Unsung hero: George Heriot De Reef made Milwaukee his home and equal rights his mission

Photograph of George Heriot De Reef from a report of the Semi-Centennial Celebration of Negro-Freedom, courtesy of the Wisconsin Black Historical Society.

​By Amy Rabideau Silvers
  
For a man who made headlines in his day, George Heriot De Reef remains a somewhat elusive figure.
 
News items and scholarly mentions provide clues to who he was and what was important to him, not unlike piecing together an incomplete puzzle.

​De Reef was an attorney, one of the few African American lawyers to practice law in Wisconsin early in the 20th century. He was involved in a host of civic organizations, including serving as president of the Milwaukee chapter of the National Organization for the Advanced of Colored People. And he steadfastly challenged institutional practices—from civil service to jury service—that he believed did not treat citizens in an equal way under the law.
 
The news articles, in keeping with the times, inevitably identified De Reef by race.
 
George De Reef, colored attorney, yesterday became the first of his race ever to seek a judicial post in Milwaukee County ….
 
The problem of appointing a probation officer to work among negroes is not settled to the satisfaction of George De Reef, negro attorney ….
 
Charles Mullineaux, negro, whose trial on the charge of murdering William Jackson, negro, started Tuesday in municipal court, changed his plea of not guilty on advice of his attorney, George De Reef, negro, and pleaded guilty to fourth degree manslaughter.
 
The attorney’s name was spelled in assorted ways, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll (mostly, except in quoted material) use the spelling on his tombstone at Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee.
 
Noteworthy chapters included his challenge to the status quo on jury service. De Reef contended that Black residents should be eligible to serve in Milwaukee County courtrooms, and the barrier officially fell in 1919.

“Black residents began serving on juries in the county after Milwaukee attorney George DeReef documented that no Black residents had been chosen out of more than 3,000 jurors in the past decade,” according to a timeline compiled by the City of Milwaukee’s Office of Equity and Justice.

(It notes that in 1921 Wisconsin passed legislation to allow women of all races to serve on juries. That followed the 1920 passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving women the right to vote.)
​
“Shall We Be Jim Crowed?”
 
De Reef was also involved in a legal battle on a Milwaukee County civil service position for a Black probation officer to supervise offenders in the Black community.
 
“The problem of appointing a probation officer to work among negroes is not settled to the satisfaction of George De Reef, negro attorney, who filed an amended complaint in circuit court Thursday in his suit to prevent the county civil service commission from creating such a special position for negroes only,” reported The Milwaukee Journal in 1930.
 
The problem, De Reef explained in assorted news accounts, was that such a position would be a step toward segregation and establish a “vicious precedent” for other exclusions.

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Photographs of Aug. 14, 1930, clippings from (L) The Milwaukee Journal and (R) the Milwaukee Sentinel. Photographs by Amy Rabideau Silvers.

“We don’t want this resolution to pass the county board because it is unconstitutional and, if it is not, we don’t want it because it ought to be,” De Reef said. “I claim the board of supervisors has no more right to bar white men from this job than it has to bar black men.”
 
One story on a community meeting noted that “negroes were called to the meeting by leaflets asking the question, ‘Shall We Be Jim Crowed?’”
 
De Reef and another Black attorney represented J.S. Bennings, of the Wisconsin Equal Rights League, in challenging that posting as “exclusive” to Negro applicants.
 
While a temporary injunction was in place, the Civil Service Commission changed the posting to allow white applicants as well, but did not change who the successful applicant would be supervising.
 
Circuit Judge John J. Gregory ultimately commended the attorneys for defending the constitutional rights of their race and for their foresight in questioning what they termed “arbitrary class legislation,” but found the civil service’s plan to be constitutional.
 
As such situations arose, not everyone in the Black community agreed with De Reef and the no-Jim Crow stance.
 
“These institutional developments represented a northern variant of what Howard Rabinowitz has called, in the southern context, ‘from exclusion to segregation,’” wrote Joe William Trotter, Jr., in Black Milwaukee/The Making of an Industrial Proletariat 1915-1945. Rabinowitz was a professor known for his writing on segregation.
 
“Milwaukee blacks increasingly accepted segregated services as preferable to the pattern of de facto exclusion,” Trotter continued.
 
“As part of his active involvement in the Milwaukee NAACP, he vigorously fought manifestations of segregation in the city’s public institutions,” Trotter wrote. “In 1919, for example, he staunchly opposed the organization of a black Soldiers and Sailors Club for veterans of World War I.”
 
Personal and family history
 
De Reef was born in 1869 in Charleston, South Carolina, to Joseph Moulton Francis De Reef and Georgina Oldfield Heriot De Reef. Accounts, including in Trotter’s Black Milwaukee, describe him as a descendant of a prominent slave-holding family. Generations of De Reef ancestors are listed as owning slaves, part of an often mixed-race “colored” elite before the end of the Civil War.
 
George De Reef’s obituary in 1937 gave the family history a more neutral spin, saying that he was “Born in Charleston, S.C., of a family that had been in the United States for 150 years.”
 
The short obituary announced his death at the Milwaukee County hospital after a long illness. He was 67.
 
De Reef first studied for the Episcopalian ministry but later went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., graduating from the law school in 1905. De Reef practiced law in Washington and served as clerk of the municipal court there. He arrived in Milwaukee in 1913, “becoming one of the first Negro lawyers to practice in Milwaukee,” according to the obituary.

Photograph of an advertisement in the Wisconsin Weekly Blade, courtesy of the Wisconsin Black Historical Society.

“He eventually came to Milwaukee and put his mind to solving some of the problems of Black people,” said Clayborn Benson, founder and executive director of the Wisconsin Black Historical Society. “He practiced law throughout the state, in Madison, Racine, Oshkosh, Kenosha.”
 
Indeed, there were few Black lawyers in Wisconsin for most of his professional life. By the 1930 U.S. Census, he was one of only three Black male lawyers in Wisconsin—A.B. Nutt and James Weston Dorsey were the others. Mabel Raimey was the only Black woman to practice law, according to an article by law professor J. Gordon Hylton of Marquette University.
 
“It was DeReef more than any other single attorney who left his mark upon the social, economic, and political life of blacks during the period,” said Trotter in his book. “His career vividly reflects ways in which the ideology of self-help and racial solidarity overlapped with an emphasis on racial protest and integration.”
 
Many civic roles
 
In other professional matters, De Reef became a founding officer in the Columbia Building and Loan Association, launched by Ardie and Wilbur Halyard. The first African American financial institution in the state, it opened in 1925 to give members a place to invest their funds and acquire home and business loans, according to Black Milwaukee.
 
De Reef served as vice president for the Community Drug Store, described as the most important retail establishment for the community, and the only store of its kind owned and operated by Blacks in the state. 
 
He was co-editor and part-owner of the Wisconsin Weekly Blade, and a member of the Milwaukee Negro Business Association.
 
Another news account mentioned that De Reef served as chairman of the committee seeing off 79 “colored selectmen” for what would become known as World War I.

Image of clipping in the Aug. 2, 1918, Milwaukee Sentinel. Photograph by Amy Rabideau Silvers.

The men left with the prayers of the community, charged with doing their part for country and race.
 
“Play your part; acquit yourselves like men, so when the history of the world is written it may be said the American negro was ready to lay down his life for democracy,” declared the pastor, J.O. Morley. “And when you return, may you find a new America, free from mobocracy, the Jim Crowism of the past and the prejudice from which you have suffered at times.”
 
A courthouse fight
 
De Reef made news of a less sedate nature after another attorney apparently poached his clients, with a headline reading: “‘Case Stolen,’ Lawyer Hits/Negro Attorney Gives Client’s New Counsel a Punch.”
 
The fight occurred in a Safety Building corridor—not a courtroom—and involved De Reef defending his right to defend his client, according to one newspaper account.
 
“Only one blow was struck Wednesday; that being from the fist of George De Reef, negro attorney, on the nose of Harold A. Baume, who, De Reef claims, ‘stole’ his case. …
 
“De Reef claims that Baume has been in the habit of stealing his cases. A week ago in district court De Reef said he discovered his name scratched from the record in the case of Joe Brazzell, negro charged with assault, and that of Harold A. Baume substituted. De Reef called the attention of Judge A.J. Hedding to the substitution and mentioned ‘ambulance chasing.’
 
“‘That isn’t ambulance chasing, George,’ the court replied. ‘That’s just plain grand larceny.’”
 
For the record, Baume and his “injured feature” retired to the washroom. When the case was called, De Reef was the attorney of record.
 
And yet more civic and civil activities
 
De Reef spoke out in other venues, including as dozens of so-called vagrants were rounded up in 1923.
 
“Negroes Not Wanted in Milwaukee, Wis.,” read the headline in The Winston County Journal in Mississippi.

News of the vagrancy case in Milwaukee in The Winston County Journal, Sept. 7, 1923, page 1.

A total of 39 people were arrested during “a general cleanup … in the west side negro district staged by three squads of detectives,” the report read.  “Police say more than 100 negroes a week have been coming from the South to Milwaukee.”
 
Twelve were released, with the remaining 27 sentenced as vagrants, none represented by counsel.
 
“We do not want men of your kind in Milwaukee,” Judge Michael Blenski said. “I am not taking exception to your race but to your actions. You are vagrants who came noth (sic) expecting to find a soft living.
 
“I am going to give you a chance to work for the county for 90 days and at the end of this time you will have 90 minutes to get out of town. Write all your friends down in the south and tell them about it.”
 
De Reef, identified as a member of the Milwaukee Urban League and president of the local NAACP, reportedly said that the organizations did not object to the arrest of vagrants or miscreants but hoped that Milwaukee would not class all negroes as vagrants.
 
He was also a member of the Free Masons, Benson said.
 
“The Masons took a leading role in helping people migrate up here to Milwaukee,” Benson said. “The Free Masons and the Masonic Temple were encouraging and supporting them in that endeavor.”
 
Another news account reported on De Reef's appearance at a hearing before the state Assembly’s Judiciary Committee.
 
“Charges that several automobile insurance companies forced negroes to disguise their racial identities in order to obtain policies were made … by George De Reef, representing the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored Race.
 
“His statement was made in giving approval to the Rubin bill providing prosecution for companies refusing to sell insurance to a person because of race or color,” according to the Milwaukee Sentinel.
 
De Reef was long active in Republican Party politics, running for the Wisconsin Assembly in 1924. He made headlines as he took out nomination papers as a candidate for the new branch No. 9 of the circuit court in 1934, but later decided to withdraw from that race. He was not elected to public office.
 
He was appointed to head the state committee organizing the Semi-Centennial Celebration of Negro-Freedom, a national exhibition held in Chicago in 1915 in honor of 50 years of freedom following the end of the Civil War.

Image of the report of the Semi-Centennial Celebration of Negro-Freedom, courtesy of the Wisconsin Black Historical Association.

​“The members of both the commission and committee endeavored to secure the active co-operation of the colored race of Wisconsin in producing appropriate exhibitions and demonstrations that were typical of negro talent and genius in their different industrial, economic and professional pursuits in this state,” read a report on the event.
 
The Wisconsin delegation included 100 children from St. Benedict the Moor School, which taught Black children. Wisconsin’s Black population then totaled 2,900 people, according to the report.
 
And there is yet one more piece of evidence on what kind of man De Reef was. His name appears in a newspaper advertisement decrying the Wisconsin congressman who did not vote for a national anti-lynching bill in 1922.

Photograph of an NAACP Advocate publication in 1922, courtesy of the Wisconsin Black Historical Society.

 
“That took a lot of courage to call out a congressman who did not support the anti-lynching bill in Washington, D.C.,” said Benson. “The KKK was very active in Wisconsin—Madison, Fond du Lac, Appleton—in the 1920s to 1935, 1940, holding parades and gatherings out in the open.
 
“He is an important man. Period,” Benson said. “He took on issues and he was everywhere.”

De Reef's grave in Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee on Oct. 12, 2024, after WJI Executive Director Margo Kirchner uncovered it and cleared away the grass and dirt.

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