Fifty years ago today, October 3, 1959, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir paid a visit to her old hometown of Milwaukee, her first since becoming Israel’s leader. According to the next day’s issue of the Milwaukee Journal, she was welcomed with open arms and not without honor in her hometown. She is shown above wearing a paper corsage given to her by students at the Fourth Street School where she spoke.  She had attended the school from 1906 to 1912, and the school is now named in her memory.

Mrs. Meir explained that she had come to Milwaukee as a child, fleeing czarist Russia. It was the privileges and equality she enjoyed in America that caused her to believe that her people, like no other peoples, needed a place of their own. She left for Palestine in 1920 to lay the groundwork for Israel.

“I have come back,” she said, “to tell Milwaukee I represent a free and sovereign people who are still struggling for peace–and having absolute faith that, too, will come.”

Security was tight for the visit, with deputies armed with rifles with telescopic sights on the roofs of buildings as her ElAl jet set down in Milwaukee. More police armed with rifles were on the roofs of downtown buildings, and a police boat cruised the Milwaukee river. Seas of admiring fans waved flags, while pro-Arab protesters carried signs reading, “no shalom with napalm.”