Vel Phillips: Five Failed Ordinances and One Enduring Answer

Vel Phillips grew up in Milwaukee, graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School in nineteen fifty-one as the first African American woman to do so, and returned to Milwaukee to practice law and enter politics. In nineteen fifty-six she became the first Black person and the first woman elected to the Milwaukee Common Council.

She introduced her first open housing ordinance in March of nineteen sixty-two. The Council voted it down. She introduced it again. The Council voted it down again. Five times over six years, Phillips submitted legislation that would have prohibited racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing in Milwaukee. Five times the Council rejected it.

She did not stop.

In the summer of nineteen sixty-seven, the NAACP Youth Council, led by a young priest named Father James Groppi, began a series of open-housing marches into white Milwaukee neighborhoods, two hundred consecutive nights. The marchers were met with crowds throwing rocks and bottles and, on some nights, thousands of counter-demonstrators organized in opposition. The marches drew national coverage. The city's refusal to pass open housing became a story the country was watching.

In April of nineteen sixty-eight, about a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, the United States Congress passed the Fair Housing Act. The Milwaukee Common Council followed five days later with its own ordinance, the same legislation Phillips had been introducing for six years.

Phillips went on to serve as the first female judge in Milwaukee County, and in nineteen seventy-eight was elected Wisconsin Secretary of State, making her the first woman and the first person of color to win statewide executive office in Wisconsin.

She died in two thousand eighteen at ninety-five years old. The University of Wisconsin, where she had been the first African American woman to graduate from the law school sixty-seven years earlier, named a residence hall in her honor.