The 16th Street Bridge, also known as the 16th Street Viaduct, links Milwaukee’s North Side to the South Side. This bridge was considered the “Mason-Dixon Line” of Milwaukee, separating the city’s white and Black communities. During the 1960s, Blacks resided… Read More

On June 17, 1965, Milwaukee attorney and state Assemblyman Lloyd Barbee filed a federal lawsuit, Amos et al. v. Board of School Directors of the City of Milwaukee, after a year of high-profile demonstrations by the Milwaukee United School Integration… Read More

Frank Aukofer was born in 1935. As a young man, he attended Marquette University and graduated with a degree in journalism. After graduation, the Milwaukee Journal hired him as a reporter and assigned him to report on national and local… Read More

  Lloyd Augustus Barbee was an attorney, a state legislator, and one of the most prominent leaders of Wisconsin’s civil rights movement. He was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on August 17, 1925, and he joined the National Association for the… Read More

During the 1950s, relations between Milwaukee’s Black community and the police department reached a boiling point. In 1958, the police department conducted a cover-up in the shooting death of 22-year-old Daniel Bell. Police shot Bell for fleeing from a police… Read More

Around the mid-1960s, the Civil Rights Movement began to shift strategies. Many activists began to question the effectiveness of the two major tenets of the movement: integration and non-violence. Stokely Carmichael, who became the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating… Read More

During the open housing campaign of 1967-1968, the Milwaukee NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) Youth Council decided to supplement its open housing marches with economic boycotts. The boycotts targeted the city’s local businesses and aimed to… Read More

In 1963, the Milwaukee NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) Youth Council began its first major direct action campaign against Marc’s Big Boy Restaurant. The Youth Council had received a complaint from a young man claiming that… Read More

In Milwaukee, Police Chief Harold Breier remained adamantly opposed to the civil rights movement which emerged in the city during the 1960s. After the Milwaukee NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) Youth Council’s 1966 Eagles Club protests,… Read More

Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing until 1971, the Milwaukee School Board utilized a practice known as “intact bussing” to deal with overcrowding in Milwaukee’s inner-city public schools. The policy called for taking entire classes of students and their… Read More