McGhee, Fredrick (1861–1912)

Fredrick Lamar McGhee (1861–1912) was Minnesota’s first African American lawyer, its most consequential early civil rights leader, the only Minnesota public figure born in slavery, a renowned orator, and a criminal defense lawyer famous for his courtroom victories. His civil rights work had national reverberations. His break with Booker T. Washington and subsequent alliance with W. E. B. DuBois led to the foundation of the Niagara Movement, and then the NAACP.

McGhee was born on the plantation of John A. Walker, near Aberdeen, Mississippi, the youngest of three sons of Abraham and Sarah McGhee. The family escaped slavery with Union troops in 1864 and made their way to Knoxville, Tennessee, where McGhee’s father had earlier been enslaved by the wealthy and prominent white McGhees.

In Knoxville young Fredrick got some rudimentary schooling at Freedmen’s schools and the secondary school known as Knoxville College. Both of his parents died young, so as a teenager Fredrick followed his brothers, Matthew and Barclay, to Chicago.

In Chicago McGhee transformed himself from a minimally educated Southern migrant to a polished member of the city’s Black society and, most important, a lawyer in the offices of Chicago’s most distinguished Black lawyer, Edward H. Morris. There he also met and married the Kentucky-born Mattie Crane.

In 1889, probably at the instance of St. Paul newspaper publisher John Q. Adams, McGhee moved to St. Paul. When admitted to the bar in June he became Minnesota’s first African American lawyer. He made headlines quickly with acquittals of three white defendants charged with luring a girl into prostitution, and securing presidential clemency for Lewis Carter, a Black soldier sentenced to thirty ears for rape.

When McGhee arrived in Minnesota he was Protestant and Republican. Within four years he was a Democrat and a Catholic. He and Archbishop John Ireland were among the founders of the Black St. Paul parish, St. Peter Claver. McGhee called the Roman Catholic Church “shelter in the mighty storm” because of its worldwide welcome of people of all races. He left the Republican Party after he was removed as an 1892 presidential elector in favor of a Swede. At around the same time, he was denied a promised appointment as assistant St. Paul city attorney.

McGhee, like most Americans, at first celebrated the American victory in the Spanish-American War, in 1898, but later turned bitterly against American imperialism. “The fruit of expansion,” he wrote, “may look tempting to the eye, but it is rotten in the middle, and the Negro who eats of it eats it to his own destruction.”

This was the Jim Crow era, and McGhee participated in every national civil rights organization that strove to find a way to fight race discrimination. The most prominent of these at the turn of the century was the National Afro-American Council, which he served as an officer. He arranged for its 1902 convention to be held in St. Paul, and for Booker T. Washington, the preeminent Black leader of the time, to attend. Then he watched in horror as Washington took control of the organization. McGhee publicly broke with Washington in 1903, and was soon joined by W. E. B. DuBois. With other dissenters they formed, in 1905, the Niagara Movement, which advocated immediate and full equality of Black Americans. In 1909 Niagara morphed into the NAACP, led by DuBois.

McGhee, unlike most other civil rights leaders of the time, made his living in the nearly-all-white world of the Minnesota courts, where he tried many cases and had great success with Minnesota juries. His greatest victory was in the 1905 trial of two transients charged with killing a night watchman. Despite the eyewitness testimony of a St. Paul police officer, who had seen the crime, McGhee’s clients were acquitted; it was front-page news.

In his personal life McGhee was a family man (he and his wife had one adopted daughter), a churchgoer, a homeowner (in Frogtown, near the corner of University and Dale), and the owner of a cabin on the Apple River in Wisconsin. It was there in the summer of 1912 that he suffered an accident that led to a blood clot, and then an embolism that killed him a few weeks short of his fifty-first birthday. He died at the peak of his powers.