2010 Reading #15: Fredrick L. McGhee
Books 1-10.
11. The Dream Years by Lisa Goldstein.
12. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow.
13. The Bone Forest by Robert Holdstock.
14. Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld by Lucy Moore.
15. Fredrick L. McGhee: A Life on the Color Line, 1861-1912 by Paul D. Nelson. Before reading Roy Wilkins' autobiography last year I don't recall having heard of Fred McGhee, who was Minnesota's first African-American attorney and an active figure in local and national religious, political, and civil rights organizations. Nelson (a local attorney and an amateur biographer, who stumbled on his subject through mentions in a biography of W.E.B. DuBois) chronicles McGhee's involvement with no less than half a dozen civil rights organizations, most of them short-lived and marked by struggles between the conciliatory impulses of Booker T. Washington and his allies on the one side, and advocates of more aggressive action and rhetoric on the other; McGhee, for most of his life, fell into the latter camp. He was among those who joined DuBois in founding the Niagara Movement and drafting its Declaration of Principles, which was remarkable for its bold (for the time) language and its implicit break with Tuskegee. McGhee's legal work is also chronicled in this biography, and some of it makes for great courtroom drama. Sadly McGhee died before seeing the civil rights struggle really begin to bear fruit, but before his death he was among those who chartered a St. Paul branch of the brand-new NAACP. Nelson does a good job (given the challenge of finding resources for such an unexplored subject) of painting a picture of McGhee: passionate, contrary, competitive, generous, and brilliant.
11. The Dream Years by Lisa Goldstein.
12. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow.
13. The Bone Forest by Robert Holdstock.
14. Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld by Lucy Moore.
15. Fredrick L. McGhee: A Life on the Color Line, 1861-1912 by Paul D. Nelson. Before reading Roy Wilkins' autobiography last year I don't recall having heard of Fred McGhee, who was Minnesota's first African-American attorney and an active figure in local and national religious, political, and civil rights organizations. Nelson (a local attorney and an amateur biographer, who stumbled on his subject through mentions in a biography of W.E.B. DuBois) chronicles McGhee's involvement with no less than half a dozen civil rights organizations, most of them short-lived and marked by struggles between the conciliatory impulses of Booker T. Washington and his allies on the one side, and advocates of more aggressive action and rhetoric on the other; McGhee, for most of his life, fell into the latter camp. He was among those who joined DuBois in founding the Niagara Movement and drafting its Declaration of Principles, which was remarkable for its bold (for the time) language and its implicit break with Tuskegee. McGhee's legal work is also chronicled in this biography, and some of it makes for great courtroom drama. Sadly McGhee died before seeing the civil rights struggle really begin to bear fruit, but before his death he was among those who chartered a St. Paul branch of the brand-new NAACP. Nelson does a good job (given the challenge of finding resources for such an unexplored subject) of painting a picture of McGhee: passionate, contrary, competitive, generous, and brilliant.