Vel Phillips’ Fight for Civil Rights

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Illustration by Aaron Boyd

Valiant Vel by Jerrianne Hayslett

Vel Phillips’ 1956 election to Milwaukee’s common council wasn’t the first of many firsts for the Black activist. In Valiant Vel, the new illustrated biography for children ages 11-14, Phillips’ first breakthrough came as a junior at North Division High School. She wanted to participate in a speech contest and the speech needed advanced approval from her forensics teacher. Phillips wanted to practice oratory, but the teacher insisted she stick to comedy. Against the advice of her father and some Black classmates, Phillips persisted, delivering an address on the discrimination endured by people of color in housing, jobs and education. 

According to Valiant Vel’s author, Jerrianne Hayslett, Phillips’ 1939 high school victory “formed a foundation” for her “perseverance and hope in the years to come.” That school speech inaugurated a lifelong campaign to open doors, yanking them open, if necessary, for Blacks in Milwaukee. 

Phillips confronted many problems as the first Black and the first woman with a seat on Milwaukee’s common council, starting with locating the nearest restroom. For an office, she was given a closet. Phillips was excluded from the informal conversations from which political decisions are shaped. She was openly snubbed. “Rather than let this racism and sexism distract her, Vel focused on her constituents and their concerns” over potholes, crime and trash pickup. Civil rights inevitably entered her agenda. 

Attracting attention beyond Milwaukee, Phillips became the first Black member of the Democratic National Committee and campaigned for John F. Kennedy in 1960. But the events for which she is most remembered occurred later in the ‘60s when she walked with Father James Groppi and the NAACP Youth Council on marches for housing rights. Their much-publicized campaign to desegregate Milwaukee were met with angry, rock throwing white mobs. Phillips persevered.  

Phillips’ struggle led to the passage of Milwaukee’s fair housing ordinance, but her career didn’t end there. She became Milwaukee County’s first Black judge and Wisconsin’s first secretary of state. She died at age 95 in 2018. Along with chronicling her achievements, Valiant Vel is a look back at the North Side neighborhood where she grew up, Bronzeville, the historic district undergoing renovation in recent years. 

Valiant Vel: Vel Phillips and the Fight for Fairness and Equality is published by Wisconsin Historical Society Press.