“*We continue to be known as the Mississippi of the North.*”
– Vel Phillips

“At the time of Lloyd Barbee’s work to influence the integration of the Milwaukee Public School (MPS) system in the 1960s, education here was as segregated as the Deep South,” said Vel Phillips, community leader and a director of the Open Housing Marches. “Today, in terms of educational quality, we see a mirror of segregation frighteningly similar to back then, and we continue to be known as the Mississippi of the North.”

Philips was one of three panelists at the “Community Brainstorming Forum” hosted by the UWM Department of Africology on Jan. 26, 2008.
Africology professor Winston Van Horne and Rep. Fred Kessler spoke in commemoration of the late Dr. Lloyd Augustus Barbee with the hope to “bring a new fire” to his work on de-segregating the Milwaukee Public School educational system. The community attendants as well as the panelists discussed the current state of MPS.

“Dr. Barbee, as a lawyer and politician, systematically unhinged the segregation of MPS through the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee (MUSIC),” said Professor Van Horne. “And with his spearheaded drive to racial integration, the boycotts and creation of ‘Freedom Schools’ began in Milwaukee.”

Many attendants of the forum felt that charter schools and “No Child Left Behind” programs and policies have deepened segregation in city schools and created a greater discrepancy in the quality of education students receive based on their location.

Deborah Wilson, a community member present, questioned what Barbee would think of the Milwaukee Public School system today. Discussion of present legislation such as the Amistad Act, which would mandate African studies in public schools, and other community actions to vocalize the quality of MPS in their communities took over the remainder of the forum with the panelists.

Some suggested a needed alternative that would be community-driven and akin to the Freedom Schools Barbee began in the late 1960s. A consensus was reached that the quality of education for children in the MPS system needed much improvement.

“Facing an educational system that seems to be zoned out to the hopeful and hopeless, and the pending recession in the U.S., I wonder how crime and poverty could stop anytime soon.” said one community attendant. “The segregation of the city from North, South, East and West, is the segregation of those seemingly with and without a future.”

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