Institution

Born on April 5, 1928, in Kansas City, Kansas, Marcia Priscilla married Milwaukee accountant and Civil Rights activist Isaac Coggs in 1952. She attended Milwaukee State Teachers College between 1955 and 1956, receiving her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee when it absorbed the College in her final year. She spent thirteen years working at Milwaukee County Children’s Home, and had four children of her own. Three years after her husband’s death in 1973, Coggs successfully ran for office in 1976, becoming the first Black woman to serve in the Wisconsin State Assembly. Over her sixteen years of public service, Coggs would be known as a champion of social change and a prolific legislation writer. Her focus on education, school desegregation, and equal housing, along with health and racial equity, earned her the nickname ‘The Conscience of the State of Wisconsin’. Among her many achievements, Coggs would become the first black member of the legislature’s Joint Finance Committee, to which she was appointed in 1987 and on which she would remain until she left the Legislature in 1993, losing her seat to her nephew, Leon Young. Coggs passed away at the age of 75 in 2003, and was laid to rest with her husband. In her honor, the Milwaukee County Human Services building was named for her soon after her passing. In late 2023, the county broke ground for a new home for the Marcia P. Coggs Health and Human Services Center on W. Cherry Street, right next to the city’s mental health emergency center._______________________This entry is part of an ongoing collaboration between America's Black Holocaust Museum and Forest Home Cemetery &amp; Arboretum. This entry was written by Sophia Furman.

Coggs' burial marker at Forest Home Cemetery, on the lower level of the Chapel Gardens West Terrace in the North-West corner.

For sixteen years, Marcia P. Coggs championed the causes of social change and human need as the first African American woman elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly. Along with her husband, Isaac, she started Milwaukee's famed Coggs political family, which continues to serve the city over 70 years later.

Marcia P. Coggs (1928-2003)

Milwaukee quickly became an
established town in the 1840s due to its access to regional rivers and lakes.
Historically, it is known for the beer, wheat and railroad barons who brought
the city wealth and fame.&nbsp; The rapid
growth of Milwaukee, and its need for funerary pomp to reflect this wealthy
population, led to the establishment of the Forest Home Cemetery in 1847. The
initial 72 acres were procured in 1850 and the cemetery was expanded to its
current 200 acres by the early 1900s.&nbsp; 

Intended to follow the Victorian ideal
of a rural cemetery layout, the space includes tall tree coverage, rambling
paths, large funerary monuments and decorative statues. Since its founding, Forest
Home has expanded in size and added several sections with specific purposes and
unique histories that deviate from that traditional landscape style.&nbsp; The soldier’s plot contains 21 Union soldiers
from the Civil War and is laid out in a traditional war cemetery style with the
burials in precise lines. The Newhall House fire Monument marks a mass grave
containing 64 people who died in the 1883 hotel fire. The land that the
cemetery currently sits upon was also known to have had over 60 American Indian
earthen works.&nbsp; These were catalogued by
a pioneer scientist and included burial mounds. Today, none of these are
visible. 

At Forest Home, there is a gothic
chapel and two prominent mausoleums.&nbsp; The
chapel was built in 1890 and designed by George Ferry and Alfred Clas. It is
Gothic in design, uses sandstone from the region in its structure and houses a
historic tropical plant collection. Both of the mausoleums are active, one of
which one contains an educational “Hall of History” for visitors of the
cemetery.

Founded in 1847, the Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is the oldest rural cemetery in the Upper Midwest. Today it encompasses 200 acres and is home to some of Milwaukee’s founders, Civil War soldiers and several notable decorative crypts. The landscape follows Victorian ideals of space and design utilizing 300 species of trees to intentionally create a feeling of restive grandeur. Forest Home Cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, as well as being listed as a Milwaukee Landmark. The first burial was in 1850, however, the site is known to have had effigy mounds and American Indian burials.

Hughes was first sold with his mother and two brothers at the age of six, and was separated from his family a few times until he was sold to a wealthy plantation owner Edward McGee in 1844 at the age of eleven. It was while living on this plantation in Tennessee that he married a free woman who was illegally enslaved, Matilda Tixley. It was here, too, that Hughes would learn about medicine from his enslaver. He would utilize his knowledge in medicine to treat enslaved people within the plantation. Despite having made five attempts to escape enslavement with his wife and friends, he never succeeded in reaching full freedom until after Emancipation in 1863. He then joined the Union Army nursing staff. After the war, Hughes would go on to travel the United States and Canada seeking various jobs until he finally settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Working alongside his wife at the Plankinton House as the coat room and bell stand attendant, Hughes produced his own laundry service in connection to the hotel that would be his main job until he revisited his passion as a nurse. He was able to achieve this through the gracious recommendations by prominent practitioners he knew. As a nurse, Hughes was able to travel across the country and make a living doing something that he loved.For the rest of his life, Hughes would share the stories of his years in enslavement. Telling his story aloud prompted listeners to encourage him to write and publish his story. Because he decided to learn to read and write in secret while enslaved and to later record his own story and share with others, we now have this incredible first hand account of the brutality of slavery and the resilience of the human spirit for posterity.You can access more of his story here for free: https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/hughes/hughes.htmlhttps://archive.org/details/thirtyyearsslavehugh/mode/2up_______________________This entry is part of an ongoing collaboration between America's Black Holocaust Museum and Forest Home Cemetery &amp; Arboretum. This entry was written by Logan Glembin.

Louis Hughes was the first published Black author in Milwaukee. His memoir, Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom, was published in 1897 by Milwaukee’s South Side Publishing Co, thirty-three years after gaining his freedom at the end of the Civil War. Chronicling his traumatic upbringing and his pursuit of freedom is now “...considered an essential text for understanding the experience of slavery in western Tennessee.”

Louis Hughes (1832-1913)

Born in 1816, Ezekiel Gillespie is most well known for his role in securing the right to vote for Black men. Per an 1849 referendum, Black men had been granted the right to vote, however, election inspectors continued to prevent Black men from casting their ballots. In 1865 Gillespie attempted to vote in the gubernatorial election but was refused. Partnering with Sherman Booth, a well known abolitionist and newspaper editor, and Byron Paine, a future WI Supreme Court Justice, Gillespie filed a case against several members of the Milwaukee board of election inspectors. Losing in Milwaukee County, the group appealed in 1866 in the Wisconsin Supreme Court where a unanimous decision granted voting rights to all black men. This marked a pivotal moment in Wisconsin history because it would not be until 1870 with the passing of the Fifteenth Amendment that all black men nationwide would be granted suffrage. Outside of civil rights activities, Gillespie was also known to be a dedicated family and religious man. In 1868 Gillespie, along with several other families, worked towards founding the First African Methodist Episcopal Church. This was the first African Methodist Episcopal church in Milwaukee and Wisconsin which continues to serve members presently under the name St. Mark’s AME Church._______________________This entry is part of an ongoing collaboration between America's Black Holocaust Museum and Forest Home Cemetery &amp; Arboretum. This entry was written by Adamali De La Cruz.

Ezekiel Gillespie was a Wisconsin activist, family, and religious man. His attempt to vote resulted in challenging voting discrimination and opening up suffrage for all Black men in Wisconsin.

Ezekiel Gillespie (1818-1892)

Born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, Isaac Newton Coggs served a year in the U.S. Army at the end of World War II and then received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1948 before settling in Milwaukee. Here, Coggs became heavily involved in his community. He served as the president of the Northside Milwaukee Businessmen's Association, as a board member for the local chapter of the YMCA, and as an active member of both the American Legion and Disabled American Veterans. Shortly after marrying his wife, Marcia, in 1952, Coggs won a seat in the Wisconsin State Assembly, becoming one of the first African Americans elected to the state legislature. Coggs served six consecutive terms in the State Assembly, gaining himself such a reputation fighting for equality that he was commonly referred to as ‘Mr. Civil Rights’. In June of 1961, he famously introduced a Human Rights bill that provided for an equal housing law and an equal opportunity employment commission. The bill was heavily challenged from all sides, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called for protests outside the Madison capitol to support Coggs, who was the only Black member of the Wisconsin legislature at the time. While the bill would eventually fail, the efforts from the public in support of it would help build the foundations of other, more successful equal housing protests in Milwaukee later in the 1960s. Coggs' time in the State Assembly ended in 1964, when he secured himself a seat on the Milwaukee County Board as the supervisor of the 6th Ward, the first Black person elected to the Board. He served only one term before stepping back from an active public role altogether as he fell ill. He passed away in 1973 at the age of 53 after a long battle with cancer, leaving behind a political legacy continued on by his wife, Marcia, and eventually their daughter, Elizabeth._______________________This entry is part of an ongoing collaboration between America's Black Holocaust Museum and Forest Home Cemetery &amp; Arboretum. This entry was written by Sophia Furman.

The Coggs political family has served the people of Milwaukee for over 70 years, and it all began with Isaac Coggs’ election to the State Legislature in 1953.

Forest Home Cemetery

Marcia P. Coggs (1928-2003)

Introduction

Images

Backstory and Context

Sources