Vel Phillips, Wisconsin’s first Black secretary of state, will be honored with a statue on state Capitol grounds, a state board decided Monday. The Capitol and Executive Residence Board voted unanimously to erect the statue of Phillips, the Wisconsin State Journal reports. Phillips, who died in 2018, broke a number of gender and race barriers throughout her career: She was the first Black woman to graduate from the UW-Madison School of Law and the first woman, as well as Black person, to serve on the Milwaukee City Council and to become a Wisconsin judge.
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