Wisconsin unveils first statue of black woman at Capitol

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — About 1,000 people are expected to attend a gala event this weekend as Wisconsin finally honors a person of color with a statue at the state Capitol.

Workers lowered the shrouded statue of Wisconsin Secretary of State Vel Phillips into place at the entrance to the Capitol on Tuesday and then packed it into a crate ahead of its unveiling on Saturday.

“This is beautiful,” said Michael Johnson, a civil rights leader who came up with the idea and led efforts to raise $700,000 to cover the costs.

Black actor Larenz Tate will host the presentation, with Governor Tony Evers and Phillips’ son Michael among those in attendance.

It is rare for black leaders to be honoured in this way in parliament buildings, although there are some examples around the country.

Workers finish installing a statue of Vel Phillips, Wisconsin’s first Black secretary of state, outside the Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, Tuesday, July 23, 2024. The statue is expected to be unveiled during a ceremony Saturday evening. (AP Photo/Todd Richmond)

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS/Todd Richmond

Statues of the Little Rock Nine, the first black students to attend the segregated Central High School in Little Rock in 1957, stand outside the Arkansas Capitol building. A statue of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. stands outside the Georgia Capitol. And the seated Rosa Parks was the first statue of a black person to be placed in the U.S. Capitol, honoring the woman who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.

Phillips broke a long list of barriers as the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, won a seat on the Milwaukee City Council and became a judge in Wisconsin. She went on to become the first woman and Black person elected to state office in Wisconsin, serving as secretary of state from 1979 to 1983. She died in 2018 at the age of 95.

Johnson, who is Black and president of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Dane County, said the idea came from complaints after the May 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis. He said there were no people of color represented in the Wisconsin Capitol.

Johnson assumed Phillips would face the least resistance because she had been able to work with Republicans at the time.

“Wisconsin’s young people and generations to come need to know that representation matters, and they need to see heroes and leaders who reflect the ecosystem of our communities as a whole,” Johnson wrote in a June 2020 proposal to the state Capitol and Executive Residence Board. The board unanimously approved the statute in late 2021. Its chair was then-Rep. Amy Loudenbeck, a white Republican, who called the vote “historic.”

A task force led by Johnson’s organization raised money to cover the entire cost, without any government support other than site preparation.

“I was shocked,” Johnson said. “I’m used to fighting for things. I expected people to stand up to it. And the fight never came.”