‘You can’t legislate morality’: Nearly 60 years after Milwaukee’s first stab at fair housing legislation, the city struggles to enforce it

Noted: Vel Phillips was already a woman of many firsts, having become the first Black person to graduate from the University of Wisconsin law school and the first Black woman elected to Milwaukee’s Common Council.

In 1962, she introduced a fair housing ordinance that would make housing discrimination on the basis of race and other protected classes illegal and was much stronger than the state law, which exempted much of Milwaukee’s duplex- and triplex-heavy real estate landscape.