Fredrick L. McGhee was a Black civil rights activist and one of America’s first African American lawyers.
McGhee was born on October 28, 1861, in Aberdeen, Mississippi, to Abraham McGhee and Sarah Walker. His father, originally from Blount County, Tennessee, taught himself to read and write despite lacking formal education, and later became a Baptist preacher. He passed these skills on to his three children—Mathew, Barclay, and Fredrick. After the Civil War, the McGhee family relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee, where McGhee attended a United Presbyterian Church freedmen’s school and graduated in 1877.
McGhee moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1879, where he worked as a waiter while studying for a law degree. Upon completing his law degree in 1885, McGhee quickly entered the upper echelons of Black Chicago society. He became the first African American lawyer admitted to the bar in Tennessee and Illinois.
In 1889, McGhee relocated to St. Paul, Minnesota. Distinguished by his hawk-like gaze and shock of silver hair, his forceful oratory and fierce advocacy, McGhee rose to fame as Minnesota’s first Black criminal lawyer and the owner by 1899 of forty acres of land in St. Cloud. McGhee also converted from the Baptist faith to Catholicism, attracted by St. Paul Archbishop John Ireland’s progressive policies toward race. After his conversion, he became one of the founders of St. Peter Claver Church, still an important gathering place for St. Paul’s African Americans.
While working as a criminal defense lawyer in St. Paul, McGhee became increasingly involved in civil rights activism. He participated in several of the Black Catholic Congresses of the early 1890s, where he pushed for a more aggressive civil rights agenda to combat disenfranchisement, lynching, and other injustices, and to encourage separate Black businesses. He won clemency for a client, Lewis Carter, a Black soldier falsely accused of a crime, from President Benjamin Harrison. In 1896, McGhee gave a St. Paul campaign speech for Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, pointing out various problems in the Republicans’ treatment of African Americans. In 1898, McGhee formed a civil rights organization called the American Law Enforcement League, whose main goal was to speak out against lynching. That same year, McGhee also participated in the National Afro-American Council (NAAC) as a representative from Minnesota.
By the early 1900s, McGhee became interested in the national discussion concerning racial discrimination and social equality. McGhee met W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett at an August 1900 NAAC meeting where he heard them speak. Though initially allied with Booker T. Washington, McGhee later sided with DuBois when the two giants in the struggle for racial equality clashed on tactics and philosophy. In 1905, McGhee, with Du Bois and others, formed one of the first national civil rights organizations, the Niagara Movement, which was an attempt by more radical Blacks to directly and honestly oppose the conservative actions and views of Washington. The Niagara Movement was the catalyst for the 1909 founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In September 1905, Du Bois went so far as to give McGhee full credit for creating the more radical entity, stating, “The honor of founding the organization belongs to F. L. McGhee, who first suggested it”. In one of his last major activities, McGhee helped establish an NAACP branch in St. Paul in 1911.
McGhee died on September 9, 1912, at age 50, victim of a pulmonary embolism caused by a blood clot that migrated to his lung from a bruised or sprained right leg.
“McGhee was not simply a lawyer,” wrote W.E.B. DuBois in a 1912 obituary for his friend. “He was a staunch advocate of democracy, and because he knew by bitter experience how his own dark face had served as excuse for discouraging him and discriminating unfairly against him, he became especially an advocate of the rights of colored men”.
Source:
http://www.nathanielturner.com/frederickmcghee.htm
http://www.blackpast.org/aah/mcghee-fredrick-l-1861-1912
http://www.mnopedia.org/person/mcghee-fredrick-1861-1912
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrick_McGhee
