Dr. King in Milwaukee in 1965

In 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Milwaukee to give a speech at UW-Milwaukee. In these excerpts he discusses de fact segregation in schools, urban inequality and solutions to the problems. The clip also includes a brief snippet of young people singing outside one of the "Freedom Schools," which were set up during a public school boycott. In 1967-68, civil rights activists in Milwaukee, along with supporters from across the country, waged a historic campaign for open housing, which ultimately played an instrumental role in spurring passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Comedian and activist Dick Gregory was one of the prominent figures who came to Milwaukee to support Fr. Groppi, the NAACP Youth Council and Commandos. This video was compiled/edited by Jasmine Alinder and Cris Siqueira using archival footage found at the UW-Milwaukee Urban Archive for the 40th anniversary celebration/conference of the historic open housing campaign in Milwaukee. For more information on the civil rights era in Milwaukee, see, Patrick D. Jones The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Harvard University Press, 2009)

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News & Politics

Tags:

• civil rights
• Milwaukee
• Wisconsin
• Martin Luther King
• MLK
• school desegregation
• de facto segregation
• urban inequality
• social justice
• freedom school
• equality
• justice
• protest
• social movement
• politics