Forgotten Legacy: William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality

Abstract

To secure his party's nomination in 1896, William McKinley courted Black Republicans. George Henry White, a Black attorney elected to Congress from North Carolina that same year, was an ardent McKinley supporter. Benjamin R. Justesen, the author of a 2001 biography of White, documents the fitful political partnership between McKinley and the congressman. Justesen argues, first, that biographers of McKinley have minimized his commitment to African American political equality; and second, that White and McKinley orchestrated the largest number of Black appointments to federal positions of any president. (Despite civil service reforms a decade earlier, both parties still expected their presidents to reward loyalists.) Justesen argues that “McKinley's role as a sincere friend and benefactor of African Americans may be among the best-kept secrets of American political history” (p. 2). White came to office at a precarious moment for Black rights. Raised on his free family's turpentine farm, he earned a law degree at Howard University and served in the North Carolina legislature before running for Congress. An erudite speaker, he stumped for McKinley during the 1896 campaign. Yet the importance of Black votes to Republican candidates was waning. Southern states were flagrantly stripping African Americans of the franchise. During White's first term, white supremacists carried out a violent coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, to oust Black officeholders. In 1900 the state's voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to disfranchise Black residents. White used his prominence in Congress to implore his fellow Republicans to stop this violation of the Fifteenth Amendment.