City Park To Be Named For La Causa Founder

The future Clementina Castro Park in 2020. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

A small, city-owned park will be named for a civil rights leader.

Clementina Castro was a prominent advocate for improved conditions for welfare recipients and Hispanic residents during the 1960s and 1970s. Her work includes founding a day care, La Causa, that has grown in the ensuing decades to include a charter school, early education and care center, social services arm and crisis nursery and respite center. She was also a key figure in a 1969 march to Madison to advocate for the reversal of welfare benefit cuts.

“Chicano Rights and Chicano activism is usually reserved for places like Los Angeles and Texas and things like that, but people don’t know that Milwaukee was a hub for it as well and at the center of it was Clementina Castro as well as Ernesto Chacon and Jesus Salas. And while we celebrate the men, we sometimes forget the women,” said County Supervisor Juan Miguel Martinez to the Public Works Committee Wednesday morning.

The decades-old playground at 937 S. 4th St. would now bear her name, just blocks away from where she lived and launched her daycare.

Castro passed away in 2016 at the age of 83. But her family and the organization she founded continues to call Milwaukee, and the Walker’s Point neighborhood, home.

Her son Tomas Castro recalled that his mom involved him and his four siblings in her advocacy. “When I was 13 years old, I walked to Madison together with Father James Groppi. My mom took us for a week-long march,” said Castro.

“Viva La Raza,” Clementine is credited with chanting along the march. Long live the people.

Martinez said he first learned of Castro when he met Tomas’ son, Clementina’s grandson, Ricky in high school. Tomas credited Martinez with pushing to make sure Milwaukee’s female leaders are recognized.

The park, described currently as the “4th and Mineral Play Area,” was created in 1971 according to city records. The current playground was installed in 2010. A 2016 “Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan” said the equipment would be due to be replaced in 2025, though no plans have publicly advanced to do so. The city has approximately 50 parks it is responsible for through its Milwaukee Plays program.

Renaming the park is strongly supported by area alderman Council President José G. Pérez.

To applause, the Public Works Committee recommended adoption of the renaming. The full council will consider the proposal at its next meeting.

The council last renamed one of its small parks, commonly called a “tot lot,” for Marlene Johnson-Odom in 2020. Johnson-Odom, an alderwoman from 1980 to 2004, was the longest serving African American in council history and longest-serving woman in council history. She passed away in 2017.

Last summer, the city opened Vel R. Phillips Plaza. The downtown gathering space honors the civil rights trailblazer.

Milwaukee County Parks has renamed a handful of its parks in recent years. Wahl Park was renamed Harriet Tubman Park in 2021, though Christian Wahl continues to be recognized in the name of the surrounding neighborhood, with a bust at his beloved Lake Park and with the nearby Wahl Avenue. Later in 2021, Lindbergh Park was renamed Lucille Berrien Park, swapping a famed but racist aviation pioneer for a Black Milwaukee activist. In 2024, Johnsons Park was renamed Clarence and Cleopatra Johnson Park, clarifying who the park was named after.

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