Wisconsin, in a first, to unveil a Black woman’s statue at its Capitol

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

Workers lowered the shrouded statue of Wisconsin Secretary of State Vel Phillips into position outside a Capitol entrance Tuesday, and then encased it in a crate ahead of Saturday’s unveiling.

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

Black actor Larenz Tate is set to host, with Gov. Tony Evers and Phillips’ son, Michael, among the attendees.

It’s rare for Black leaders to be honored this way at capitols, although there are some examples around the country.

Statues of the Little Rock Nine, the first Black students to enter Little Rock’s segregated Central High School in 1957, stand outside the Arkansas Capitol building. A statue of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stands outside Georgia’s Capitol. And seated Rosa Parks was the first full-length statue of a Black person to be installed inside 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, to win a seat on the Milwaukee City Council and to become a judge in Wisconsin. Then she became the first woman and Black person elected to statewide office in Wisconsin, serving as secretary of state from 1979 to 1983. She died in 2018 at age 95.

Johnson, who is Black and president of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Dane County, said the idea grew out of complaints following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 that no people of color were represented at the Wisconsin Capitol.

Johnson figured Phillips would generate the least resistance because she was able to work with Republicans in her day.

“The young people of Wisconsin and generations thereafter need to see that representation matters and they need to see heroes and leaders that reflect the ecosystem of our communities at large,” Johnson wrote in a June 2020 proposal to the state Capitol and Executive Residence Board. The board unanimously approved the statue in late 2021. The chairperson was then-Rep. Amy Loudenbeck, a white Republican, who called the vote “historic.”

A task force led by Johnson’s organization raised donations to cover the entire cost, with no state assistance other than preparing the site.

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