Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Lloyd Barbee
Lloyd Barbee
One of the greatest civil rights activists in Wisconsin history was Black attorney Lloyd Barbee. Born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1925, he died in Milwaukee in 2002. Tall, trim and intense, Barbee spoke with a soft southern accent. Early in his life, he set his purpose and never wandered. He embodied a jewel box of progressive ideas that American culture rarely let him wear. Barbee often signed his correspondence with “Justice for All,” reflecting his fight for equality.
In 1937, when he was just 12 years old and living in Memphis, Barbee joined the NAACP. His lifelong civil rights crusade fighting discrimination and inequality had begun. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. In 1949, Barbee graduated from the all-black LeMoyne College with a B.A. in economics. Later that year, he moved to Madison to attend the University of Wisconsin Law School but dropped out after his first year after experiencing racism among peers and professors. Eventually he returned to the university and received his law degree in 1956. Out of law school, he worked as an attorney for the Wisconsin State Department of Labor.
Barbee quickly earned a reputation as a human rights advocate. In 1955, he was elected president of the Madison branch of the NAACP. In 1958, he completed a study outlining discriminatory housing practices in Madison. In 1961, he conducted his first civil rights demonstration in support of open housing at the Wisconsin State Capitol.
Fighting Segregation in Housing and Schools
At 74, Clayborn Benson is the Director of the Wisconsin Black Historical Society, which he founded in 1987. He is one of the few people still alive who knew Lloyd Barbee well. Having spent 39 years as a news photographer for WTMJ-TV, Benson had been in the thick of the news business in the time of the civil rights movement. “In 1961, Lloyd Barbee led a 13-day sit-in at the state capitol in Madison, a dramatic event that galvanized support for several anti-discrimination bills then pending,” Benson recalled.
The sit-in campaign also drew attention to fair housing. In 1962, at the urging of the NAACP, Barbee moved to Milwaukee and opened his own law practice. He was also president of the Wisconsin chapter of the NAACP. By 1963, Barbee was focusing on the housing issue that he believed was the central point of segregation.
In 1965, he was elected to the State Assembly from Milwaukee’s 6th district, which consisted of largely inner city Black neighborhoods. Shortly after taking office, Barbee demanded that the Milwaukee Public School system (MPS) develop a comprehensive plan for ending the institutional segregation in the schools. While he acknowledged that segregation was not an explicit policy by MPS, he argued that many of its day-to-day decisions served to concentrate African Americans in schools with inferior facilities and equipment. Barbee was also disturbed about the school system’s tendency to place African American teachers only in predominantly Black schools and to deny requests by individual Black students to transfer out of those schools. In response, MPS claimed that the racial disparities in the schools were due to settlement patterns, which the school system had no control over.
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Suing MPS
In 1963, Barbee led the NAACP’s challenge to MPS, demanding that school officials make stronger efforts to integrate schools. When MPS refused to modify its school policy, the NAACP organized boycotts of schools and operated “freedom schools” in their place. When that failed, Barbee decided to use litigation to make the courts do what the school board would not.
On June 17, 1965, Barbee filed a federal lawsuit charging the Milwaukee School Board with unconstitutionally maintaining racial segregation in its schools. From 1965 to 1976, Barbee spent thousands of hours on the suit, often working alone against a battery of lawyers paid by MPS. Ultimately, the lawsuit proved one of the most important desegregation cases filed in a northern city in the civil rights era.
In 1972 when Barbee won the lawsuit, Milwaukee became one of the first major Northern cities under court order to integrate its public schools. Nevertheless, MPS appealed the decision. Finally, in January of 1976, Federal Judge John Reynolds ruled that Milwaukee’s public schools were unlawfully segregated, prompting the Wisconsin Legislature to enact a school integration program.
Although Barbee won the case in 1976, he spent the next several years dealing with appeals and new trials and worked to enact a viable plan to desegregate the school system. The publicity drew attention to schooling issues in Milwaukee.
According to Benson, “After that lawsuit victory, there was also the matter of bussing in the 1970s. Lloyd Barbee hated the yellow school busses. He saw the busses as tools for segregation. Black kids were bussed to a white school where they experienced good teachers, good lunches, and clean classrooms. But some Black kids were being taught in trailer parks near the playgrounds or in cold hallways and closets. Some white teachers were turning their backs to the kids. To Barbee, the yellow school busses stood for segregated practices.”
From 1965 through 1977 Barbee was the only African American in the Wisconsin State Legislature. Over the next 12 years, he produced an impressive legislative record. He sponsored the Fair Housing Act, several employment and public accommodation civil rights acts, legalization of abortion, reparations to African Americans and Native Americans, and a bill mandating that Black history and multicultural history be taught in the state’s public schools.
March on Milwaukee
In 1964, Barbee organized and led an alliance of civil rights activists dedicated to ending de facto segregation in Milwaukee called the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee (MUSIC). This group became the primary vehicle for his desegregation efforts with Father James Groppi among its prominent members.
On Aug. 28, 1967, the Milwaukee NAACP Youth Council and its adviser, Groppi, began the March on Milwaukee against residential segregation. For 200 consecutive days, they led protestors who marched to rally for a fair housing ordinance. The March on Milwaukee helped lead to Title VIII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1968, banning discrimination in housing accommodation because of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, disability or familial status.
“Housing is complicated,” said Benson. “Segregated neighborhoods, restrictive covenants, schools, health institutions, businesses. These things all impact the Black community and keep the residents isolated and impoverished. Fair housing covers so many factors.”
In 1967 Barbee represented comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory, who had been arrested and charged with “disorderly conduct” while participating in a civil rights march in Milwaukee. In a 1968 case, Barbee represented African American students at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, who protested to get Black history courses taught, but had been dismissed by the university administration for their actions. Barbee obtained a court order allowing the students’ readmission on the grounds that their due process rights had been violated.
Endless Quest for Civil Rights
“Barbee fought the battle on so many fronts,” said Benson. “He felt that anyone has a right to be on the front lines fighting for justice. He wrote many articles in the Black newspapers on justice for Black people. He also inspired the creation of a thriving inner city neighborhood along 20th and Walnut Streets, 44 houses of mixed ethnic families.”
How would describe Barbee’s personality? “I can’t say I knew his personality,” said Benson. “I don’t think anybody knew. He didn’t give out that side of him. He was always very serious. He visited me at the Black Historical Society Museum probably nine or 10 times. In the early 1990s, he would bring boxes and boxes of historical artifacts and would sort through the material with me. He also spoke at one of our school desegregation conferences.”
In 1982, Barbee wrote, “The State of Wisconsin is racist. If it desires to do anything about its racism, it cannot continue to teach children that all things good in America and the world are white.” Benson nodded, and said, “Milwaukee is still that way to an extent and so is the whole state of Wisconsin. White people view Black people as new visitors to the state because of the northern migration in the 1950s.”
Among his many accomplishments, Barbee also taught at UW-Milwaukee in the Africology Department from 1978 to 2000. In 2001 he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree in sociology from UWM, which created the Lloyd A. Barbee scholarship in his honor.
Barbee died on Dec. 29, 2002, in Milwaukee. He was 77. A Milwaukee street is named in his honor, as is the Lloyd A. Barbee Montessori School on Teutonia Avenue. A life-size statue of Barbee stands proudly in the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison. He had three children, Finn, Daphne and Rustam.
Lloyd Barbee never attained his goal of complete equality in America. But like a great musician, he never stopped searching for the correct chords.
