Two Hundred Nights on the Viaduct

On the evening of August twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-seven, more than two hundred members of the Milwaukee NAACP Youth Council gathered at their headquarters on North Fifteenth Street and walked toward the Sixteenth Street Viaduct. Father James Groppi, a white Catholic priest who served as the Youth Council's adviser, walked with them. They carried hand-lettered signs: We Need Fair Housing. They were marching to the South Side of Milwaukee, which was almost entirely white, to demand the right to live there.

At the north end of the viaduct, approximately eight thousand people were waiting for them. Milwaukee police estimated the counter-crowd at eight thousand. The marchers were met with rocks, bottles, firecrackers, and sustained verbal abuse as they walked across the bridge and down into the South Side streets.

The marches did not stop. They continued the next night. And the night after that. For two hundred consecutive nights, from August twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-seven through March fourteenth, nineteen sixty-eight, the NAACP Youth Council marched. There was no night off. Historians of the civil rights movement call it the longest sustained open-housing protest in American history.

What they were marching for was the ordinance that Alderwoman Vel Phillips had introduced to the Milwaukee Common Council in nineteen sixty-two and watched defeated eighteen to one, with her as the single vote in favor. She had reintroduced it four more times. It had failed four more times.

The federal Fair Housing Act passed in April nineteen sixty-eight, one week after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Milwaukee's Common Council, which had refused for six years, passed a city ordinance on April thirtieth, nineteen sixty-eight.

The Sixteenth Street Viaduct is on the National Register of Historic Places. A plaque acknowledges what happened here. The racial geography of Milwaukee, documented repeatedly by researchers as among the most segregated in the United States, remains.