Vel Phillips, one of the most important civil rights figure in Wisconsin’s history, has died. She was 94 years old
In 1956, Phillips became the first African-American, and first woman, ever elected to the Milwaukee Common Council. During her tenure on the Common Council, she introduced the city’s first open-housing ordinance 1962. In 1967, Vel joined Father James Groppi and the NAACP Youth Council in leading marches for fair housing, enduring the city’s race riots, hostility and violence. She finally saw Milwaukee’s open housing bill passed two weeks after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.
Phillips also distinguished herself on a national level in the civil rights era, becoming the first African American in the United States elected to the National Committee of either of the two major political parties, and knew three presidents on a first-name basis: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter.
Phillips was also the first African-American woman to serve as judge in Wisconsin and the first female judge in Milwaukee. In the 1970s she became the first woman judge in Milwaukee County and the first African American to serve in Wisconsin’s judiciary. Phillips again made history in 1978 when she was the first woman and African American elected to a statewide constitutional office as Secretary of State.
Vel Phillips was honored with the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Wisconsin Alumni Association at a daylong seminar focusing on civil rights, “A Nation Still Under Construction: Observing the 50th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act,” held at Union South on March 26, 2014.
