
“It’s amazing to me that The Center for Black Excellence and Culture will be Black-led, Black-designed, and Black-inspired and the broader community is supporting us because they understand what I’ve been saying in my other work: Black people must set the table for what we need to help us,” says Rev. Dr. Alex Gee, the senior pastor at Fountain of Life Church and the founder of the Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development.
Gee has been leading the charge for the construction of The Center for Black Excellence and Culture which will officially break ground at 655 W. Badger Road in South Madison with a special ceremony on June 19, Juneteenth National Independence Day.
“It was my sister Lilada’s idea to do it on Juneteenth. We thought for so many symbolic reasons and for the stories that we want to tell, let’s do it then,” Gee tells Madison365.
The groundbreaking will feature remarks from members of The Center’s leadership team and public officials who helped make the groundbreaking possible. There will also be a special recognition of the 300-plus Black donors who kicked off The Center’s fundraising efforts as part of the Black Excellence Campaign.
Gee has been planning the creation of this new cultural space to celebrate and advance Wisconsin’s Black community for many, many years.
“We really started planning for this during the pandemic. It sort of went underground when everything shut down and then we picked it back up. It’s been a long time coming,” Gee says. “We are so excited to be breaking ground. To be honest, my brain is just catching up to how exciting this is to see something start as a concept and persevere through a long pandemic and to know that we did the bulk of the fundraising on Zoom calls with business leaders and individual philanthropists and then we had listening sessions with members of the Black community. It’s amazing to me that it is happening. It is amazing to me that the pandemic did not slow down people’s interest in this.”
The Center, made possible by a successful $33 million capital campaign, will host visual and performing arts displays; senior, youth and intergenerational programming; Pan-African community events; leadership development and professional research collaboration; celebratory receptions; film and book festivals; and much more. The space will also highlight the amazing accomplishments and contributions of Black Wisconsinites from Madison and beyond.
“We will be finished in late 2025. So it’s about a 16-18 month construction. They’re going to bring the trucks and equipment just right after the groundbreaking and so they’ll have the foundation and everything in … late 2025 is when we’re slated to open,” Gee says.
The Center for Black Excellence and Culture will be the latest major building construction in South Madison that has been going through a Southside Renaissance of late with the recent creation of the Urban League of Greater Madison’s new Black Business Hub, Madison College’s Goodman South Campus and Centro Hispano’s brand-new building, all just stone’s throw away from where Gee has called home for decades.
It’s a big contrast from what the area looked like not too long ago. Gee can still remember the liquor stores, the blighted buildings, the trash on the street, and the broken-down carwash that was the scenery from his back balcony at Nehemiah.

(Photo by A. David Dahmer)
“As a South Madisonian…. as someone who has lived in and worked on property in South Madison for the past 50-plus years, I look at what’s happening and I say two things… I say, ‘Wow!’ and I say, ‘It’s about time!'” Gee says.
“It’s always been a great area and community. And so I look at it and think this is fantastic,” Gee continues. “I think about the fact that you’ll be able to see our building from the Beltline [Highway], the [Black Business] Hub from the Beltline, and all of these great things … it’s going to just create this draw to the Park Street corridor and I’m just excited to be a part of what’s happening in that community.”
The creation of The Center for Black Excellence and Culture may have never happened (at least not on Madison’s South Side) because when Gee’s mother, Veriline, first came to Madison, the Gee family lived on the East Side of Madison near the Tenney Park Locks. And they were fond of that side of town. “There was a house on the East Side of town I remember us looking at on the isthmus that my mom liked. We really liked that side of town. But my mom ended up finding a place on the South Side of Madison and I realize how fortunate I am that she brought us to the South Side,” Gee remembers.
In a lot of ways, everything that Gee does, he does with his late mother in mind. Verline Gee passed away in January of this year. Her move to Madison from Chicago in the early ’70s to find new opportunities for her and her children would later pave the way for her family to eventually earn 13 degrees altogether from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Alex Gee was recently honored with an honorary doctorate degree from UW.
Not only was Veriline Gee a founding member of Fountain of Life Church, but also the Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development.
“She helped me start Nehemiah and she was the first hostess of our church. By the time we really got planning for the Center, dementia had really set in and so I don’t know to what extent she really grasped it,” Gee says. “But I learned early lessons and my introduction to Black history from mom when I was six, seven and eight and she was a college student. So she’d be so pleased. We’re doing this with her in mind.”
There will be a new senior space at The Center for Black Excellence and Culture dedicated to his mom, he says.

(Photo: Alex Gee)
“The senior space will be a place where we’ll house intergenerational programming because Black seniors just disappear as they get older, or they develop cognitive or memory diseases,” Gee says. “Rather than call it a senior space, we’re going to call it “Elders for Excellence” so there’s an emphasis on excellence and it will be named after mom.”
Officially, it will be called the Veriline Gee Elders for Excellence Center.
“I will have a chance to think about mom every day in my career, as there will be spaces named after her and it’s a place where her peers and other people who are becoming seniors will have to go and take classes, read to children, volunteer, help at the front desk, work in the store, work in the library, work in the art gallery, work in the coffee shops,” Gee says. “I do this with a lot of pride because she loved Madison … it gave so much to my mom and my family. I love being able to give back in her honor to a community that absolutely changed my mom’s life by the way it accepted her and her two young children.”
As the official groundbreaking approaches, The Center for Black Excellence and Culture stands just $3 million shy of the funds necessary to build a debt-free building. Additional funds will be raised during construction to support program development, hiring of staff, and other startup costs in anticipation of opening in late 2025.

“After we break ground, I’m going to be raising money to close that gap because I don’t want any debt on the building. And then we’re going to raise an endowment that is reserved for programming and for staff and for the upkeep of the building,” Gee says. “So even though we’ve raised enough to break ground and we’re looking forward to doing that, we just want the broader community to know that we still have $3 million to go because it is my goal to have a debt-free facility in our community for something so beautiful and iconic.
“We want to model for the entire nation that the Black community in a midsize city that has its challenges can do something like this in partnership with the broader community,” he adds.
Community members are invited to attend the groundbreaking event for The Center for Black Excellence and Culture on June 19. To RSVP, click here.