Historic Bronzeville

10 Locations | Curated by Milwaukee Bronzeville Histories

The individuals who made up historic Bronzeville were remarkable. Not solely based on their popularity, although some of them were. The driving force behind the greatness of Bronzeville was the commitment to achieve regardless of the apparent or imperceptible obstacles, or as Lisa Krissoff Boehm puts it, “making a way out of no way.” On this tour, we will survey some of the individual efforts of historic Bronzeville that made the collective memory of the community so valuable. This tour does not cover every individual who should be recognized, yet instead we like to consider this a rising expedition, where it continues to grow as new discoveries are made or information is recovered. From the factory worker to the movie star, this tour aims to show the variety of Milwaukee’s African American community of the past.

Long before civil rights pioneer Vel Phillips would go on to achieve a long list of historic breakthroughs – as the nation’s first African American woman elected statewide to an executive office, among many unprecedented honors – she faced multiple challenges in her youth, such as overcoming the racially discriminatory treatment that could have thwarted her path in high school. She described one…
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A community thrives when residents benefit from a variety of services, including those essential to health and well-being. Having access to them is also extremely important. Bronzeville was successful because it had a variety of services and business, including dental offices, such as that of Fred…
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Jarius Anthony Josey was born to parents Anthony and Patience Josey on January 6, 1876, in Augusta, Georgia. Josey enrolled in Atlanta University for college in the early 1900s. While a student, he co-edited the Atlanta Independent springing his roots with media. In 1905, after his graduation, he…
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Malik el-Shabazz, commonly recognized as Malcolm X, was born on May 19th, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, with the given name of Malcolm Little. His father was a prominent member of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and when Malcolm was a child, his family endured conflicts…
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An established singer, actor, intellectual, professional athlete, and activist, to say Robeson was talented would be an understatement. Mark Alan Rhodes, II argues that Paul Robeson was one of the greatest athletic activists in history. He was an all-American football player at Rutgers in 1917 and…
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Woods wrote for the Chicago Defender, Milwaukee Defender, Milwaukee Star and Milwaukee Globe over the course of her long career, and freelanced for Ebony and Jet magazines. However, she is best known for her society column, ‘The Party Line’ for the Milwaukee Courier Newspaper, where she followed the social events of the African American society in Milwaukee, a post she held for 40 years until her…
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Imagine going to work and somehow being enlisted into another country’s civil war. Cleveland Colbert is most well-known for leading the Afro American National Economic Society as its first president beginning in 1940 and for advocating for the African American community through civic, political, and economic avenues. But prior to those endeavors, he had to advocate resolutely for himself in the…
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