Forgotten Legacy: William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality by Benjamin R. Justesen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Forgotten Legacy: William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality by Benjamin R. Justesen Robert J. Norrell (bio) Forgotten Legacy: William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality. By Benjamin R. Justesen. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 368. $55.00 cloth; $17.75 ebook) This work is a hagiography of a president, William McKinley, and a Black congressman, George White, who the author pairs on the basis of a common commitment to Black political rights. Justesen insists that the historical record has given each man short shrift, and he sets out to correct that wrong. In so doing he exaggerates the accomplishments of each, especially McKinley, and he fails to develop the full picture of White's career. In a 2001 biography of White, Justesen rationalized a five-hundred-page book on the insistence that White was one of the most important African American political leaders during the last decade of the nineteenth century but one of the least remembered. The latter claim is true no doubt, the former is certainly not. From modest beginnings in North Carolina, in 1896 he became the only remaining Black member of the U.S. House of [End Page 438] Representatives. He served until 1901, the last African American in Congress during the post-Reconstruction period. His departure left a void that would go unfilled for nearly thirty years. He was outspoken in his challenge to racial injustice, but, as Justesen shows, he was no extremist as white Democrats charged. After Congress, he remained active in politics and civil rights and enjoyed a career as a banker. Sometimes historians get more than one chance at the biography of a great historical figure, but it rarely happens in the case of an obscure provincial congressman. Forgotten Legacy is really a re-do of White, notwithstanding Justesen's occasional focus on McKinley's presidency, lauding his dedication to the advancement of African Americans, including their appointment to the federal bureaucracy. McKinley also acted to stiffen federal penalties for lynch mobs. Indeed, Justesen claims that McKinley was the first "civil rights president," especially when compared to his five successors in office. He maintains that historians have long minimized or overlooked McKinley's cooperative relationships with prominent African American leaders like White. In fact, civil rights leaders in McKinley's own day believed he and his political guru Mark Hanna had sold out Black Republican voters to white southern Republicans who were determined to have a "lily-white" party. The author's bibliography is thin and out of date. He has ignored David Lewis's two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois. Justesen casts Booker Washington as a malign influence on politics and civil rights, relying on Louis Harlan's malevolent half-century-old interpretations and ignoring the revisionist works that have since significantly rehabilitated Booker. The writing is sometimes clumsy, e.g. a "fictional novel" (p. 1). Another instance of this is the following sentence: "Jeter Pritchard, the only Republican southerner in the Senate and a powerful ally, probably provided the White House with status reports, but strained relationships between state and national party leaders were plagued by infighting, and the state party's [End Page 439] gradual split into quarrelsome factions, further clouded by collapse of Populist fusion" (p. 103). Readers deserve better. Robert J. Norrell ROBERT J. NORRELL is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee. Copyright © 2021 Kentucky Historical Society