Fredrick McGhee was perhaps the most significant black leader in St. Paul in the 1890s and early 1900s.  He was deeply involved in the city’s political, religious, and cultural life.  His life highlights the difficulties black Americans faced in organizing for change, and the victories that they achieved through diligence and pragmatism.

 

McGhee was born a slave in 1861, on a Mississippi plantation.  When his family was freed in 1864, they made their way to Knoxville to live with family.  Not much is known about McGhee’s early life, but in 1879 he moved to Chicago, where he worked as a porter.  In Chicago he also attended law school and was admitted to the Illinois Bar in 1885.  In 1889, he came to St. Paul following the invitation by J.Q. Adams, then editor of The Appeal (20).

 

Two characteristics set Fredrick McGhee apart from the vast majority of black leaders, both in St. Paul and nationally: while most African Americans worshipped at Protestant churches and supported Republican politics, McGhee was a Catholic Democrat. He began his career in the 1890s a Protestant Republican, but in St. Paul his mind began change. He was drawn to Catholicism through Archbishop John Ireland, who had extremely progressive racial views for a white religious leader in the 1890s.  During an 1891 Emancipation Day celebration, Ireland delivered a speech in which he condemned slavery, racial discrimination, and proclaimed: “color is the merest accident….I would say let all people in America be equal socially and politically (21).”  McGhee even participated in the short-lived Negro Catholic Congress, but Catholicism did not remain a stronghold of racial activism later in the 1890s, as national politics became more resistant to racial issues (22).  But Mcghee remained a devoted Catholic for the rest of his life, and was deeply involved with St. Peter Claver Church (which still exists today and serves a mixed race congregation) (23).

 

McGhee was drawn to Democratic politics because of his increasing disillusionment with the Republican Party, both locally and nationally.  The 1892 campaigns made no mention of lynching or even the general plight of black America, and in St. Paul McGhee was disappointed to be replaced as presidential elector by a Swede, who cared little for the interests of the black community (24).  The Republican Party was also pro-imperial, and McGhee agreed with anti-imperialists who argued that American racism abroad would entrench it at home.  Blacks serving in the military had also been scorned by Republicans; Theodore Roosevelt himself dismissed a black Texas regiment without trial after a race riot and slandered black troops who fought in Cuba (25).  Although the Democrats hardly championed racial equality, McGhee was tired of feeling like Republicans had profited from the black vote only to turn their backs on them.

 

McGhee was also very involved with national racial politics.  He helped found The American Law Enforcement League of Minnesota (the beneficiary of "Cuba"), and participated in the National Afro-American Council. He also suggested to W.E.B. DuBois that the growing faction radical black leaders meet in 1904, which was to become the Niagara Movement, in which McGhee served as chief legal officer and designated successor as president to DuBois. Many historians trace the founding of the NAACP back to the Niagara Movement.

 

In 1912, McGhee died from complications of a leg injury.  Although he died relatively young, McGhee lived an incredibly rich life.  He had an extraordinary career as an attorney in St. Paul, known as one of the most brilliant lawyers in Minnesota.  He had loving relationships with his wife and daughter, and although he was extremely busy working and travelling, they always took time to vacation in Wisconsin together as a family (once W.E.B. DuBois accompanied them).  Although he achieved few tangible victories during his life’s work in racial politics, he carried the torch of activism that was carried on by leaders like DuBois, and would eventually be passed on to the likes of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.