They wanted Christmas cheer. They were rejected, arrested.
They were asking for $25 and a little holiday cheer. They got arrested instead.
The protests in Milwaukee over inadequate welfare payments had begun earlier in the fall of 1968. After a nearly a decade without any increases, payments were boosted, but far short of what protesters were asking for.
On Thanksgiving, about 60 people — including 20 mothers receiving welfare, some bringing their children along — picketed the Wauwatosa home of County Supervisor Rudolph P. Pohl. Pohl was chairman of the County Board’s finance committee, and a vocal critic of welfare.
Pohl wasn’t home. So the protesters left on his porch two empty bushel baskets with signs reading “Thanks for Nothing.”
“We’ve got nothing to be thankful for this Thanksgiving,” Barbara Davis, one of the protesters and president of Northside Welfare Recipients, told The Milwaukee Journal in a Nov. 29, 1968, story.
As the women and children began leaving, 11 Wauwatosa police officers arrived “wearing riot helmets and carrying riot sticks” to enforce the city’s ban on picketing. No one was arrested.
After the protest, Pohl doubled down, calling for jobs to replace welfare payments.
The protesters doubled down, too. On Dec. 2, more than 150 people “stormed” the county welfare office, The Journal reported, to give County Welfare Director Joseph E. Baldwin their latest demand: a $25-per-familymember “Christmas grant” (the equivalent of nearly $182 in 2018 dollars).
“Our little kids … deserve a Christmas, too,” one mother told The Journal.
Baldwin wasn’t in either. The protesters left 124 copies of their demand with his administrative assistant.
Three days later, on Dec. 5, 1968, about 100 people returned to the welfare office, the former Schuster’s department store at 1220 W. Vliet St., to press their demand for the Christmas grant.
Baldwin told the protesters that, because of the late date, they should get jobs to earn extra money, since it wouldn’t be counted against their welfare checks.
“I’d like to ask where where we could get a job to buy our children something between now and Christmas?” Mary Loggins, one of the protest’s leaders, asked Baldwin, according to a story on the Sentinel’s front page the next day. “Would you be responsible for getting these people jobs?”
“I think that’s up to you people,” Baldwin replied, rejecting their demand. “Christmas is not a state of emergency.”
About three quarters of the protesters left, but 25 people hunkered down, most of them mothers on welfare and their children. They turned the visit into a sit-in, singing Christmas carols and refusing to budge.
Sheriff’s deputies told the protesters they would have to move. According to The Journal’s story Dec. 5, Loggins grabbed a decorated Christmas tree in the office and tried to make off with it. Lawrence Friend, president of the NAACP Youth Council, went to help her.
When officers tried to stop them, the deputies said Friend “shoved the tree at them,” The Journal reported.
Friend was arrested, as were 13 other protesters, and charged with disorderly conduct. (In June 1969, Friend was found guilty and fined $25, the same amount the protesters had been asking for.)
On Dec. 6, the night after the confrontation at the welfare office, protesters tried a more seasonal approach.
About 50 children and 20 adults — one of them an African-American man dressed as Santa Claus — marched from the St. Francis Social Center at 1916 N. Fourth St. to the Gimbels-Schusters department store three blocks away, on what is now King Drive. At the store, the African-American Santa “took a seat beside a white Santa Claus and began listening to the Christmas wishes of children,” The Journal reported on Dec. 7, 1968.
According to The Journal, some of the kids asked the white Santa: “Why
can’t we have a Christmas?”
“The demonstrators spent less than an hour in the department store Friday night, then returned to the St. Francis Center with a supply of balloons given them by the white Santa Claus,” The Journal reported.
That was all the protesters got. The county never issued the Christmas grant.