the supporters of open housing refused to give up. The demonstrations continued for 200 consecutive nights, from August through bone-chilling winter nights. On April 4, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. On April 8, thousands of mourners filled Wisconsin Avenue for a peaceful march considered the largest civil rights rally in Milwaukee’s history. On April 30, with seven newly elected members, the Common Council passed open housing legislation by a vote of 15-4.
“Hello, my name is Mya Berry and my school is named after a slaveowner. James Madison, the fourth president of the United States, was an owner of over 100 Black slaves.”
Thus begins a 2017 change.org petition by Berry, then a senior at the school, to rename James Madison Memorial High in Madison. More than four years later, on Nov. 22, 2021, the Madison School Board renamed the west side school Vel Phillips Memorial High School.
Before that final vote, other names were proposed, from Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman. But, Berry says, “I didn’t waver on the name of Vel Phillips from the beginning.”
When Berry launched her petition – with the support of her teacher and the school principal – African Americans accounted for about 15% of the school’s students; she says she felt the sting of racist stereotypes. She officially requested the new name in 2020, after she graduated.
“Instead of honoring historical figures that oppressed and enslaved Black Americans, we will have a school respecting the life of a woman who worked toward bridging racial gaps right here in Wisconsin,” she told the Cap Times newspaper.
After graduating from UW-Madison, Berry attended the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and she recently moved to Phoenix. In 2022, Berry visited her high school and she noticed “a change in the space,” from photos of Phillips throughout the school, to a school-wide screening of excerpts from a PBS documentary on Phillips. “Feeling the shift of the racial climate in the school was honestly all I could ask for,” she says.
IN 1971, AFTER 15 YEARS on the Common Council, Vel was appointed by Gov. Patrick Lucey to the Milwaukee County Circuit Court, becoming the state’s first African American judge. In 1978, she continued her string of “firsts” as the first African American to win statewide office in Wisconsin, as secretary of state.
Even after she left elected office after one term as secretary of state, Vel’s political involvement never stopped. She was a leader of Milwaukee Community Brainstorming, a monthly everyone-invited gathering in the central city. She taught at UW-Milwaukee, served on boards, mentored both rising political stars and children still in school. She never lost her instinct for doing the right thing and strongly supported public education, reproductive freedom, marriage equality and LGBTQ rights. In 2016, she was a fan of Bernie Sanders.
“A lot of people who aren’t in office anymore, they don’t serve anymore, they check out – but not Vel,” notes Mandela Barnes. In 2018, Barnes won the vote for lieutenant governor to become, after Vel, the second African American elected to statewide office in Wisconsin.
Barnes met Vel when he was in the Assembly, around 2014, and they became friends. “I, for sure, would not have been elected lieutenant governor or had the confidence to run for the U.S. Senate if it weren’t for Vel Phillips,” he says.
A range of adjectives have been used to describe Vel: purposeful, committed, connected; strategic, under-estimated, youthful, tenacious, smart – razor-sharp smart. But Vel was also proud and did not broadcast her life’s low points.
When asked recently to describe his mother, her son Michael Phillips began with common refrains. But then he paused, took a deep breath and added “melancholic.” It was not an adjective typically associated with Vel.
Two personal tragedies struck particularly deep. The first was the death of her husband, Dale. A formidable activist and attorney in his own right, Dale was an astute political adviser to Vel and oversaw the home throughout Vel’s career – “an early Mr. Mom,” as Michael calls him. In 1988, after 38 years of marriage with Vel, Dale died of a heart attack. Vel was distraught. She had thought about running for the U.S. House but after Dale’s death, “I just fell apart,” she recalls in a PBS documentary.
The most difficult heartbreak involved her oldest son, Dale Franklin Phillips. In the mid-1970s, when about 17 years old, Dale Franklin was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. It tore the hearts out of his parents. Michael recalls that his father believed that “no matter what the problem was, if we addressed it as a family, we could solve it.” But the mental illness was not something to be “solved.” There were good years, but they didn’t last. In 2005, Dale Franklin Phillips died by suicide.
U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore saw how it devastated Vel. “She called me up – my God, she could barely speak above a whisper,” Moore recalls. Time, coupled with Vel’s resilience and tenacity, was the only remedy.
Moore first met Vel as a student at North Division; Vel judged an oratory contest. They became lifelong political allies, and when Moore ran for Congress in 2004, Vel was her campaign chair. “She was so excited,” Moore recalls. “We’re going to run for Congress!”
Moore came from a working-class background, while Vel was from the upper crust of Milwaukee’s Black community. Moore notes that Vel could have led a comfortable life, free of controversy, but she made a choice. “She threw her lot in with the people and became their champion,” Moore emphasizes, adding that’s a part of Vel “that I want people to know.”
When Moore won her House seat in 2004, she became the first African American and the second woman (after Tammy Baldwin) to represent Wisconsin in Congress. Today, women make up more than a quarter of all members of Congress, with comparable figures for people of color.
ALTHOUGH KNOWN MOSTLY for her impact on Wisconsin politics, Vel played a national role during a pivotal time for the country and the Democratic Party. In 1958, just two years into her tenure as a Milwaukee alder, national leaders noticed Vel’s talent, and she became the first African American elected to the Democratic National Committee, the party’s ruling body. During the 1960 presidential campaign, Vel was one of John F. Kennedy’s few African American campaign workers, even appearing with him in campaign photos.
Perhaps most importantly, Vel was on the platform committee at the 1960 Democratic National Convention. It was a watershed moment for the party, which was split between those supporting a strong civil rights plank and Southern segregationists who called it “government-enforced social equality” and warned it could doom Kennedy’s election. Vel openly challenged the segregationists, asking how they could expect other countries to respect the United States “if we take a weak position on enforcing equality for all our citizens?” More important, she added, “Winning isn’t nearly so important as doing the right thing.”
The civil rights plank was adopted. Jump forward to 1972. Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn, who four years earlier became the first Black woman elected to Congress, became the first African American woman to run for president on a major ticket. Not surprisingly, she and Vel were friends, part of a small but powerful group of African American trailblazers.
Brad Pruitt, head of the American Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, makes it his job to understand the role of history and how roots planted in one decade bloom years later. “You can’t have a conversation about Kamala Harris,” he notes, “without having one about Barack Obama, without having one about Jesse Jackson, but first having one about Shirley Chisholm.” And Vel, he states unequivocally, is a part of that through line.
“From my perspective, Vel should be a Rosa Parks type name,” Pruitt says. “That’s the level of her accomplishment and contribution.”
A New Vision for Milwaukee Public Spaces
BEGINNING JUST SOUTH of Capitol Drive, Vel R. Phillips Avenue traverses neighborhoods lined with classic Milwaukee bungalows, intersects the historic Bronzeville district, and skirts Fiserv Forum and the Baird Center. At Wisconsin Avenue, the city’s premier Downtown street, it leads to the Vel R. Phillips Plaza – an ambitious, city-funded project reflecting a 21st-century urban ethos.
What was for four decades a dingy corner parking lot now reflects an increasingly vibrant Westown. When finished, the 30,000-square-foot plaza will provide an urban oasis and public gathering spot complete with trees, a garden, art, rest areas, a bus rapid transit station, a cafe and, yes, even public restrooms.
Throughout the city, most public spaces and parks are overseen by Milwaukee County or the Milwaukee Public Schools Recreation Department. The Phillips plaza is a new direction for city government – a $17.8-million public space, with an unprecedented $600,000 to fund public art.
“Mayor [Cavalier] Johnson has made it a priority to redo our exciting public spaces and create new public spaces, and this is part of a broader plan,” notes Dan Casanova, the lead economic development specialist for the city. As for the plaza’s name, Casanova says that was easy: “Milwaukee did not have a proper memorial to Vel, and we felt this was a great location to do that.”
In the past, memorials and statues focused on military men riding horses, raising a gun or sword in victory. But that’s not who Vel Phillips was. The sculpture of her at the State Capitol in Madison purposefully has Vel seated, listening. “It’s about the new form of politics and the way that women execute politics,” says Marilu Knode, a curator involved in the memorial. “It’s to us, not down to us.”
Scores of trees have been planted, benches installed, and kiosks dot the area providing information on Vel’s life and legacy. Other elements, including the cafe, were still under construction as summer wound down. The artists for the public art will be announced by year’s end, with another year or so until the art is installed. In the best of all worlds, funding will become available for The Hop streetcar to bisect the plaza as it heads north past Fiserv Forum into Bronzeville.
The Madison sculpture and Milwaukee plaza also reflect contemporary perspectives on the role of art, especially in public areas. More often than not, art is confined to museums and galleries, but about 90% of the public doesn’t frequent such spaces, notes Marilu Knode, a curator involved in the Madison and Milwaukee memorials to Vel.
Like Vel’s sculpture in Madison, the plaza reflects a growing recognition of how historical memorials shape public consciousness. As historian Eric Foner notes, monuments “represent markers – perhaps one should say combatants – in ongoing culture wars over how history should be remembered and what historical figures are worthy of veneration.”
