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Vel Phillips was a distinguished civil rights activist and politician in Wisconsin, celebrated for her groundbreaking accomplishments in public service. In 1956, she became the first Black person and woman elected to the Milwaukee Common Council, marking a historic achievement. She continued to break barriers by becoming the first Black woman elected to the Democratic Party’s National Committee while serving on Wisconsin’s state committee. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1978, as a staunch advocate for equal housing, Phillips made history once again by being elected as Wisconsin’s secretary of state, becoming the first Black woman in the United States to be elected statewide to an executive office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More than six years after her passing, Phillips’s pioneering legacy endures with a new sculpture unveiled at Madison\u2019s Capitol Square in late July. This sculpture is noted by community members as the first of a Black woman to be installed outside a state capitol building in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A 2021 audit by Monument Lab found that only six percent of U.S. monuments represent women, and merely ten percent honor Black or Indigenous people. Created by the late artist Radcliffe Bailey, this artwork joins other state capitol statues that celebrate key figures in Black American history, such as statues of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass in Maryland\u2019s statehouse, the Little Rock Nine memorial in Arkansas, the Martin Luther King Jr. monument outside Georgia\u2019s capitol, and statues of Mary McLeod Bethune and Rosa Parks in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The new statue stands at the capitol, where two statues were previously removed by protesters during the George Floyd protests in 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n