​The final chapters
 
Meta became a widow during the summer of 1929. Her husband was struck by a streetcar while crossing the street outside his newspaper office. He died of his injuries three weeks later. Victor Berger’s body lay in state at Milwaukee City Hall, and 75,000 people came to pay their respects.
 
In the following decade, Meta did not hew to the official Socialist Party lines. She explored Communist affiliations and friendships, even traveling to Russia, though she never joined the Communist Party. While the Socialist Party had long had its own philosophies and factions, Meta’s actions were no longer acceptable. In 1940, after she was asked to withdraw from “communist-front” organizations, she instead chose to resign from her longtime party.
 
She died in 1944 at a family home in Thiensville.
 
“Meta Schlichting Berger served her community and her country, as well as her husband and family, by helping to shape her century for the better,” wrote historian Genevieve G. McBride in the forward to Meta’s memoir. “There is no better testament to a life lived well, nor to the lessons she left for the next generation.”

​Wisconsin legal historian Joseph Ranney joined WJI at its virtual June Salon for a fascinating talk on post-Civil War civil rights laws across the nation and in particular here in Wisconsin. 

Ranney is an adjunct professor at Marquette Law School and the author of several books and articles on  Wisconsin and American legal history, including Trusting Nothing to Providence: A History of Wisconsin's Legal System and Wisconsin and the Shaping of American Law. He is working on a history of civil rights law in the Northern and Western states from colonial times to 1968.

Ranney's talk relates to WJI's Unsung Heroes blog series on women and people of color whose impacts on Wisconsin legal history deserve more attention. Ranney discusses, among others, two men profiled in the series: Ezekiel Gillespie, who fought for the right to vote for Wisconsin's Black men, and William T. Green, who as an attorney worked to enforce civil rights.

While Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette may now be the more familiar name to Wisconsin ears, his wife should be regarded as an equally remarkable person in Wisconsin law and progressive politics.
 
Her name was Belle Case La Follette. In 1885, she became the first woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School, starting law school after she was already a wife and mother.
 
She earlier helped husband Bob with his studies and then with legal briefs, including one brief in the 1890s “that broke new legal ground and won his case before the state’s supreme court,” according to an article by historian Nancy Unger in the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Wisconsin Magazine of History.
 
“Justice William P. Lyon complimented Bob on the brief,” Unger explained, speaking in an interview with the Wisconsin Justice Initiative. Bob La Follette proudly and matter-of-factly told the court that his wife had written it.
 
Belle La Follette never formally practiced law, but she practiced plenty of activism. She wrote, lectured and agitated for progressive causes, including women’s suffrage, child labor reform and racial justice. In 1909, her husband began La Follette’s Weekly, later La Follette’s Magazine and now The Progressive. Belle La Follette served as its first editor and as columnist, expanding the boundaries of what was considered appropriate for women readers. Her writing was nationally syndicated as brief “Thought for the Day” articles in newspapers in 20 states.
 
“She was a tremendous voice for women’s suffrage,” Unger says. “She was instrumental in women getting the vote and changing minds.”
 
In 1912, that included testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Women’s Suffrage, where she declared that suffrage was “a simple matter of common sense.”
 
“You know how Lincoln defined government at Gettysburg. ‘Ours is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people,’” she said. “And are not women people?”
 
That same year, she went on one of her barnstorming tours for suffrage, giving 31 speeches in 12 days across 14 Wisconsin counties. In 1914, she spoke for 63 consecutive days in states including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan.

Belle La Follette and friends listened from the Senate gallery as the Nineteenth Amendment was approved on June 4, 1919.
 
Her next action was likely one of the reasons that Wisconsin became the first state to officially ratify on June 10, 1919. She sent telegrams to representatives back home with the news. Once ratified, then-Sen. Bob La Follette announced Wisconsin’s vote and had it read into the Congressional Record. (For the record, Illinois technically passed a resolution first, but that was found to be invalid.)
 
“And it was no mere state pride that caused me to thrill with joy when Mr. La Follette made the announcement in the Senate,” she later wrote in La Follette’s Magazine. “It was the conviction that a great service had been rendered. With Wisconsin as an example—an object lesson—ratifying so speedily, almost unanimously, the opposition was beaten at the very beginning of the race—left dashed and hopeless at the very start!”
 
The Nineteenth Amendment became law in 1920.

“And now the 17 million women of the United States are fully enfranchised,” Belle La Follette wrote in celebration. “… For the first time in American history, women may vote in every state in the Union for candidates for all offices ... and women may hold any office now held by men, whether appointive or elective.”

The new constitutional amendment meant that the University of Wisconsin’s first female law graduate could finally vote. She was 61.

A progressive family tree
 
Belle Case was born in 1859 in Summit, Wisconsin, the daughter of Anson and Mary Nesbit Case, and grew up in Baraboo. Her mother was moved by a lecture on women’s suffrage and spoke to her children about such matters. Her parents valued education, including for their only daughter. An eager and brilliant student, Belle was accepted at the University of Wisconsin, which was where she caught the eye and heart of a student named Bob.
 
After graduation, she taught for two years before agreeing to marry in 1881. At Belle Case’s request, the Unitarian minister omitted the word obey from their marriage vows.​

They were true partners in life and progressive politics. During his long career, her husband served as Dane County district attorney, congressman, private attorney, three-time governor of Wisconsin, and U.S. senator, as well as founder of La Follette’s Weekly and as a Progressive Party presidential candidate. Belle La Follette is credited with some measure of his success, sharing her progressive arguments, legal skills and political savvy through the years.
 
She was, Bob La Follette declared in his autobiography, his “wisest and best counsellor.” He also spoke of “when we were governor.”
 
“And though she did not enjoy all of the trappings that came with being a politician’s wife (she particularly hated Washington small talk), she saw great value in women becoming politically aware,” according to Unger, a professor at Santa Clara University, who has written extensively about the La Follettes, including two books that received Book of Merit Awards by the Wisconsin Historical Society. “She urged all women to recognize that the problems they thought of as personal were in fact political and therefore required women’s political activism.”
 
After her husband’s death in 1925, La Follette was asked to finish his term in the U.S. Senate, which would have made her the first woman to actually serve as senator. (Rebecca Latimer Felton, 87, of Georgia, was sworn in as a member of the Senate in 1922. She served just one day. No woman would be elected until 1932.)
 
La Follette declined and son Robert La Follette Jr. ran instead. For the ever-practical and political Belle, it made sense to have someone younger take up the family’s progressive banner. Robert Jr. served more than 20 years in the Senate; another son, Phil, was elected Wisconsin governor three times.
 
She also encouraged her daughter-in-law, Isabel “Isen” Bacon La Follette, to give her opinion of a draft platform by husband Phil as he began running for governor, according to an article by historian Bernard A. Weisberger in the Wisconsin Magazine of History. Belle La Follette did not buy Isen’s argument that she knew nothing of politics.
 
“You are an intelligent woman,” Belle La Follette told Isen. “If what Phil writes doesn’t appeal to you, rest assured it will not appeal to others.”
 
True to her convictions
 
La Follette continued her writing and speaking, advocating on a wide variety of issues for the rest of her life. For reasons of health and comfort, she gave up corsets and stays and told other women they should, too. She believed in exercise for all, including women. Women should not, La Follette contended, have to change their names when they marry.
 
She decried racial injustice, speaking before and in support of Black communities and making headlines for it. “She Defends Negroes—Wife of Senator La Follette Denounces Segregation—Says U.S. Government Errs,” read a 1914 front-page story in The Washington Post.
 
“It seems strange,” she once wrote, “that the very ones who consider it a hardship to sit next [to] a colored person in a streetcar, entrust their children to colored nurses, and eat food prepared by colored hands.”
 
Civil rights activist Nannie Helen Burroughs introduced her as “the successor of Harriet Beecher Stowe.” La Follette also supported rights and respect for American Indians.
 
La Follette especially deplored violence in all forms, from corporal punishment for children to capital punishment for crime. She was a founder of the Women’s Peace Party, which later became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Former President Theodore Roosevelt was outraged by its public stance, writing a scathing assessment of the WPP and calling it cowardly and foolish. Unger tells what happens next.
 
“Belle La Follette fired back in La Follette’s Magazine that Roosevelt assumed ‘that War is the only means of settling international differences and moreover that War is bound to settle them right. … History demonstrates that [even] imperfect and temporary plans of mediation, conciliation, and arbitration have been more effective than war in securing justice ….’”
 
“Was Christ cowardly? How long did the agitation against human slavery last before it was abolished?” La Follette wrote.

​A legacy hailed and then long forgotten
 
Belle La Follette died in 1931. She was 72. She rated obituaries in newspapers across the country, including The New York Times, which called her perhaps “the most influential of all American women who have had to do with public affairs in this country.”
 
Mostly, though, her life was told through the lens of “the little woman behind the great man,” according to Unger. “Only a few go so far as to recognize her as an important reformer in her own right.”
 
In 1993, the State Bar of Wisconsin’s charitable arm, the Wisconsin Law Foundation, began its Belle Case La Follette Awards in recognition of her accomplishments. The annual awards now honor three bar members working in Wisconsin and representing underserved populations, one each from the UW Law School, Marquette University Law School and an out-of-state law school, said Joe Forward, communications director for the State Bar.
 
La Follette was, at heart, a bit of a homebody and somewhat shy, but she believed in standing up and speaking out, something she thought all citizens should do. Perhaps more than her politician husband could, she claimed a measure of greater freedom in pushing progressive ideas, says Unger.
 
“She’s a bit like Eleanor Roosevelt,” Unger says. “She wielded tremendous influence as a journalist and public speaker, and the nation improved because she did. She didn’t pull any punches in her sweet ladylike way.” 
 ​

This project is supported by grants from

​A legal victory — and historic first
 
Almost 20 years after Congress voted for termination, the Menominee tribe was officially reborn. The Menominee Restoration Act was signed into law by President Richard Nixon on December 22, 1973.
 
“The Menominee Restoration Act was the first time that a tribe’s legal status was restored after being terminated,” said NARF attorney Wilkinson, speaking to the Wisconsin Justice Initiative.
 
While many were involved, Deer is considered the driving force behind the success.
 
“Ada was the leader,” Wilkinson wrote in the foreword to Deer’s memoir. “The adoption of the Menominee Restoration Act announced the end of termination and the beginning of the tribal self-determination era. Without question, the single most important person in this transition was Ada Deer.”
 
Deer was elected the first woman to chair the tribe, serving from 1974 to 1976, helping her people chart a new course and reestablish relations with federal, state and neighboring governments.
 
Deer served in other roles during her working life, including as a lecturer with the American Indian Studies program and the School of Social Work at UW-Madison, returning to serve as American Indian Studies director.

Called to service in Washington
 
In 1993, appointed by President Bill Clinton, she became the first American Indian woman to direct the Bureau of Indian Affairs. On her watch, the federal government established government-to-government relationships with 226 Alaska Native villages and tribes, expanded self-governance to many other tribes, and approved the recognition of four tribes.
 
She recalled in her memoir how, during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, Sen. Slade Gorton, a Republican from Washington state, asked her how long these welfare payments to Indians were going to continue.
 
“Excuse me, Senator,” Deer replied. “These are not welfare payments. As you know, this country was built on Indian land with Indian resources, and treaties lay out the nation’s obligations to Indians, and treaties are the supreme law of the land. These are permanent obligations and will continue.”
 
“I could hear the air being sucked out of the room,” she wrote. Connie Deer’s daughter was not going to let the welfare myth go unchallenged.
 
In the case of the Menominee, tribal homeland once encompassed 10 million acres. Twentieth century descendants had fought to restore the tribe’s claim to some 235,000 mostly forested acres.
 
“Few individuals have had as profound an impact on U.S. Indian policy as Ada has had,” wrote Theda Perdue, the historian and friend who, says Deer, co-authored the memoir.
 
Running like a Deer
 
Deer also ran for public office, twice for Wisconsin secretary of state, as well as for Congress against then-State Rep. David Clarenbach (the subject of another WJI Unsung Hero feature and someone she described as “a good guy”) in the 1992 Democratic primary. She beat Clarenbach but lost in the general election.
 
Her campaign slogan was “Nothing Runs Like a Deer.” When the John Deere company threatened to sue, the campaign said go ahead. Company officials apparently reconsidered how it would all look because no lawsuit materialized.
 
More recently, she served as a consultant on the American Indian exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum. While no longer as active, Deer remains interested in social issues, including mass incarceration, adequate substance abuse treatment, and protecting the environment. Education and involvement, she said, remain the true paths to social justice and change.
 
“There are many opportunities to serve,” said Deer. “I want everyone to get a decent education and get involved, depending on their interests. And vote. I think every citizen should vote, and it should be an informed vote. We should appreciate our country and all that it offers.”​

This project is supported by grants from

​
​Winning consensus for consent
 
Then it was back to the matter of the Consenting Adults Bill. The measure was next offered as a budget amendment and approved by the Democratic Assembly caucus. That should have cleared a path for approval. Instead, a few Democrats said they couldn’t vote for the budget bill because of it.
 
Clarenbach made the difficult decision to withdraw the amendment. It was later reintroduced as a standalone bill in the next session of the Legislature, and despite pressure from the conservative right it won bipartisan approval.
 
“In retrospect, I am certain that withdrawing the earlier amendment was one of the things that contributed to getting the Consenting Adults Bill passed,” Clarenbach said. “Suddenly I was seen in a different light and that next session I got elected speaker pro tem.”
 
Democratic Gov. Tony Earl signed the Consenting Adults Bill into law on May 5, 1983.
 
Once again, the right words helped make the case for the change. The issue was cast as one of “sexual privacy” – including for married heterosexual couples – rather than the repeal of what was known as the anti-sodomy law.
 
It all made for some interesting debate. Clarenbach remembers quipping that “95% of the adults in Wisconsin have violated the law and the other 5% have no imagination.”
 
Lest anyone think Wisconsin was going too wild, the final version of the bill included a disclaimer that “Wisconsin does not approve of sexual conduct outside of the institution of marriage.”
 
The Consenting Adults Law ended an unusual legal situation created by the passage of the nondiscrimination bill, as the late Dick Wagner, a longtime gay advocate, activist and historian, once explained in an Our Lives article.
 
Consider, Wagner declared, the “strange anomaly that for a year homosexual acts were technically illegal but you could not discriminate against people for them.”
 
Clarenbach later won other legislative victories, including on bills banning discrimination in health care and insurance for patients with HIV/AIDS, signed into law by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson.​

On July 19, 1854, in a two-to-one decision, the Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed Smith’s decision to discharge Booth from custody. Whiton and Smith found that the state court had the power to protect the state’s citizens from illegal restraint, the warrant for Booth’s arrest failed to charge a crime, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was unconstitutional.

Whiton wrote the Act illegally conferred power on appointed commissioners, rather than judges. Second, he said, it denied the alleged fugitive the right to have his or her case tried to a jury in violation of the right to due process. Whiton focused on the danger to a free citizen of being taken into slavery when the evidence determining whether the person was a slave was presented in the state of the slave owner, with no opportunity for cross-examination of witnesses or submission of contrary evidence. The certificate of that court was then taken as conclusive in the state where the person was captured, causing the commissioner to order the person’s return.

“We are at a loss to perceive how this proceeding, by virtue of which a freeman becomes a slave, can be justly called ‘due process of law,’” Whiton wrote.

Smith concurred in a lengthy opinion based on the Constitution’s reservation of rights to the states. States, he wrote, retained the right to determine their own process for a slave owner’s claim.

“In Virginia he may be, indeed, a chattel; but in Wisconsin he is a MAN. . . the laws of Wisconsin regard him as a person here,” Smith wrote. Moreover, he said, there was no basis for federal law enforcement or court officials’ involvement in the return of slaves. He continued:

Had the Northern States imagined, that by assenting to this clause of the Constitution, they were thereby conferring upon the federal government the power to enter their territory in pursuit of a runaway negro, . . . to subject their houses to search, and to override their own laws and municipal regulations, and that they were parting with all power to regulate the mode of procedure by which that clause was to be carried into effect; does any sane man believe that they would ever have assented to it?

Crawford dissented, writing that the Wisconsin courts should decline to interfere with federal custody and that Congress had the constitutional power to pass the act. The dissent is thought to have caused his loss to Orsamus Cole in the 1855 election. 

Ableman, the marshal, sought review in the U.S. Supreme Court. The state Supreme Court clerk forwarded the record to the U.S. Supreme Court when ordered. 

This is the second of two posts about Joshua Glover. Read the first one here.

Meanwhile, in July 1854, Booth, and two other men who assisted Glover were indicted on criminal charges of aiding a fugitive slave in violation of the 1850 act. One, John Messenger, who had spirited the just-escaped Glover to a abolitionist's home in Waukesha, died shortly after his arrest and release on bail. The other, attorney John Rycraft, who had created a "vigilance committee" to ensure Glover's rights were protected, was tried and convicted in November 1854 and sentenced to ten days in jail and a fine of $200.

Booth’s criminal trial took place in early January 1855. The jury found him guilty, and Miller sentenced him to one month of imprisonment and a fine of $1,000, with Booth to remain in custody until the fine was paid. 

A few days later Booth and Rycraft applied to the Wisconsin Supreme Court for writs of habeas corpus, arguing that the federal court trial proceedings were void. The Wisconsin Supreme Court held, this time 3-0, that Booth’s and Rycraft’s convictions were illegal and ordered them discharged from imprisonment. All three justices agreed that the indictments in the cases failed to charge and the evidence at the federal trial failed to prove any offense within the jurisdiction of the federal court. ​

By Margo Kirchner

First of two parts

The capture and escape of Joshua Glover in southeastern Wisconsin in 1854 sparked an abolitionist outcry and an attempt by the Wisconsin Supreme Court and Legislature to nullify federal slavery law.

Two years earlier, Glover had escaped from slavery in St. Louis and established a life in freedom in Racine, but federal deputy marshals captured him in his home under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Outraged citizens of Milwaukee and Racine broke Glover out of jail and sent him on the Underground Railroad. Glover eventually reached safety in Canada.

Although Glover departed Wisconsin by mid-April 1854, his legal impact here had just begun. His escape from custody led to a struggle between state and federal authorities and the state’s defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Benammi Stone Garland purchased Glover, then known only by his first name, on January 1, 1850, on the steps of the St. Louis Courthouse. In May 1852, Glover escaped from Garland’s farm and crossed the Mississippi River to Alton, Illinois. Garland placed a reward notice in a Missouri newspaper on May 19, 1852, and ran the notice for about two weeks.

Glover traveled about 350 miles to Racine, arriving in late spring or early summer. Racine was a bustling community of 5,000 people due to its trading post, harbor, and plank road to Janesville. About 60 Black or mixed-race adults were recorded in the city’s 1850 census.

Glover found a job at a sawmill on the Root River a few miles out of town. He chose his last name and had his own home, where he lived freely for two years. 

Wisconsin’s antislavery movement was active by the early 1850s. The Burlington Liberty Association, the first antislavery society in the state, had been around since 1844. Sherman Booth published an abolitionist newspaper in Milwaukee called the Free Democrat. Chauncey Olin published the abolitionist American Freeman newspaper in Waukesha. The Underground Railroad (UGRR) stopped in Waukesha and elsewhere. And, as described by authors Ruby West Jackson and Walter T. McDonald, Racine was a “hotbed of abolitionist sympathizers.”*

Clayborn Benson, executive director of the Wisconsin Black Historical Society, said in a recent interview that abolitionists were motivated by several reasons. Some opposed slavery on religious grounds, while others opposed slavery for political purposes as part of the developing Republican Party. Some were European immigrants with ancestors who had been enslaved, while “free-soilists” did not want to compete against the South’s unpaid labor when it came to agriculture. 

Although Wisconsin’s antislavery movement was vigorous, Blacks nevertheless were not close to being treated equally with Whites. They had the right to assemble and act as jurors, said Benson. But Blacks were still denied the right to vote, and Whites did not want Blacks living nearby. In 1850 Milwaukee, about 100 Blacks lived in a city of 20,000.

Political battles raged in the nation over slavery in territories and newly formed states. Sentiment ran strongly in Wisconsin against slavery and its reach northward, and there was strong opposition  to returning  escaped slaves who had become Wisconsin residents. Many people in Wisconsin wanted “no part of enslavement,” said Benson.​

Slavery’s reach from the South, however, found support in the U.S. Constitution and federal law.
Article IV, section 2 of the U.S. Constitution provided that a slave in one state would not be discharged from service by escaping to another state and would be delivered back to his or her owner on demand. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 established a process for slave owners to reclaim runaway slaves, but in southern eyes it did not have teeth.

As part of the Compromise of 1850 between northern and southern states, a new fugitive slave act beefed-up the rights of slave owners to recover escaped slaves. A slave owner could obtain a court order in his home state confirming the status of a slave, then proceed to find and arrest the escapee with the assistance of federal marshals. A U.S. commissioner, rather than a regular district judge, could determine the fate of the person. Notably, the commissioner received a larger fee for sending a fugitive to slavery than for releasing him or her. The alleged fugitive slave was denied a jury trial or any other opportunity for testimony or defense. Moreover, the act created criminal penalties for citizens who helped escaped slaves or interfered with their return.

This is the first of two posts about Joshua Glover. Read the second one here.


The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 “brings fire” to northern abolitionists and made them determined to help fugitives reach Canada, said Benson. Wisconsin politics included disagreements regarding whether the state had to defer to the federal government’s efforts to enforce the 1850 act. From 1850 to 1860 “there is turmoil,” Benson said. 

Garland remained intent on reclaiming Glover under the 1850 act. He somehow learned that Glover was in Wisconsin and provided a St. Louis court with proof of his ownership and Glover’s escape. The court ordered Glover’s removal from Wisconsin. 

Garland arrived in Milwaukee in early March 1854 with a St. Louis police officer and the Missouri court order. He swore out an affidavit and presented his paperwork to U.S. District Judge Andrew G. Miller, who issued a warrant for Glover’s arrest. 

Deputy U.S. Marshal Charles Cotton accompanied Garland and the St. Louis police officer to Racine, where they were joined by another federal deputy marshal.

Garland and the officers surprised Glover at his home on Friday, March 10, 1854. After a physical struggle the officers subdued Glover and led him away in shackles. Several reports indicate that Glover was bruised and bloodied during the capture.

Possibly because of the small size of the Racine jail or the abolitionist forces in Racine, the captors transported Glover to Milwaukee County’s larger and stronger jail located in Courthouse Square (now Cathedral Square). ​

By Gretchen Schuldt

​Fewer than 30 years had passed since the end of the Civil War when Canadian-born William T. Green graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1892, one of the first Black people to do so.

​He was by then 31 or 32 years old. 

Law degree in hand, he settled in Milwaukee, where he became the city's first and only Black attorney. By that time, he already had authored the state's first civil rights bill. 

Green's enrollment in law school was fortuitous, according to a September 1893 Milwaukee Journal newspaper story. The short, one paragraph account announced a benefit for Green, "a colored lawyer of the city, who was stricken with paralysis some time ago." 

"Years ago he was an errand boy in Milwaukee, but later obtained a position about the state university building," the newspaper reported. "He was without money and although eager to learn was unable to provide himself with an education. One of the professors one day found him with his ear to the keyhole listening to a law lecture. Attracted by the lad's earnestness to learn the professor helped him through college and he graduated a year or two ago with high honors."

Green, as a young man, watched as the country moved away from its commitment to civil rights. In 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal law prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations.

​The move had ramifications in Wisconsin. Black people were turned away from taverns and other public places; some attending a teachers' convention in Madison were not allowed to register at hotels, according to the summer 1966 issue of the Wisconsin Magazine of History.

The small Black population (304 people in 1880) began pushing for a state law that would do what federal law no longer did. 

Then in 1889, Owen Howell, a Black man, bought a ticket to a play. When he went to the Bijou Opera House in Milwaukee, he was denied his seat and an usher instead directed him to the gallery. Howell sued in Milwaukee County Circuit Court.

Black leaders in the city, including Green, held a convention to show off their increasing political strength – the city's Black population was by then about 449 –  and to push for a new civil rights league, which was indeed established. Green also helped organize a meeting to censure the Bijou's owner. The meeting drew about 75 people – about 17% of the city's Black population.

Howell won his case and was awarded $100 and costs. 

Law student Green, meanwhile, was busy with his civil rights bill. It was drafted in late 1889, and introduced in January 1891 by a one-term legislator, Orren T. Williams. Republicans at the time were the advocates for civil rights.

They also were in the legislative minority that term.

The bill would have provided equal access to a variety of public accommodations, including restaurants, saloons, barber shops, theaters, and transportation conveyances. Violations would be punishable by fines of $25 to $500 and incarceration for up to one year.

The debate in the Judiciary Committee was overtly racist.

"Where is the man on this floor who will say the colored man is the equal of the white man?" Assemblyman John Winans asked. "God did not create them equal."

First the bill was watered down. Then it was defeated. 

"Mr. Williams, who introduced it, wanted it killed because it had been limited to hotels and common carriers," The Milwaukee Journal reported.