Wisconsin civil rights activist and politician Vel Phillips had a reputation for making historic breakthroughs during her lengthy career in public service. After becoming both the first Black person and the first woman on the Milwaukee Common Council in 1956, she went on to win a position in Wisconsin’s state committee, becoming the first Black woman elected to the Democratic party’s National Committee. In 1978, the equal housing advocate broke barriers again when she won the seat for Wisconsin’s secretary of state, becoming the United States’s first Black woman elected statewide to an executive office.
Now, just over six years since her death, Phillips’s pioneering legacy continues to barrel ahead with a new sculpture officially unveiled in Madison’s Capitol Square on Saturday afternoon, July 27. Community members claim the outdoor bronze statue is the country’s first sculptural rendering of a Black woman installed outside a state capitol building. In 2021, a year-long audit by Monument Lab revealed that only six percent of US monuments portray women and ten percent commemorate Black or Indigenous individuals.
Designed by the late artist Radcliffe Bailey, the artwork joins other state capitol statues around the country honoring figures of Black American history, like the Little Rock Nine memorial in Arkansas, the statues honoring Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass inside Maryland’s state house, the Martin Luther King Jr. monument outside Georgia’s capitol building, and the statues of civil rights activist Rosa Parks and educator Mary McLeod Bethune inside the National Statuary Hall in Washington, DC.
Michael Johnson, executive director of the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County, told Hyperallergic that it was “breathtaking” to see the sculpture on display over the weekend. Johnson initially kickstarted the initiative in 2020 amid nationwide protests against the police murder of George Floyd. In Madison, protesters toppled two statues honoring abolitionist Hans Christian Heg and Wisconsin history that had stood in front of the capitol for decades (both statues have since been restored). The event led Johnson to suggest erecting a sculpture honoring Phillips given the lack of monuments to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) figures. In June of that year, he submitted a proposal to the State Capitol and Executive Residence Board (SCERB) for the construction of the sculpture, which he offered to finance privately through a dedicated task force.
“The young people of Wisconsin and generations thereafter need to see that representation matters and they need to see heroes and leaders who reflect the ecosystem of our communities at large,” Johnson wrote at the time, noting that “there are no prominent pieces of art that reflect the contributions of African Americans in the Capitol building.”
In November 2021, SCERB unanimously approved the plan, and over the next few years, the working group went on to raise $700,000 to execute the project. (Johnson said $550,000 of the funds were allocated toward commissioning the statue while the remainder was used to organize the unveiling event; Hyperallergic was unable to independently verify these numbers.)
Now, four years after Floyd’s murder, the sculpture’s inauguration has arrived in the wake of another devastating police killing that has sparked outrage among racial justice advocates — the killing of 36-year-old Sonya Massey in the nearby state of Illinois. Earlier this month, Massey was fatally shot by a sheriff’s deputy after initially calling authorities for help with a suspected intruder. Her death follows those of Black women like Breonna Taylor and Atatiana Jefferson, who were also killed in their homes at the hands of police.
In the aftermath of Massey’s killing, Madison’s new statue honoring the life of a woman dedicated to dismantling racial injustice in her community offers a sliver of hope for a future where such change is possible.
