The first Africans Americans came to Wisconsin with French and British fur traders in the eighteenth century. While many were enslaved, others traded independently and owned their own land. This Wisconsin 101 collection features stories from the fur trade and mining eras before jumping to the twentieth century, when African American’s in music and bowling used their talents to shape American culture and claim an important place in our state’s history.
The collection is divided into three parts:
Slavery and the Mining Rush
The Blues in Port Washington
African American Bowling Leagues and Earlene Fuller
Slavery and the Mining Rush
The Blues in Port Washington
Recruiting Talent
With a roster that included Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Ethel Waters, Paramount Record became perhaps the most important blues recording company of the 1920s. Their success was dependent on their ability to recruit …
The Record Production Process
Paramount Record’s parent company, the United Phonographic Corporation, decided to begin recording and pressing records to include with their phonograph cabinets in the early 1920s. Paramount initially recorded in studios throughout the United States. They …
Paramount Records
The Wisconsin Chair Company’s (WCC) decision to enter the record label industry was an economic one. With the United Phonographic Corporation (UPC) picking up steam, management at the WCC began pressing records. The UPC’s first …
Listen to a Sample of Paramount Blues
Learn more:
Paramount Records feature by Wisconsin Public Radio’s Wisconsin Life
The history of Paramount Records in Wisconsin
African American Bowling Leagues and Earlene Fuller
Earlene Fuller and the African American Bowling Scene in Milwaukee
Earlene Fuller designed and made bowling outfits for numerous black and white teams in Milwaukee and elsewhere from 1970 through the mid-1990s. She was a member in two African American bowling organizations — the National Bowling Association and the Milwaukee Bowlers Guild, Inc. — and in the 1990s began incorporating kente cloth and other African-inspired fabric patterns into the shirts she made for her own teams.
Milwaukee: The Bowling Capital of America
Bowling evolved in the mid-nineteenth century United States from imported European games like the German kegling. Beginning with clubs in eastern U.S cities, bowling grew in popularity and spread to the Midwest—particularly cities like Milwaukee—as German-Americans …
OBJECT HISTORY: Earlene Fuller’s Bowling Shirt
This shirt, which features an African kente cloth print, was designed, made and worn in the mid-1990s by Milwaukee's Earlene Fuller, an African American bowler and seamstress.