After attending gradeschool at Immaculate Conception and Bay View High School, Groppi studied atboth Mount Calvary Seminary from 1950-1952 and St. Francis Seminary from1952-1959. He was ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood in June 1959 andassigned to St. Veronica Parish on Milwaukee’s South Side. In 1963, Groppi wastransferred to St. Boniface Parish on 11th and Clarke streets in the heart ofMilwaukee’s “inner core,” as the largely African-American central city was thenknown.
After participating inthe 1963 March on Washington and devoting his two-week vacation in 1964 to theFreedom Summer Project in Jackson, Miss., Groppi’s interest in the cause ofcivil rights for black Americans downright became a passion during a trip toSelma, Ala., in early-1965.
Marching beside MartinLuther King Jr., Groppi was, according to John Gurda’s The Making of Milwaukee, “struck by the hypocrisy of Northernliberals who traveled hundreds of miles to confront Southern racism but ignoredthe prejudice in their own back yards.”
Soon after returning toMilwaukee, Groppi joined the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee(MUSIC) and logged his first arrest during a protest against what was then apolicy of the Milwaukee School Board: the busing of African-American childrenfrom overcrowded inner-city schools to schools in outlying areas where theywere segregated from the neighborhood children who attended those schools. Bythe end of the year, Groppi was the adviser to the Milwaukee Youth Council ofthe NAACP.
The novelty of a whiteCatholic priest leading a group of young blacks in civil rights protests alonewas enough to garner media interest, but Milwaukee earned national attention inAugust 1967 when Groppi led the Youth Council in a 200-day campaign to secure acitywide open-housing ordinance that would give citizens the right to rent orown property anywhere, regardless of race, color or creed. Angrycounter-demonstrators hoisting effigies and hurling epithets, as well as rocksand bottles, greeted the initial marches into the predominantly white SouthSide neighborhoods.
As 1967 drew to a close,the Associated Press voted Groppi “Religious Newsmaker of the Year.” The PriestSenate of the Milwaukee Roman Catholic Archdiocese and three Wisconsin Lutherandistrict presidents made public statements urging the passage of legislationfor open-occupancy. In April 1968, following the assassination of Martin LutherKing and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included robustopen-housing provisions, Milwaukee passed its own strong open-housing measure.
After resigning asadviser to the Youth Council in 1969, Groppi led a march to Madison to protestcuts in welfare benefits, and participated in actions to supportAmerican-Indian rights and end the war in Vietnam. He left the priesthood in1976 and married fellow activist Margaret Rozga, with whom he had threechildren. Groppi became a bus driver for the Milwaukee County Transit System in1979 and remained in that capacity until he succumbed to cancer in 1985.
