Protest over welfare benefits leads to an office takeover
In the 1960s, people who received welfare benefits from Milwaukee County began raising their voices about how meager those benefits had become.
On Sept. 4, 1968, they took it a step further.
Welfare payments — allowances for food, clothing, shelter and some incidentals — had been flat from 1959 until 1967, when allotments were increased by 8%. Unfortunately, the cost of living in that time had gone up 12%.
Making matters worse was a new federal law that limited the number of children for whom public assistance could be granted.
About 150 welfare recipients and their supporters took to the streets on May 12, 1968 — Mother's Day — to kick off what they called a "basic needs campaign," and ended up at the county welfare office, the former Schuster's store at 1220 W. Vliet St.
There, they issued a statement of their demands: "We are tired of feeding, clothing and housing our children on 60 cents a day (about $4.34 in 2018 dollars)," The Milwaukee Journal reported on May 13. "We are tired of malnutrition, poor diets, worn-out clothes and rundown houses. We demand an adequate income … "
County welfare director Joseph E. Baldwin greeted the protesters, and said he'd be happy to listen to their demands. And on Aug. 7, Baldwin urged the county welfare board approve a $4-a-day grant to cover basic needs and added expenses.
But when the Milwaukee Sentinel reported that Baldwin had told the board not to approve their request for a
another group of protesters returned Aug. 8 and briefly blocked entrances to the building. Plainclothes sheriff's deputies broke the blockades and made sure the doors stayed open.
Baldwin denied the Sentinel report and urged the protesters to meet with the county welfare board to make their case Aug. 21. But when they did, they were told by Baldwin and County Board Chairman William F. O'Donnell that it wasn't up to them, and that the state held the purse strings.
In other words, no.
The leader of the coalition pushing for an increase in welfare benefits didn't take it well.
"Cut Mr. Baldwin's salary in half, confiscate all the snowblowers in surburbia — we don't care what you do, but get the money," Dennis Nicholas said angrily near the end of the meeting. "We're hungry."
Less than two weeks later, the protesters returned to the county welfare office (now known as the Marcia P. Coggs Human Services Center) with a more vocal agenda.
On Sept. 4, about 25 adults and 20 children refused to leave the building, conducting loud demonstrations and demanding the bigger benefits checks they'd been agitating for for the past year.
The group — which, the Sentinel noted in a Sept. 5 story, was multiracial ("white, black and Spanish Americans") and mostly made up of mothers with their kids — occupied Baldwin's office twice during the day.
"They sang civil rights songs, chanted and shouted at Baldwin," the Sentinel reported. To illustrate their complaint that their children had to go to school "in raggedy clothes," the demonstrators brought a clothesline with tattered clothes attached.
"The group pranced around with the clothesline, shouting and pushing at deputies," the Sentinel wrote.
"We want back-to-school checks. We want basic needs, clothes," one of the protesters told the Sentinel.
Although Baldwin said he didn't ask deputies to make any arrests, 10 people were arrested — nine of the mothers, some carrying little children at the time, and Nicholas, a 28-year-old man and father of two who used a wheelchair since contracting polio as a teenager.
At Baldwin's urging, none of the demonstrators was charged, and, after a meeting with the nine women who were arrested (Nicholas hurt his head in the scuffle, and was in County General Hospital), the two sides reached an agreement.
In return for an end to the demonstrations, the welfare department would work to catch up on its backlog of special-needs requests; a grievance committee would be formed, including welfare recipients; and the county would push the state to step in to mediate disputes.
Baldwin told the Sentinel in a Sept. 6 story that the skirmishes at the county welfare building had generated a backlash "from the taxpaying public that they are working … and that they have to skimp and have to juggle finances."
But, Baldwin added, many of the welfare recipients involved in the protests were one-parent families receiving Aid to Families of Dependent Children.
"Most of the people who make these complaints I'm sure would not want to trade places with these mothers of five or six children," he said.
When the county began its budget deliberations later that month, however, County Executive John Doyne decried the county's soaring welfare tab, complaining that the deal to ease protesters' complaints had increased the proposed welfare budget by $1 million (about $7.24 million today) in just the past few weeks.
The battle over welfare benefits would return later that year — just in time for Christmas.