Ezekiel Gillespie: Milwaukee’s Champion of African-American Voting Rights

Wisconsin was among the first states to grant its African-American residents the right to vote, thanks to the protest vote of a former slave who became a well-respected Milwaukee resident.

Just after the Civil War, Ezekiel Gillespie, born into slavery in the South in 1818 as the son of a slave owner, successfully sued the state to affirm the right of Wisconsin’s black citizens to vote. Gillespie had been turned away from the polls when he attempted to register to vote in Milwaukee’s Seventh Ward in 1865. But Gillespie argued that it was his right to do so. After all, Wisconsin voters had approved a referendum in 1849, just a year after becoming a state, to allow black men in Wisconsin to vote.

That referendum wasn’t seen as being valid, however, so black suffrage was put on hold until Gillespie challenged it with the support of local abolitionists Sherman Booth and Byron Paine.

The state Supreme Court agreed with Gillespie’s challenge in 1866, and African-American men over the age of 21 were allowed to cast ballots, a few years before that right was conferred nationwide. Black women had to wait until 1920 to be able to vote legally.

But that wasn’t Gillespie’s only lasting contribution to the community. A few years after he cast his historic ballot, he helped to found the first African-American church in the state, St. Mark African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, in downtown Milwaukee.

“Ezekiel’s achievements affect even the young people in the congregation today,” said Patricia Chisom, public relations director of St. Mark AME Church. “They show that if you take action, things can happen.”

A Forward-Thinker

Ezekiel Gillespie was born into slavery in 1818, and purchased his freedom from his father, a slave owner, for “several hundred dollars,” Chisom learned during her extensive research on Gillespie. Once freed, Gillespie peddled small goods in Indiana, then came to Milwaukee in 1854 and sold groceries on the corner of Mason and Main. He later became a messenger for the Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway Co. and prospered, becoming a well-respected member of Milwaukee’s African-American community. He was married twice and had children.

Chisom found that Gillespie had a social conscience in addition to business acumen. He was a leader of the Underground Railroad in Milwaukee and got involved in the Joshua Glover controversy, in which the runaway slave sought asylum in Racine in 1854.

Gillespie’s involvement in the Underground Railroad “was a very dangerous thing to do,” Chisom said. “At that time not everyone was anti-slavery.”

When Gillespie and his friends realized that no black churches existed in the state of Wisconsin, they petitioned Bishop Richard Allen to start an African Methodist Church in Milwaukee. After getting approval, in 1869 they founded the church on Fourth Street and Kilbourn Avenue, now the site of the Hyatt Regency Hotel. (A marker on the site notes the church’s history. The church is currently located at 1616 W. Atkinson Ave.) Chisom said the congregation is “forward thinking.”

“St. Mark’s has always been a kind of politically active church,” Chisom said. “A lot of the black leaders of the city were also members of the church and they were always active in what was going on in the community.”

Letting the People Decide

Gillespie’s involvement in the abolition movement in Milwaukee seems to have influenced his desire to vote in an election almost 20 years after Wisconsin became a state.

According to attorney and adjunct professor of law at Marquette University, Joseph A. Ranney, African-American suffrage was the subject of much debate during the Wisconsin constitutional conventions prior to statehood in 1848. The state was quite welcoming to European immigrants, and even allowed white, noncitizens to vote in elections, as long as they had lived in Wisconsin for one year and declared their intention to become U.S. citizens.

But African-American voters were another matter. At the time, only a handful of states in New England allowed blacks to vote.

“In the Wisconsin constitutional conventions, there was a debate between some of the delegates who were abolitionists, and some of them actually did get it that rights for black Americans should extend to suffrage,” Ranney said. “But there were also a lot of delegates, particularly from the western part of the state, where there were more people who had originally come from the South. One delegate said that if you put the black suffrage provision in the state Constitution, it will not get more than a handful of votes west of the Rock River.”

As a compromise, delegates opted to let the people decide.

In the November 1849 general election, a referendum was held on extending the right of suffrage to “persons of African descent.” And, in fact, the question was approved by a vote of 5,265 to 4,075.

But, Ranney explains, it was thought at the time that a majority of all voters in the election—not just the majority of voters who weighed in on the referendum question—was required for approval. The question was put back on the ballot in 1857 and 1865, but failed to win a majority both times.

Then Gillespie attempted to register to vote, was turned away by the elections inspectors, and sued. A year later, the state Supreme Court agreed with him. And in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted, granting black men nationwide the right to vote.

“At the time [of Gillespie’s suit] Wisconsin was one of the earliest states to enact black suffrage,” Ranney said.

Gillespie died in 1892 in Chicago, but he was so well regarded in Milwaukee that his body was brought back to this city. Chisom said that newspaper accounts from that time indicate that there were many whites at his funeral, which was unusual. He’s buried in Forest Home Cemetery along with other prominent Milwaukeeans.