Victory for Mrs. Vel

Few northern cities have more sharply segregated housing conditions than Milwaukee, where de facto barriers for years have walled Negroes into the inner core. And last summer and fall, few cities seemed less likely to do anything about the problem.

For 200 days last year, black demonstrators led by the Rev. James Groppi, 37, a Milwaukee-born Italian-American, paraded from the ghetto into the Polish-occupied South Side and the city's other ethnic sections to demand a city open-housing ordinance. Negroes constitute only 10% of the city's 781,600 population, and for a time the marches threatened to polarize white opinion against the Groppians, who were greeted on the South Side with abuse and flying bottles.

Gradually, however, Negro militancy paid off. White merchants, disturbed by a black Christmas-shopping boycott, helped to pressure the Common Council into enacting an open-occupancy statute that matched a state law and covered some 33% of the city's housing units. When Congress last month passed the federal open-housing bill in the aftermath of the riot-commission report and Martin Luther King's assassination, Mayor Henry Maier asked the council for an ordinance to keep pace with the federal law.

Even that did not seem enough to

Mrs. Vel Phillips, 44, a slight Negro alderman who has labored for six years for council action to break down segregated housing. Last week, with the aid of seven men newly elected to the 19-member council, Mrs. Phillips pushed through a law even stiffer than the new federal statute. While the federal law will cover some 80% of the nation's housing by 1970, the Milwaukee measure, effective immediately, grants far fewer exceptions. The question now is whether the city, in the face of inevitable white backlash, can effectively enforce the ordinance.

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