By Anita Weier
Northside News
Muriel Simms, a retired Madison teacher and principal who lives in the Cherokee Park area, has written a book titled “Settlin’: Stories of Madison’s Early African-American Families.”
“My original plan was to self-publish and give the books to my friends, but then I thought further,” Simms recalled. “My friend edited it and then it was submitted to the Wisconsin Historical Society Press,” which recently published the book.
The interviewing and writing process started in 2003 and took years as she collected oral histories of people whose families came to Madison in the early 1900s. “I’ve always been a student of history. My family had picture albums but no stories,” she explained.
Simms learned that Madison was a place that drew people who wanted an education and loved the beauty of the city. But life was not always easy for black people who settled here. It was sometimes difficult to find a place to live because of discrimination. Some black families provided places for new arrivals to stay until they found their own homes. It was also difficult to find jobs other than as maids, cooks and janitors. However, many did attend the University of Wisconsin.
Simms discovered that in 1914 a minister said there were complaints about blacks swimming in the same lakes as whites did. He suggested sarcastically that perhaps each race should have a lake and that Mendota was deeper and darker.
African-Americans started clubs that brought them together. Those included the Women’s Afternoon Club, the Dane County Colored Club, the Capital City Lodge, the Book Lovers Club and the NAACP.
Simms collected oral histories from 24 people, including Billy McDonald, George Harris Henderson, Paul Washington, Margaret Hall Studesville and Odell Taliaferro. She also interviewed her brother-in-law, James Lincoln Greene, who is now deceased. Green worked for Gisholt Machine Company in Madison and later was a fireman in the Milwaukee Fire Department, a computer specialist for the Milwaukee County Library, and eventually the 911 emergency coordinator for the State of Wisconsin.
However, his father, George Green, had a harder time. He graduated from the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and wanted to start a dry cleaning business. Not finding a job that fit his qualifications, he took a position at the Loraine Hotel shining shoes. He worked his way up to pressing and cleaning and then designing clothes for people who stayed at the hotel. He started or bought two dry cleaning businesses, but his son recalled that landlords would raise the rents until he could no longer continue and had to go back to work at the hotel.
Many of the interviews in this important historical volume describe obstacles to success, but also great successes.
The book is available locally at A Room of One’s Own, Barnes and Noble and Mystery to Me. It will eventually be sold through Amazon. The cost is $18.95.