Earlier today, Wisconsin’s Capitol Residence Board approved adding a statue of Vel Phillips to the state capitol grounds.
Phillips’s achievements are too numerous to list here. She was – among many other things – the first woman and Black person elected to statewide office, the first Black woman to graduate from the UW-Madison School of Law and the first Black woman to sit on Milwaukee’s common council.
Now, her statue will be the first on the capitol grounds to depict a Black woman.
Shortly after today’s vote, our Producer Jonah Chester spoke with some of Philips’s family and the organizer behind the effort to erect her likeness on the capitol grounds.
Photos by Jonah Chester for WORT-FM
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