In the 1960s, Lloyd Barbee’s young daughter and a friend were turned away from an ice cream store on Milwaukee’s east side. Barbee, the daughter recalls, “drove us both there and demanded to see the manager.” After the ensuing “confrontation,” writes Daphne E. Wooten-Barbee, “we were able to get ice cream.”
Wooten-Barbee, a civil rights attorney in Hawaii, tells this story in her introduction to Justice For All: Selected Writings of Lloyd A. Barbee, just out from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Barbee was a longtime Milwaukee civil rights activist and lawyer best known for his work on a landmark case that desegregated Milwaukee schools. From 1965 to 1977, Barbee served as the sole African American in the state Assembly, as a Democrat from Milwaukee.
Justice For All, compiled by Wooten-Barbee, draws from Barbee’s speeches, articles and an unpublished manuscript begun in 1982. Barbee died in 2002 at age 77, and all of the writing in the book is more than a quarter-century old. And yet the book still feels urgent, as a whirlwind display of Barbee’s courage, independence, integrity and wit.
One especially bracing entry is a speech Barbee gave to students at UW-Oshkosh in 1973. He called for legalizing marijuana, which “creates no victims, except perhaps ... when the consumer gets poor merchandise,” and then for abolishing all laws against drugs, gambling and consensual sexual behavior, including polygamy. “To require that all people adhere to a one-spouse, opposite-sex ideology is as absurd and repressive as to require everyone to go to the same church,” Barbee declared.
Barbee was not just ahead of his time; he was ahead of ours.
As a legislator, Barbee fought to remove the “silly, oppressive law” that required divorced persons in Wisconsin to wait a year before they could remarry. He introduced legislation to end compulsory education, arguing that parents would do better to keep their kids at home than subject them to “a disjointed collection of outdated notions called an educational program” and to shut down the state’s prisons, calling them “pens and cages for members of oppressed minority groups.”
As an attorney, Barbee represented plaintiffs in police brutality and sex discrimination lawsuits, as well as black college students expelled for demanding black studies courses. He defended comedian Dick Gregory, who was arrested during a protest in Milwaukee on trumped-up charges. Barbee was arrested for blocking a bus during an anti-segregation protest in 1965.
As part of his unfinished 1982 manuscript, Barbee wrote an essay about what it takes to be an effective legislator, including this crystallization: “Have a sense of purpose, perseverance, stamina, long memory, goal-setting ability, vision, cooperative spirit, good-working staff, good bladder and bowel control, and [a] good seatmate.”
In an age where members of the Wisconsin Legislature flip each other off and call each other “terrorists,” it is good to have this book to help us remember the unquiet dignity of Lloyd Barbee.
