Lucille Berrien's North Side home is the hub for her social justice work as well as a base for seven of her great-granddaughters. Upon our arrival to take her to lunch for the interview (during which she ordered a plate of liver and onions at Ma Fischer's) we overheard someone ask one of these great-granddaughters, "Who is that?" The great-granddaughter merely shrugged and answered, "She knows everyone."

Berrien is an 84-year-old welfare rights activist, former member of the Black Panther Party and the first Black woman to run for the mayor of Milwaukee.

In 1953, Berrien and her two young children moved from Florida to Milwaukee after her husband was killed in the Korean War. She had married at 16 and had her first child at 17.

"I was 24-years-old when I became a widow, and I think about all those mothers who have husbands in Iraq. It will be harder for them than it was for me," says Berrien. "I always said that if anything happened to my husband I would take the kids up North. I thought they would have a higher quality education."

Berrien's family has kept growing, now with 13 grandchildren, 20 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren. Berrien's mother is 109 years old and still lives in Florida.

"We talk on the phone a lot. She remembers stuff I don't remember," says Berrien.

Upon first arriving in Milwaukee, Berrien was a domestic worker in Bayside and Whitefish Bay homes.

"Then the civil rights movement came, and I got involved in that," she says. "And Open Housing here with Father (James) Groppi, who was my friend."

Open Housing was a movement to eliminate segregation in Milwaukee. In 1962, Vel Phillips, the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School as well as the first woman and the first African American elected to the Milwaukee Common Council, introduced the Phillips Housing Ordinance, a bill that would have outlawed housing discrimination.

When the ordinance did not pass, the Open Housing movement heated up and Berrien marched across the 16th Street viaduct with Groppi at the height of the Open Housing marches. Groppi, a Roman Catholic priest and civil rights activist, left the priesthood in 1976 to marry Dr. Margaret Rozga, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha. He died of brain cancer in 1985.

Berrien became involved with welfare rights and took a class in Chicago to become an organizer.

"I was still a welfare recipient myself at the time," she says.

Berrien marched with Father Groppi in the Welfare Mother's March from Milwaukee to Madison to protest funding cuts. "He was a great man," she says.

In 1970, Berrien spoke to thousands of Milwaukeeans at a demonstration on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus after the Kent State shootings. Around this time, she got involved with the Black Panthers.

"I supported them. I thought what they were doing was correct," she says.

In 1972, Berrien ran for mayor of Milwaukee, making herself the first Black woman to do so. She ran against Mayor Maier as a non-partisan candidate and says, although she attempted, she was unable to get Maier to debate with her.

"It was a lot of hard work," she says. "And I knew I wasn't going to win. There are two kinds of power: money power and people power. If you don't have the money, you can still win with people."

Also in 1972, Berrien ran the local committee for Shirley Chisholm during her bid for the Democratic party presidential nomination. Chisholm was the first Black female elected to the U.S. congress and a vocal opponent of the war in Vietnam.

Berrien supports Vietnam Veterans Against the War and was a local chairwoman of the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice, a national organization she helped form with her friend John Gilman. Gilman, a decorated World War II vet and an activist by the time he left high school, wrote an autobiography "Foot Soldier for Peace and Justice," published in 2009.

"Things are going so backwards in Milwaukee, makes you wish for those days to come back," she says. Page 1 of 2 (view all on one page)

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