Lloyd A. Barbee House

This modest Near North Side house was built in 1890 during the neighborhood's development between 1870-1910. By the 1960s the neighborhood was predominantly African American.  Lloyd Barbee bought his house in 1966 and lived there until 1980. The house is a single-family small home built in the Victorian style.

Lloyd A. Barbee (1925-2002) was an attorney, Wisconsin State Assemblymember for twelve years, and civil rights leader. He was President of the Madison branch of the NAACP in 1955, a year before he received his law degree from the University of Wisconsin Law School. In 1961 Barbee conducted his first Civil Rights hearing at the Wisconsin State Capitol in support of open housing and earned the election of President to the state's NAACP. The following year he moved to Milwaukee and formed the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee (MUSIC) to confront the harsh segregation of the city's public schools. Barber was elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly in 1964.

In 1965, Barbee and his team decided that the most effective way to support integration was to make a public legal stand with a federal lawsuit. That suit became Amos et al. v. Board of School Directors of the City of Milwaukee, 408 F. Supp. 765 and suit represented 41 Black and white students and claimed that the school board intentionally upheld segregation, strengthening it in the face of overcrowding instead of weakening it. The lawsuit was in court until 1976, when Federal Judge John Reynolds ruled, “I have concluded that segregation exists in the Milwaukee public schools and that this segregation was intentionally created and maintained by the defendants.”1

 

From 1966-1980, his Near North Side home doubled as his office, serving as a hub of Civil Rights activity. Fellow activists such as comedian Dick Gregory often stayed with Barbee in his guest bedroom. It was here also that Barbee fought appeals to the landmark ruling and devised practical solutions for desegregation in Milwaukee.