♪ ♪ - A traveling exhibit created in 2014 by Appleton's History Museum at the Castle revealed some of the hidden and often forgotten Black History of Appleton and other Fox Cities.

- Sabrina Robins: As we just find out what life looked like, we feel that the Black contributions deserves to be part of the regional history and the local histories.

- Nick Hoffman: The idea for this project first started when I started to learn a little bit more about some of the early Black community members that lived in Appleton and so.

- Historian Nick Hoffman's desire to learn more about Appleton's Black history led him to team up with Dr. Sabrina Robbins of Appleton's African Heritage, Incorporated.

- Sabrina Robins: We really felt compelled to contribute and help with this project to be able to participate in chronicling the experience of Blacks and African Americans in the region.

The project uncovered important records of Black settlement of the area from its earliest days.

It's not just Europeans alone who are settling in this region.

Since that immediate time, Black men, women, and children have lived along the Fox River.

People have hopes that this could be their long-standing home.

[cannon fire] - The Civil War became a turning point for Appleton's Black History.

In 1863, Pr esident Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared th at Black people held as slaves in the Confederate states were freed.

The document also declared the acceptance of Black soldiers in the Union Army, whose numbers would grow to almost 200,000.

Horace Artis served in the 31st United States Colored Troops Regiment during the Civil War and fought in several battles.

He also witnessed the surrender of General Robert E. Lee.

After the war, Horace and his wife Bercina moved to Appleton, joining a growing Black population moving North.

- Sabrina Robins: North, within the African American tradition, represents Canaan: freedom and a paradise.

Canaan represents the promised land, and so naturally, Wisconsin would represent almost the apex of what Canaan means.

[military drumroll] - As thousands of Wisconsin Civil War volunteers returned to the state, they were joined by a growing number of Black residents.

- Nick Hoffman: For northern states that supported the Union effort during the Civil War, people really had a wide variety of beliefs about what equality could look like after the war.

And so, that really sets up a really big conversation in Appleton and Wisconsin when there's larger numbers of African Americans moving and settling in the region.

- As more Black people settled in Appleton, they were often met with hostility.

Despite his status as a veteran and owning land in the city, Horace Artis was once arrested for vagrancy and spent a night in jail.

To keep Black people out of the city, real estate contracts began including racial covenants, which blocked Black buyers from becoming property owners.

- Nick Hoffman: Appleton, very quickly from 1910 to 1920, is going to go from having a growing Black population to zero.

[people shouting] - After World War I, a growing Ku Klux Klan movement further intimidated Black people in Wisconsin and kept communities like Appleton all white.

Appleton became known as a "sundown town," one of many in the area with unwritten rules requiring Black people and other minorities to leave town before sunset.

- Sabrina Robins: That sundown town mentality and mindset is really about controlling Black bodies.

If a majority of the Black population has been pretty much targeted to Milwaukee and a little bit of Madison.

And as you move north, the population numbers significantly stop.

That is not by accident or happenstance.

It is by design.

[gospel music] - In the 1950s, a growing civil rights movement began demanding equal rights and freedom under the law.

By 1961, Appleton native Jim Zwerg joined a growing civil rights movement traveling the south with the Freedom Riders in an attempt to desegregate bus station terminals.

The severe beating of Zwerg and se veral others by a violent mob made national news and brought the civil rights debate home to Appleton.

The debate continued when a famous segregationist came to town.

- Nick Hoffman: In March 1964, George Wallace was governor of Alabama, and one of the major national leaders in favor of segregation, was invited to speak in Appleton, Wisconsin.

In response to Wallace's invitation to come to Appleton, students at Lawrence University started to organize.

Students led a civil rights week.

They started to bring in major national civil rights leaders to help them organize and also to help challenge the city.

[blues music] - At the same time, Lawrence be gan recruiting Black students who would face widespread discrimination both on and off the campus.

- Joe Patterson: I matriculated to Lawrence's campus in the fall of 1965.

I'd heard about Lawrence as the Harvard of the Midwest, and that phrase stuck with me.

I was very attracted to that.

Well, it was a shock to me, first of all, to be in a region where the closest African-American community was 120 miles away.

The first day of class, the biochemistry professor told me straight up, I didn't belong there, and in fact, if you stay in my class, your A, your A equivalent, is a C minus.

and if you don't like it, yeah, then, you know, leave.

- To create community and support and push for needed changes, Black students came together to form the African American Association on campus, known as AAA.

- Joe Patterson: I became its first-- its inaugural president.

And the idea there was to, again, make the campus more viable for the, in effect, life and times of African American students.

Not a separatist movement, and we were talking about inclusion.

I tried to create an environment that basically would not allow other African American students to face, basically, the same plight that I did.

- The Students of the AAA presented a list of demands to Lawrence President Curtis Tarr that would create a more welcoming culture of fairness and inclusion.

Most importantly, they demanded the school increase the number of Black students.

- Joe Patterson: Through the Association of African Americans, we were able to get some clarity and get some of these things remedied, but nothing's perfect, and it's always a work in progress.

But I think while I was there, I think I made a difference.

- Robert Currie: The kind of exploration that a Liberal Arts College allows you to do.

I first arrived in Appleton in 1970.

It wasn't long after being here when we had all been subjected to some of the racism, in town mainly, of folks calling out to us when we walked downtown.

That bonded us in a way that we, very early in our tenure here, said we're going to work to change some things here.

By my sophomore year, I assume the presidency of AAA.

And I said we need to do something that will catch the attention of the entire campus by shutting down the business operation.

And so, in the dead of night on that particular day in March 1972, we occupied the administration building.

People just started showing up with the signs and the placards and the yelling and marching in front of the building and everything.

- The next day, President Smith met with members of the AAA.

He agreed to bring 35 new Black students to campus, hire more Black faculty, offer more diverse academic subjects and better academic support.

Black students at Lawrence challenged the local community's mi ndset and beliefs around race.

And in the 1970s, Appleton's sundown practice came to an end.

- Robert Currie: We had to focus on the similarities and not the differences that we may have.

That there are ways to bridge those differences.

I left here with that as one of the things on my personal mission and journey that I wanted to be able to practice, espouse, and articulate for the rest of my life.

And Lawrence forced me to do that.

- Joe Patterson: The word diversity really applies to Lawrence now.

- I present to you Lori A. Carter, our 17th president.

[cheers and applause] - Joe Patterson: I think, with President Carter, this is something that's unprecedented; to have an African American, who happens to be female, to be president.

So, it's a different place, as Appleton is a different place.

John Kennedy, he says, "We all live on this small planet called Earth.

"We all breathe the same air.

"We all wish the best for our progeny, "our children, and our grandchildren, "and we're all mortal.

We gotta find a way to get along, period."