Vel Phillips: The Lone Vote

Vel Phillips introduced her first open-housing ordinance to the Milwaukee Common Council in nineteen sixty-two. She had spent seven months researching and drafting it with her husband Dale, an attorney. The ordinance proposed to ban racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing in Milwaukee. When she brought it to a vote, the council defeated it eighteen to one. She was the one.

She brought it back in nineteen sixty-three. Defeated again. Nineteen sixty-four. Defeated again. Nineteen sixty-seven, before the marches began. Defeated.

Phillips was at that time the only Black person on the Milwaukee Common Council and the only woman. She had been elected from the Sixth Ward in nineteen fifty-six, a first on both counts. She was a lawyer trained at the University of Wisconsin, which had accepted her when Howard University's law school waitlisted her. She was not a symbolic figure; she was the person doing the work, bringing the ordinance back year after year while her colleagues refused to consider it.

In the spring of nineteen sixty-seven, the NAACP Youth Council began picketing the homes of aldermen who had voted against her bill. In August, the marches across the viaduct began. By April nineteen sixty-eight, with the federal Fair Housing Act passed and Dr. King dead, the Common Council voted to pass a city ordinance. They passed it without Phillips' name attached.

She went on. In nineteen seventy-eight she was elected Wisconsin Secretary of State, becoming the first Black person to win statewide office in Wisconsin's history.

Vel Phillips died in twenty eighteen at ninety-four years old. The Milwaukee Common Council building where she cast eighteen losing votes is about a ten-minute walk from here.