'Justice for All' lets civil rights leader Lloyd Barbee tell his story

In 1966, when a Milwaukee civil rights leader challenged Mayor Henry Maier's commitment to fighting segregation, the mayor challenged right back: 

"The record shows I was in the field of fighting prejudice long before I heard of Mr. Barbee and long before there was a climate in support of the fight, such as Mr. Barbee has," Maier told The Milwaukee Journal. 

Maier was definitely mistaken. 

Lloyd A. Barbee had been fighting for racial justice in Milwaukee and Wisconsin for two decades before Maier's outburst, and continued to do so for nearly 40 years more, until his death in 2002 at the age of 77. 

Sometimes, as in his early years in the Wisconsin Legislature when he was its only African-American member, he was fighting on his own. Best known for leading the long battle to integrate Milwaukee schools, he fought for equal rights on multiple fronts, and kept fighting till justice was in sight.

But Barbee never did tell his story. In 1982, he started work on a manuscript that he never finished. Barbee's daughter, Daphne E. Barbee-Wooton, took that material and, with a collection of notes to constituents, speeches and other ephemera, shaped it into "Justice for All: Selected Writings of Lloyd A. Barbee." 

Even with its patchwork structure, "Justice for All" is a solid and sometimes surprising vehicle for hearing one of the most important voices in the fight for civil rights in Milwaukee. 

You can't call it a memoir, although the first half is roughly structured as autobiography, with Barbee talking about growing up in Tennessee and then going to law school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he soon became head of the state chapter of the NAACP and led the fight to change the racially offensive name of a lake in Polk County to Freedom Lake. 

Much of the book, however, is made up of letters — mass mailings, really — to constituents on a surprising range of topics. 

The most engaging of them reveal his experiences on the front lines of the fight not just on school integration but also for less-remembered battles, such as the black student protest at what is now UW-Oshkosh in 1968.

As he did in his public statements, Barbee rarely pulled his punches. 

"The State of Wisconsin is racist," Barbee wrote in 1982. "If it desires to do anything about it, it cannot continue to teach children that all things good in America and the world are white."   

In his recollections of leaders he'd met, Barbee gives insights not only into those leaders but his own continuing education, especially a 1982 excerpt about Malcolm X, whose changing worldview came closer to Barbee's — he called himself a "one world, one race person" — as he moved forward. 

But the message that rings through "Justice for All" is that Barbee never stopped fighting. Barbee recounts his campaign over a half-decade in the Legislature to toughen the state's anemic fair housing laws. 

"This, among other matters, earned me the reputation as a person who stayed on the job until it was completed as planned," he wrote. 

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50-Year Ache: How far has Milwaukee come since the 1967 civil rights marches? https://projects.jsonline.com/topics/50-year-ache/