Milwaukee City Wire

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett on Nov. 3 announced the placement of Vel R. Phillips on State Capitol grounds.

Born in Milwaukee in 1924, Phillips was elected to serve on Milwaukee’s Common Council at the age of 32. She was both the first woman and first African American on the council. She introduced the Phillips Housing Ordinance in 1962, which would have outlawed housing discrimination, but it was defeated 18-1. She introduced the bill three more times over the next several years, but it was defeated every time, according to the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.

“Milwaukee takes pride in the pioneering achievements of Vel R. Phillips, and I am pleased she will be honored with a statue on the grounds of the State Capitol in Madison," Barrett said in a Nov. 3 Tweet. "Vel Phillips achieved numerous important firsts. She was the first African American to win election to Milwaukee’s Common Council and the first to be elected Wisconsin Secretary of State. She was a leader in civil rights, in the law and in politics."

Every year, Milwaukee’s Common Council now awards the Vel R. Phillips Trailblazer award to a woman who embodies Phillips’s spirit of service to Milwaukee. Phillips was also the first African American woman graduate of the University of Wisconsin’s law school, the first female judge in Milwaukee, the first African American judge in Wisconsin and the first African American to ever be elected as a member of the Democratic National Committee, according to the City of Milwaukee.

A youth and family justice center in Wauwatosa is also named after Phillips, according to the City of Milwaukee.

"A prominent street in the heart of Milwaukee now carries the name, Vel R. Phillips Avenue, a posthumous honor that recognizes her remarkable accomplishments as a woman and as a person of color," Phillips said in his tweet. "It is fitting that she will be additionally memorialized at our State Capitol.”