Lloyd Barbee ’56 was just a few years out of law school and the president of the local NAACP branch when he and two friends hatched a plan to use hidden cameras to document and expose housing discrimination in Madison.
It would be more than sixty years before an audience would see the footage.
Their film, banned and locked away in the archives by university officials who initially approved its production, captured thirteen incidents of clear-cut discrimination as they played out in real time. In many cases, landlords told prospective Black renters that housing wasn’t available and then later agreed to rent to white tenants. Some were more direct. “I’m sorry but I can’t let you have it — not in this neighborhood. … I don’t want to have trouble with my neighbors,” one landlord said.
The film — finally shown last April during an online event sponsored by PBS Wisconsin, the UW–Madison Public History Project, and the UW Archives — is a powerful piece of history that could have been made in any Midwestern city, but a few familiar buildings from some Madison neighborhoods that remain primarily white today stand out and reinforce the longstanding effects of housing discrimination. For today’s audiences, it was a somewhat hidden chapter in the life of Barbee — an attorney, activist, and legislator who frequently held a mirror up to society to reflect injustices and push for change.