Vel R. Phillips

2009 Honoree

Midway through a telephone interview, Vel Phillips paused to listen to a news broadcast about the 2008 Democratic primaries.

Returning to the phone, she remarked "I am a huge [Barack] Obama fan. He will make a great president!"

Phillips, a retired Milwaukee elected official and civil rights pioneer, relates to Obama because, like him, she also has achieved numerous "firsts" in her lifetime. In 1956 she became the first female and the first African American elected to the Milwaukee Common Council.

That election in 1956 came after she was also the first African-American woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School.

She and her husband W. Dale Phillips, were the first husband, wife law couple of any race admitted to the Eastern District of the Federal Bar in Wisconsin.

While on Milwaukee’s city council, Phillips, who attended Howard University as an undergraduate, introduced the city’s first open-housing ordinance and led NAACP marches for fair housing for more than 230 days. Her actions came amid the city’s race riots in the 1960s.

Phillip’s friendship with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders led to her involvement in national politics and more “firsts”. She was the first African American in the United States elected to the National Committee of either of the two major political parties, and she came to know on a first-name basis three presidents: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter.

More milestones were made in the 1970s when Phillips became the first woman judge in Milwaukee County and the first African-American judge to serve in Wisconsin’s judiciary. In 1978 she was elected secretary of state and thereby became the first woman and the first and only black ever elected to a statewide constitutional office, a record that still stands today.

Phillip’s lifetime in law and politics did not end when she retired from full-time work from her law practice. She still does pro bono work and remains active in the political arena and in the Milwaukee community. She serves on the boards of America’s Black Holocaust Museum, the NAACP, the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, Community Shares and the Marquette University Haggerty Museum.

She also is the founder and chairman of the Vel Phillips Foundation, which seeks equal opportunities for minorities through social justice, education, equal housing and jobs. Recently she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws from Marquette, where she serves as a distinguished professor of law.

While she does not plan to run for another public office, Phillips recalls with excitement the thrill of her many victories in politics and in the courtroom. She hopes that her life will continue to symbolize the true meaning of one of her favorite quotes by Winston Churchill who, many years ago said, "We make a living by what we earn, we make a life by what we give."