Father James E. Groppi called the 16th Street Viaduct Milwaukee’s “Mason-Dixon Line.”
In the summer of 1967, Groppi, one of Milwaukee’s most vocal civil rights activists and an adviser to the city’s NAACP Youth Council, announced plans to march across the 16th Street Viaduct to protest the city’s lack of an open housing ordinance.
The viaduct had great symbolic significance: it connected the north side of the city, where predominantly black people lived, with the south side, which at that time was predominantly white.
Plans for the march emerged during an already turbulent summer in Milwaukee.
On July 30, 1967, clashes with police, a racist threat, and gunfire sparked a riot in the neighborhood around Center Street and what is now King Drive. Buildings were set on fire, shots were fired, and the National Guard was deployed to seal off the city. In the end, four people were killed, 100 injured, more than 1,700 arrested—and the city was in turmoil.
The Youth Council planned to lead its open housing march from the south end of the viaduct to Kosciuszko Park at South 10th Street and West Lincoln Avenue. (The group had a picnic permit for the park.)
200 demonstrators met 5,000 counter-demonstrators
On the night of August 28, 1967, about 200 demonstrators – a third of them white, including, according to the Milwaukee Journal, quite a few clergy – began marching across the viaduct.
Police estimated that 3,000 people watched the protesters along the route and in some cases even harassed them. Another 5,000 people met them and surrounded them as they reached the park on the south side.
By then, the Journal reported, “the number of police officers had grown to about 125, many wearing helmets and carrying battle rifles, tear gas guns and gas masks.”
In Kosciuszko Park, “the shouts of spectators and protesters became so loud that one had to shout to be heard from six feet away,” the Journal reported.
“Several spectators held up a Confederate battle flag.”
The Journal reported that the demonstrators were followed by about 500 protesters on their way back to 16th Street.
At one point, the demonstrators’ path was blocked by an old, white-painted hearse with “Last Ride – Groppi’s” and “White Power” written on it in large black letters.
Scuffles broke out between protesters and police. The Journal reported that 16 people were arrested and two injured during the night’s events.
Second night: More counter-demonstrators and a firebomb
The following night, August 29, a second march to Kosciuszko Park encountered 13,000 protesters, and the demonstrators “were pelted with eggs, bottles, rocks, firecrackers and beer cans,” according to the Milwaukee Sentinel, with some police officers also hit. Twenty-two people were injured, the Sentinel reported, and 45 were arrested.
Not long after the August 29 march, the Freedom House, run by the NAACP Youth Council on North 15th Street, was hit by a firebomb. No one was injured; the house was completely destroyed.
Those two nights in August 1967 marked the beginning of over 200 days of demonstrations in various parts of the Milwaukee area calling for open housing legislation. Although the demonstrations officially ended in mid-March 1968, some continued protesting for several more days.
On December 12, 1967, the City Council passed an open-living ordinance. However, the measure was so weak that Councilman Vel Phillips, who had introduced stronger open-living proposals in each of the previous four years, voted against it.
On April 30, 1968, the City Council finally passed an open-housing ordinance with teeth—one even stricter than the federal laws hastily passed after the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. earlier that month.
On August 21, 1988, nearly 20 years after the first night of marches, the 16th Street Viaduct was renamed the James E. Groppi Unity Bridge.
About 400 people – almost twice as many as attended the first night – gathered for the inauguration, the Journal reported.
Unlike the thousands of protesters who gathered for the first march across the bridge in 1967, this time there were only four – and each carried a Confederate flag.
Editor’s note: This story is based on reports on Milwaukee’s historic open-housing protest marches of 1967-1968 that appeared in the Journal Sentinel’s Green Sheet on August 25, 2015, January 3, 2018, and March 13, 2018.
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