A Militant Priest’s Nonviolence: Critical Reception of Father Groppi

As marches proliferated in the Jim Crow South during the 1960s, movements also gathered in the North, protesting segregated housing and unequal treatment of Black Americans. In Milwaukee, a priest named Father Groppi—after witnessing the maltreatment of Black Milwaukeeans throughout his youth and adulthood—decided to use his position in church leadership to aid the efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to achieve fair housing.