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Article: Lloyd Barbee's battle Equal-rights fighter doesn't quit
- Article from:
- The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI)
- Article date:
- October 27, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1996 The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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When Lloyd Barbee was a boy growing up in Memphis, he once heard a
prominent white minister describe heaven.
"He said that he had once had a mammy that he had loved very
much," Barbee said. "He said that when he died and when he got to
heaven, he was going to go over to the colored side of heaven and
embrace her."
Barbee has made a career out of challenging earthly versions of
that minister's separate but equal paradise.
A former state legislator, civil rights activist and president of
the state NAACP, it was Barbee who on June 17, 1965, filed the
lawsuit that desegregated Milwaukee Public Schools.
At a time when, in the name of ethnic pride and cultural
pluralism, updated forms of ...