Black people have been a part of the Wisconsin story since the beginning, and groups gathered this week to celebrate that story in preparation for Madison’s annual Juneteenth celebration on Saturday.
….(Elizabeth Harris) Hodge grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Madison, a time when African Americans faced little overt racism, she said. Friends have told her she grew up in a utopia, she said.
“But I did not have an African-American teacher until I went to the University of Wisconsin,” said Hodge, who became Madison’s first black TV news reporter in the early 1970s.