James Groppi
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Father James Edmund Groppi (November 16, 1930 – November 4, 1985) was a Roman Catholic priest and noted civil rights activist.[1]
James Groppi was born in the Bay View neighborhood on the south side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Italian immigrant parents. Giocando and Giorgina Groppi had twelve children, of which James was the eleventh. In this working class community, Giocando joined others from Italy in Milwaukee's grocery business, opening "Groppi's" store in Bay View, where James and his siblings worked. Typical of boys in heavily Catholic south side Milwaukee, James attended a parochial grade school (Immaculate Conception), but went on to the public high school in Bay View, where he was captain of the basketball team in his senior year. A year after graduation, James Groppi enrolled at Mount Calvary Seminary (1950-1952) in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. According to Frank Aukofer, "It was during his seminary years that Father Groppi began developing an empathy with the black poor. He worked summers at a youth center in Milwaukee's inner core. It was there that he saw the social suffering and ostracism that Negroes lived with every day" (p.90). Groppi was ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood in June of 1959, after studying at St. Francis Seminary (1952-1959).
At first assigned to St. Veronica's Church in Milwaukee, in 1963 Groppi was transferred to St. Boniface, the latter parish having a predominantly African-American congregation. It was then that Groppi became interested in - and active in - the cause of civil rights for black Americans, participating in the 1963 March on Washington and also the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 on behalf of the Voting Rights Act.
Later in 1965, he returned to Milwaukee, where he began organizing protests against the segregation of Milwaukee public schools. Later he lead fair housing marches across the 16th Street Viaduct (since renamed in his honor) spanning the Menomonee River Valley. The 1/2 mile wide valley was considered to be a symbolic divide for the city.[2][3]
In 1967, Groppi discovered that several judges in the Milwaukee area belonged to the Fraternal Order of Eagles, which at the time did not admit non-whites to its membership. Groppi questioned how a judge who was a member of an organization that did not welcome African-Americans as members could rule impartially in cases involving African-Americans, and reacted by organizing pickets at the homes of some of the judges, most notably Circuit Court Judge Robert Cannon, despite the fact that Cannon was a liberal and had voiced opposition to the Eagles' membership policies. These demonstrations continued, on and off, until 1969. Also during this period, Groppi worked for passage of legislation which would outlaw discrimination in the buying and renting of homes (in 1968 such a law was passed on the federal level, known as the Fair Housing Act)
Groppi's ecclesiastical superiors did not always approve of his activities, and in 1970 transferred him to St. Michael's Church. He then gradually became disenchanted with the priesthood, leaving it in 1976 to get married, eventually having a child as well. In 1979 he became a bus driver for the Milwaukee Transit System - a job he had previously held in the 1950s to help put himself through the seminary—and remained in that capacity until his death in 1985. He is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Milwaukee. His papers are at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
(however it should be noted that in a National Geographic interview of Groppi by Louise Levathes he is described as having been, "stripped of his parish.") Vol. 158 NO. 2 August 1980 pg. 200
[edit] Sources
- Aukofer, Frank A. City With a Chance. Bruce Publishing Co., Milwaukee. 1968
- Jones, Patrick. "'Not a Color But An Attitutde': Fr. James Groppi and Black Power Politics in Milwaukee," in Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements, edited by Jeanne Theoharris and Komozi Woodard (New York: NYU Press, 2005).
