"That's When We Were Marching for Jobs": Black Teachers and the Early Civil Rights Movement in Milwaukee

“That's when we were marching for jobs … They didn't even have the first black teacher then.” —Calvin Moody, Black politician, on Milwaukee civil rights activism in the 1940s The 1930s and 1940s pose a challenge to historians of the civil rights era, since these decades are still the “forgotten years.” Most accounts of the movement focus on the tumultuous events of the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s: the mass boycotts, sit-ins, and protest marches which mobilized thousands of African Americans. Thus civil rights historians commonly draw upon the 1930s and 1940s only to set the stage, merely a preface to more important events yet to come.