Almost 50 years ago, the young director of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Leslie Fishel, and three other leading Madisonians asked the United Givers Fund — the predecessor to the United Way of Dane County — to fund a study of discrimination in Madison and the needs of the city?s growing African-American population. The request was initially rejected on the grounds that ?discrimination as it exists in other communities does not exist in Madison.?
Fishel, already one of the nation?s pre-eminent historians of Northern segregation and discrimination, begged to differ.
(Fishel died of complications from colon cancer at his Seattle home on Sept. 8. He was 88.)