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Racine, Wisconsin Claims to Fame
Civil Rights
Olympia Brown
Olympia Brown (1835-1926) dedicated her life to opening doors for women. Among only a few of women to have graduated from college, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Antioch in 1860 and three years later became the first woman graduate of a regularly established theological school at St. Lawrence University. She was ordained a Universalist minister, the first woman to achieve full ministerial standing recognized by a denomination. As a young minister, she took an active role in the women's suffrage movement and was one of the few original suffragists who lived to vote in the 1920 presidential election.
In working for justice, Olympia was fierce, feisty, and relentless. She had no time for the social niceties with which women were expected to concern themselves. Uncompromising on matters of principle, she had no patience for incompetence.
Discovering that a Universalist church in Racine, Wisconsin, was in need of a minister, she wrote to Mr. A. C. Fish, the clerk of the society, to offer her services. He wrote back that the parish was in an unfortunate condition, thanks to "a series of pastors easy-going, unpractical and some even spiritually unworthy, who had left the church adrift, in debt, hopeless and doubtful whether any pastor could again rouse them." This was precisely the kind of challenge that Olympia welcomed. It is also true that her options were limited.
The church Brown helped to vitalize in Racine has been re-named the Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church. In 1975 a group of parishioners mounted a successful campaign to have an elementary school in Racine named in her honor. Nothing would have made this proponent of education, especially for women, prouder.
To honor the centennial of her ordination in 1963, the Theological School at St. Lawrence University unveiled a plaque which reads in part:
- Preacher of Universalism
- Pioneer and Champion of Women's Citizenship Rights
- Forerunner of the New Era
- The flame of her spirit still burns today.
Joshua Glover
The Glover episode became a celebrated case elsewhere than in Wisconsin. Here it stirred public excitement to fever pitch and profoundly affected the course of future events in politics. Joshua Glover was a runaway slave, who sought asylum in Racine in the early part of 1854.Racine was a way station on the route of the underground railway, and the abolition sentiment had made considerable headway among its people. The Glover found employment in a local mill. Once learning of Golver's whereabouts, his Missouri master, B. S. Garland, procured a process in the United States District court and proceeded to Glover's shanty in company with two deputy United States marshals. Glover was in his little shanty engaged in playing cards when his master and the marshals surprised him. He jumped up, and while resisting arrest, one of the deputies knocked him down with a club and leveled a pistol at his head, while the others handcuffed him. In the words of Sherman M. Booth, whose subsequent connection with the case gave him national notoriety, the slave "was knocked down and handcuffed, dumped mangled and bleeding into a democrat wagon, and with a marshal's foot on his neck taken to Milwaukee and thrust into the county jail."
When a hundred determined men landed by boat from Racine, formed in line and marched toward the jail, the public excitement in Milwaukee grew intense. Great crowds congregated around the county jail and gathered on the grounds adjacent to the courthouse. There a great indignation meeting was held that ended in the storming of the jail . A mob led by John Ryecraft, battered down the jail doors, freed Glover and spirited him away to Canada.
Glover's rescue gave rise to many legal complications and a great deal of litigation. The sheriff of Racine county arrested the slave-master and those who had aided in the capture of the fugitive, on a charge of assault. Garland obtained his release on a writ of habeas corpus. In the meantime the underground railway had conveyed the slave to Canada. Booth was arrested and a grand jury found a bill of indictment against him and two others. He appealed to the Supreme court for a writ of habeas corpus. The learned judges read long opinions declaring the Fugitive Slave law of 1850 unconstitutional.
Sister Rose Thering
(August 9, 1920 – May 6, 2006) A Roman Catholic Dominican nun, activist against antisemitism, educator and a professor of Catholic-Jewish dialogue at Seton Hall University.
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