An iconic image
Girl holding priest’s hand in historic photo reflects on 50 years since Milwaukee civil rights marches
ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Lucia Rogers looked at the black-and-white photo — more familiar to her than to anyone else who knows the history of Milwaukee’s open housing marches.
A little girl in a paisley dress is shrouded in darkness. Her eyes look downward. Her hands grasp the hand of a white man dressed in black. His face is unseen, but it is Father James E. Groppi, who helped lead the 200 nights of marches 50 years ago.
As Rogers looked at the photo, her eyes welled with tears. She is the little girl. It was a fall day in 1967.Groppi was holding a rally at St. Boniface Catholic Church. The building was filled, pew after pew, with hundreds of supporters. Many more waited outside. Rogers, 11, was set to recite parts of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream,” speech, which he haddelivered four years before.
“I remember this like it was yesterday,” Rogers said as she sat on a bench in Oronoco Bay Park in Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., where she now works. “My mother motioned me up on the stage.”
As she climbed up to the altar next to Groppi, she was shaking. She didn’t want to mess up in front of hundreds of strangers.
“It was very chaotic,” she said. “Reporters were asking Groppi questions. Photographers were snapping so many pictures that it was blinding. I had never been so scared in my life. And then he reached down and took my hand.”
Rogers now thinks Groppi needed someone to lean on at that moment as much as she did. His fatherly gesture put her at ease.
“I just took a deep breath and closed my eyes,” she said, “and before I knew it, Father Groppi was walking off the stage and everyone was following him.”
The crowd followed Groppi outside to start that night’s march.
“I never got a chance to give my speech,” Rogers said. “I was relieved, because I didn’t have to give the speech, but also disappointed because I wanted my mom to be proud of me.”
Milwaukee Journal photographer Erv Gebhard arrived early at St. Boniface that late August evening, because he expected another huge crowd.
Months earlier, on July 30, riots had erupted on the city’s north side, after a series of brawls with police, a racist threat and gunfire. Milwaukee was one of more than 150 cities to experience riots that summer.
Now, Groppi — a spirited, 34-year-old assistant pastor at the inner-city church — and others were marching nightly from the city’s north side across the 16th Street Viaduct to the white south side, pushing for passage of an open housing ordinance. On the first night — Aug. 28, 1967 — there were about 200 marchers.
The group, including some as young as 12, were met by more than 5,000 angry, white counterprotesters determined to maintain neighborhood segregation.
Gebhard was 25 when he photographed the marches.
“You never knew what to expect,” he said. “They were throwing rocks, broken glass, anything they could get their hands on. And the chants, you never forget those hateful chants.”
When the doors to St. Boniface opened that night, on that warm fall day in 1967 members of the media began jockeying for position near the aisle where they expected Groppi to enter.
Gebhard took a seat in the front row, away from the pack.
“I wanted to get a different angle, something a bit different,” he said.
As the crowd grew, Gebhard realized that if he stood up, he would be in everyone’s way, so he crouched down.
“I kept bending down and I ended up being about an arm’s length from Father Groppi and the little girl,” he said. “By bending, I was right at her eye level and I could see his hand take her hand.
“I knew the picture was there. I was just hoping it was going to be a nice shot — that one-of-akind shot. Sometimes you just feel a picture, and this was one of those times.
“When I took the shot, I believed I had something special.” Indeed he did. The photo ran in the Milwaukee Journal and was later picked up by Jet magazine, which named it their “Photo of the Week.” It has been reprinted repeatedly over the years and has become an iconic image of the era.
The photo captured a tender moment amid the tension of the times. Some say the fact it was a white hand and a young AfricanAmerican girl in some ways helped to unify the movement.
“It is definitely the shot that I will always be remembered for,” said Gebhard, who retired from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2004.
Mary Arms, 68, who was a member of the NAACP Youth Council in 1967, said the photo captured not only the innocence of Rogers, but the essence of Groppi.
“If you knew Father Groppi, this was a common sight. You always saw him with a kid on his shoulders, or being kind,” Arms said. “To this day, my sister still talks about how he used to pinch her nose with two fingers to tease her.”
Fred Reed, 79, one of the Commandos, a group that protected Groppi and the marchers by forming a barrier around them, said the photo symbolized something different.
“To me, that picture reminds me of a guardian angel,” he said. “It’s like he’s saying ‘Don’t worry, I got you. Everything is going to be alright.’ ”
When Gebhard took the shot, he didn’t know about Rogers’ planned speech that day. Her name was not even included in the caption when the photo ran in print.
At one point, years later, Rogers tracked Gebhard down. “You don’t know me,” she told him, “but I’m that little girl from the picture that you took with Father Groppi.”
The two have talked on the phone several times since.
“She is one of the nicest people you can ever talk to,” Gebhard said. “She asked me how I was doing, and she has called another time just to check up on me.”
Rogers first saw the photo when she was in her late teens, when the picture was included with a story looking back on the
open housing marches.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she said.
Her brother, Anthony, had the photo placed in a thick wooden frame and gave it to her as a birthday gift.
She keeps the photo in her bedroom.
Rogers, now 61, works for the U.S. House of Representatives as an executive assistant for the Joint Committee on Taxation. She joined the staff in 1988, after spending a year working for former U.S. Rep. John Rowland (R-Conn.) as a computer systems operator.
Rogers may have never moved to Washington if it wasn’t for the frequent encouragement of her mother, who urged her to see the world.
“She always told us that things are so much bigger than Milwaukee,” Rogers said. “I believed her.”
After graduating a year early from North Division High School in 1973, Rogers moved to
Madison and briefly worked for state Sen. Monroe Swan, a Milwaukee Democrat, before taking a record-keeping job with the state Department of Veterans Affairs in Madison.
She later joined the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve, serving from 1983 to 1990. A temporary active duty assignment put her in Washington, and she never looked back.
Rogers had not been back to Milwaukee for nearly 10 years until July, when she came to visit a sick brother, Sebastian, who died a short time later.
She was struck by the run-down properties in her old neighborhood, the lack of employment opportunities for people of color and the overall feeling of despair.
“I left nearly 30 years ago,” she said. “Honestly, I was shocked at how little of the inner city has changed.
“I don’t understand why that is, but people can’t continue to live like that.”
Milwaukee’s downtown is undergoing a dramatic transformation with the building of a new $550 million arena, the just-opened $400 million Northwestern Mutual office tower, the $65 million streetcar project and scores of other developments.
“I don’t see that same kind of investment in the inner city,” Rogers said.
Rogers said she doubts she would ever move back to Milwaukee.
Her sister, Virginia Rogers, 63, says she will never leave.
“I’ve been living in my duplex for 44 years and I’m not going to let violence and crime push me out,” she said. “Where will I go? This is my home and, while it could be better, this neighborhood helped me to raise my two sons.”
Her oldest son, Czarvitto Rogers, 47, lives in Dallas, after serving 22 years in the U.S. Army. He works as a social worker finding housing for veterans. Her youngest son, David Rogers, 35, is an inspector for ThermTech of Waukesha. He lives upstairs.
Virginia Rogers credits lifelong neighbors, her mother, and Hopkins Street School — both of her sons attended — for keeping the boys safe and out of trouble.
“We had more of an ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ mentality back then,” she said. “When I was at work, the neighborhood looked out for my boys, and they told them if they were doing wrong, and they alerted me.”
Rogers said her mother set a high bar for everyone by earning a degree in community organizing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at 53.
“She didn’t let raising 12 kids on her own stop her, and she wanted us to know that nothing should stop us from succeeding.”
Tazzaleen Rogers died on Nov. 3, 1998. She was 77.
Lucia Rogers recalls how her mother — who never had much money — would often send her $5 in the mail from time to time, just to be sure she would have money for lunch.
“No matter when I got it, it seemed like it was right on time,” she said. “I would either be short cash or forget my wallet at home or something like that, then I would get this letter.
“It is those little things that I miss the most.”
Lucia Rogers, who never married or had children, often spends time in Oronoco Bay Park — about 10 minutes from her home — reading a book or just watching the planes come in. When she retires, she hopes to travel more.
“I don’t get to do much traveling now,” she said.
Her dark gray Honda CRV is evidence of that. She bought the car brand new in 2003.
It only has 54,000 miles on it.
Tazzaleen Rogers was a devout Catholic, and the family attended St. Boniface. The children attended the old 12th Street School, where Rogers worked in community affairs. She was active in the open housing marches, even getting arrested during one march on Wisconsin Avenue.
The arrest did not deter her; she got her children involved as well.
“Mom was very political and she fought for what was right,” Lucia Rogers said.
As she sat in the park last week, talking with a reporter about a moment from 50 years ago while a photographer shot photos, a man approached. Steve Eisenberg, 73, saw the activity from his nearby condo and came to investigate.
Rogers showed him the picture and explained her role in it. As she finished telling her story, Eisenberg saluted her.
Eisenberg served 20 years in the U.S. Army as an artillery officer and later as an attorney for the Pentagon Federal Credit Union.
“That’s a beautiful story,” he said. “You are a hero.”
He said the photo reminded him of the famous Norman Rockwell painting of Ruby Bridges, who in 1960 became the first African-American child to integrate an all-white elementary school in the south. In the painting, Bridges carries books and a ruler as she walks between two pairs of men wearing badges, their faces unseen.
“That was a painting, not a photo,” he said. “This is history.”
When Rogers told him that she didn’t get a chance to give her speech that day, he asked her if she remembered it.
“I have a dream,” Rogers said, easily falling into the words, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ ”
“These are the stories that people need to hear,” Eisenberg said.
Rogers thanked Eisenberg for his service to our country. They shook hands and Eisenberg walked away.
“It was very chaotic. Reporters were asking Groppi questions. Photographers were snapping so many pictures that it was blinding. I had never been so scared in my life. And then he reached down and took my hand.”
LUCIA ROGERS