 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual book talk with Benjamin Justuson, author of Forgotten Legacy. Before we begin though, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, February 4th at 1pm, Alice Baumgartner will tell us about her new book, South to Freedom. In the years before the Civil War, thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery, not by heading north, but by crossing the southern border into Mexico. South to Freedom gives us a new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War. And on Wednesday, February 10th at 1pm, Alec Tresniowski, author of The Rope, will relate a story of a murder investigation in 1910 that helped launch the NAACP. When William McKenley was inaugurated as the 25th President of the United States in March 1897, the era of Jim Crow in the American South was firmly entrenched. Reconstruction had been over for nearly 20 years. African-Americans voting rights were suppressed, and the terror of lynching was real and widespread. Among our records, you'll find heart-rending petitions and letters to the federal government appealing for justice and for protection of citizens' rights. Against this backdrop, it is surprising to learn that President McKenley, in his four-and-a-half years in office, supported measures promoting racial tolerance and the advancement of African-Americans, even appointing a number of African-Americans to federal office. In his new book, our guest author, Benjamin Justison, makes us aware of this forgotten legacy of William McKenley. In telling this story, he reveals an unlikely alliance between the last president to have fought in the Civil War and the nation's only black congressman at the time, George Henry White of North Carolina. Although the cause of equality would need decades more to fulfill its promise, the efforts of McKinley and White flesh out our historical knowledge of the struggle for rights. Benjamin Justison is the author of five books on historical subjects, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated biography George Henry White and Even Chance in the Race of Life. A former journalist and teacher, Ben currently works as an editor. He was also a commissioned Foreign Service Officer for the United States Department of State for more than 14 years serving at embassies in Jamaica, United, Denmark, Suriname, Singapore, and Latvia. In addition to articles for scholarly journals and magazines, he has also written the script for a 2012 documentary film about White, American Phoenix. Now, let's hear from Benjamin Justison. Thank you for joining us today. Let me begin today by thanking the National Archives for the opportunity to offer this lecture today. The Archives have been one of my favorite research hangouts since I began researching my first book by George White in the 1990s. Many thanks to Douglas Sponson for arranging this, and a special thanks to the Archivist of the United States, David Ferreira, for encouraging this wonderful series of presentations. 120 years ago, this past fall, another Republican president was running for reelection to a second term. The former congressman and governor was now running against the same man he'd had when we defeated four years earlier, but each was now accompanied by a new running mate. The former vice president running to reclaim his own office on the other party's ticket. McKinley's mate, a very popular young war hero, was being kicked upstairs by his jealous elders, or so they thought. The end of the hour was William McKinley, our 25th president, his new running mate was Theodore Roosevelt. Former vice president Adler Stevenson was on the other ticket. If rarely celebrated now, McKinley was enormously popular at the time, arguably the most popular president ever elected before 1900. A century later, the average American probably knows only a handful of facts about him. We're ever lost in the shadow of the far younger, more charismatic, and much more unpredictable, that he Roosevelt, however, is often overlooked. How much do you know about William McKinley? Like any former college instructor hoping to get his classes attention quickly, I'm going to stop here and give you a virtual pop quiz. Oh, great, obviously. Just raise your hands. The first thing you remember about our 25th president, if you answered six-term congressman and governor of Ohio, go to the head of the class. If you said almost elected speaker of the house, the gerrymandered out of his safe district by democratic legislative force, you can teach my next course. Today is his birthday, January 29th. Four and 18 years ago, born in Ohio, life as a junior but dropped it later in life. Born in 1843, dropped out of college after a year, fought in the Civil War, then went to law school, raised as an abolitionist. Like some of you, perhaps, the most memorable things I remember learning about William McKinley, from when I was growing up, involved the very short Spanish marathon four, which happened on his watch against wishes, and the fact he was assassinated in Buffalo, New York, the third president to be murdered in just 36 years. Only a few of us have probably ever handled a $500 bill, but McKinley's portrait still adorns that piece of U.S. currency. Produced in 1928, and still a real currency. Many of some of them were produced during the Great Depression. Now, he might have remained more familiar if this portrait had stayed on the $10 bill when it started out in 1902. I remember his other portraits. McKinley rarely resembled a charismatic leader. He always looked stern and unapproachable and not very exciting, although that is a distortion of actual fact. He was extremely popular and drew large adoring crowds wherever he appeared. At 57, he was still young by historical standards. Only three presidents re-elected to a second term, had ever been younger. Lincoln Grant and his predecessor, Barbara Cleveland, and only five presidents that ever been younger, the first to elect. But he looked older than he was, perhaps because he rarely smiled, perhaps because of the shape of his face. He had the misfortune to be followed into the White House by the youngest president in American history, who acted even younger than he was, among the most charismatic ever, TR, who seemed over somehow larger than life. An overgrown kid, some called him, TR instantly overshadowed McKinley. TR is one of four faces on Mount Rushmore, and that may have something to do with it, with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. McKinley is not there, of course. But McKinley already held an impressive geographical honor. The highest mountain in North America, now called Mount Denali, was named after him in 1898, just after the Republicans had nominated him for the presidency before the election. By a gold prospect, renamed WA, it proved in advertising here the unofficial name became the official name when Congress approved it in 1917, and it hung around until 2050. Back to the subject of my remarks today, forgotten legacy. Why did I write a book about William McKinley and not one of the more exciting presidents? That's a good question. If you want to know the truth, short answer is I like reasonably unexplored topics and obscure historical figures who have hidden depths. The long answer, I've always been a student of history, especially American history, just can't get enough of it. Our presidents have always intrigued me from the truly great list to the ones whose names you barely remember. Bill Moore, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce. I knew all the trivia. At a very young age, I could name them all, including the dates they serve for most unmemorized names of their wives and vice presidents. Some of those I still remember. For McKinley, the striking facts to me, the ones I have remembered longest included a few personal quirks. His loving devotion to his wife, Ida, a semi-invalid who sometimes suffered brief, quiet seizures during state dinners, and whom he assisted against all protocol that ever seated next to him. The story may be apocryphal, but it was said that he would draw out a clean dinner that can arrange it over her blank face and continue the dinner until she was able to rejoin the conversation. I always thought that was a loving and somewhat daring thing. His 1900 campaign for reelection wasn't much of a campaign in the typical sense. He made no speeches, no campaign appearances. He depended on his choice as vice president, that energetic, pugnacious war hero to bear that burden. It was not until I began researching books on George Henry White, the so-called prophet of the White House, that I began to look seriously, or more seriously at William McKinley, the president under whom White's heard. There were a number of good biographies, including two that have been published in my book on Mr. White, 2001. But the more I dug, the more puzzled I became. I began to notice a disconnect between my research and all those biographies, and it worried me. No one else seemed to notice just how devoted President McKinley was to the cause of African-American issues. Those noticed it, ignored it, or said it was just politics. But the deeper I dug, the more that excuse sounded like a very bad generalization. When McKinley ran in 1896, as it turned out, he did have a kind of secret weapon. A near unanimous endorsement of a relatively small but significant demographic group, black voters, who later argued, not without good reason, that they had helped elect him by submitting his narrow emergence in certain key states. Ohio, of course, and New Jersey, Pennsylvania, to a lesser degree. He did not carry any southern states, although he came very close to North Carolina, and had strong showings in Virginia, Georgia, and Texas, where black men were generally still able to vote without obstacles in 1896. Now, the exact numbers for black voters in the 1890s were not readily available. Both estimates are, out of 8.8 billion blacks in the country in the 1900s. Perhaps 20, assuming that at least half of them were theoretically available. A large majority, perhaps 80 to 90 percent of the 750,000 to 1 million black votes were Republicans, at least in the South and Ohio. But there was a catch in 1900, more than 6 million U.S. black citizens in certain other states that were carried somewhat narrowly by McKinley, Ohio, Kentucky, Maryland, and West Virginia, for instance. And where black voters faced few or no restrictions, even a solid small block of black votes could easily have provided that narrow margin of victory. Or at least, let me read you a short newspaper article from early 1897 that helps provide a little context for this. The writer was a black Washington, D.C. lawyer and newspaper editor, one W. Calvin Chase. And this article appeared the weekend for McKinley's first inaugural hearing. Last Saturday noon, the members of the Afro-American Press Association of the United States met at the office of the Washington State. Editor Chase informed members that he had arranged a 20-minute survival clock at the association headed by Editor Chase, and President W.H. Stuart arrived at the executive mansion. The editors repaired the Secretary Porter's private office. Editor Stuart delivered the following address. The country has shown its confidence in you personally, as well as in the principles you represent, and now look forward with the brightest anticipation for a revival of business and a return of good and prosperous times. This is not a formal meeting of our association, but their names I thank you most heartily for the honor done to us. I again wish you a long and happy life and a successful administration. Among those who met McKinley that day were a remarkable number of well-known black journalists and professional men, including John Dancy of North Carolina, Dr. Samuel Courtney of Boston, Lenroy Morton, and Jackson McHenry, Georgia, Professor William Grader, Jesse Lawson, first held. At least two dozen of them heard McKinley's reply thanking them for their visit quote and assuring them that he has always held them in high esteem. McKinley would allocate so much time on his first week in the office, still unpacking 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to meet with a group of black journalists he did not know. McKinley was unusual in one respect. Unlike many of his white Republican colleagues who paid lip service to the need to have a racially integrated party, McKinley actually seemed to feel comfortable in the company of African Americans. Colleagues were content to seek black folks at election time, but once the elections were over, rarely felt the need to cultivate their most equal members of the party. They were useful, yes. And many Republicans did adhere to the creative party at a certain limit. Social interaction outside the strictly defined rules of political gatherings, however, was a problem area. For McKinley, unlike any president before him, then almost all after it, there was no such problem. He considered himself president of all of me. And anyone who came to his office was treated with the same unfailing courtesy and warmth. During his years in Congress, he'd already served with black congressmen. Eight out of 18 elected to the House since reconstruction, from 1876 until he left Congress in 1891, and alongside the nation's only full term black U.S. senator, Mike Bruce. During his term, McKinley would carefully cultivate their support by making an astounding number of mid-level and high-level appointments of black men. Perhaps not surprisingly, including several of them. He met on that Saturday in early March, 1897. And by actually consulting them while considering those appointments and other issues that concern black Americans. Likewise, extended his hand to black women, appointing no less than 14 black female postmasters, the highest patronage office available to non-voting women. Intassantly, at least, encouraged employment of African American women as clerks by his administration. He told me not to overstate this. I found no evidence that McKinley ever took a meal with black acquaintances from the White House or elsewhere during his presidency. And he was not, to my knowledge, a public advocate of social equality between the two races due to the politician's work. In the political environment of the day, it was ordered on political suicide to breach the Jim Crow era segregation rules that had begun to calcify the separation of races to set the new rules of segregation. But he was a man of principle, and he believed permanently in that political equality was sex. He had fought in the Civil War as a true believer in abolition of slavery and had endorsed the unsuccessful federal elections bill of 1899, which barely passed the Republican House, failing in the Senate. As governor of Ohio, he had insisted on listening to what the small handful of white legislators in Ohio's general assembly had to say carefully and sympathetically. The act to stop the notorious attempt at mob violence aimed at lynching a convicted rapist by sending out the Ohio National Guard to Fayette County in 1894. As he planned his quest for the presidential nomination in 1895, he had met repeatedly with white leaders in groups small and large and listened to their advice. In Jacksonville, Florida, he received a delegation of black Republican leaders in his hotel suite in March 1895, almost unheard of, and very nearly sparking a revolt by white and Florida Republicans. He won the 1896 Republican nomination for president with the enthusiastic endorsement of almost every black delegate to the St. Louis Convention, many of whom became his forces for appointment of federal patronage officers after his presidency. And with their enthusiastic help, he would go on to win convincingly in 1900, becoming the first sitting president to win reelection in almost three decades since U.S. C.S. Grant in 1877. I will pause here for another short talk. Can you name the most popular president of the United States of the 19th century, at least in terms of popular ones? Well, if you guessed William McKinley, you're right. In 1896, McKinley piled up the largest popular vote of any president before him, 7.1 million. Price as many as U.S. C.S. Grant had won in 1872 at 2 million more than Benjamin Harrison, but he was defeated for reelection in 1892. In 1900, he would also go on to win more electoral college votes, 292 out of 447, more than any candidate before him. Part of the reason, of course, was that more men voted in the 1896 election than in any U.S. presidential election industry. Just under 14 million votes cast compared to just 12 million, just four years earlier, and of course there was one more state, Utah, that joined the union that year. I prefer, generally, approved of his presidential actions during his first term, but on one issue they all dismissed his achievements. They acknowledged, sometimes, if rarely, his few black advisors, and that he won the nomination in 1896 for almost every single spot in all of his vote in St. Louis. There were only 100 of them I found, as I drilled down into the records. They tended to attribute all of this to why only strategy by his campaign manager and handwork, Mark Hanna, as if McKinley simply followed Hanna's lead with little enthusiasm and almost cynical ambition. But there were other signals for biographers. I wouldn't pick them up, in my opinion. Time for another pop quiz. Who was William McKinley's first vice president? The answer is Garrett Augustus Hobart, known to his friends simply as Gus. An amazing character, a wealthy but little-known New Jersey state senator. He came highly recommended, although McKinley did not even know him before 1896, and selected him for regional balance as much as anything else. But the two men took to each other quickly. Gus and Jenny Hobart rented a house in Washington near the executive mansion called the Little Cream White House of Lafayette Square, still standing if no longer used as the residence. And became close friends with McKinley's who often ventured across Pennsylvania Avenue for afternoons. Gus Hobart was also unique in another very important way as a very good manager. He was the first vice president ever to take an active part in helping the president from the government, both as president of the Senate, which he ran behind the scenes like they will or will machine. And as a sounding board for the famously private McKinley, Hart became known as the assistant president. The first time that term was used and the last time for about a century that any vice president served as the assistant park. Mondale for Carter in the 1970s, Gore for Clinton, Biden for Obama, almost all of them or all three of them had just left the Senate, making their presidency of the Senate extremely useful. In similar fashion, Vice President Cheney, a former congressman, long time government appointee, served the second president. Hobart took his duties a step forward. When McKinley's first attorney general, former federal judge Joseph McKenna, set down in early 1898 to become McKinley's always Supreme Court nominee, it was Hobart who recommended his protege, New Jersey Governor John W. Griggs, to become attorney general. And here is where fate put the right man exactly where he was needed at the precise moment. He did an activist with a conscience. In the mid-February 1898 coincidentally the same week in which the USS Bain was destroyed in Havana, Harvard, setting off use to the Spanish-American War, a black U.S. postmaster was shot and burned dead along with the Senate's daughter by a group of masked white men in Lake City, South Carolina. Hobart's almost certain advice and at President McKinley's quiet urging, Griggs became a strong advocate for investigating and prosecuting 13 alleged law members. That investigation was supervised by Griggs that President McKinley suggested and went to an extraordinary trial in Charleston a year later. The most vigorous prosecutions ever melted in U.S. history against co-accused winters, which seemed ironclad. The trial also supervised by Griggs over from a distance was actually for conspiracy. Murder was not a federal crime at the time except from federal lands like military reservations and Indian reservations with no death penalty involved. But it was a dramatic trial, nonetheless. Two defendants turned states' evidence against co-accused winners, although brave witnesses of both races testified in open court against fellow townsmen, something being recruited by them for the lynchmen. The postmaster's widow who was shot but survived the burning of her house and escaped with five of her children, two of whom were wounded severely, testified to the grizzly circumstances. But she could not identify any of her family's attackers. In the end, however, the case simply unraveled. The dramatic trial produced a hung jury, one with a majority of jurors, apparently favored guilty verdicts against seven of the post-defendants, and one report of an 11-to-1 violent against the lead defendant. An extraordinary, astonishing outcome in the notion itself. Had the case ever been retried, both Griggs and the actual prosecutors wanted that to happen. A conviction might have still been obtained, but it did not happen. Witnesses and defendants quickly began disappearing and sealed the criminal. The case remained open technically for ten years despite Griggs. A very disappointed attorney general next turned his attention for advising George White on introducing an anti-witching bill to the next U.S. Congress, which opened seven months after that, this trial. Witchings were painfully common at the time, perhaps 100 to 150 each year. Most were in the South, most were with Black victims. The bill was conceived by the nation's only Black congressman, and its language was carefully tweaked by Mr. Griggs, and by former Massachusetts Attorney General Albert E. Pillsbury, who later helped found the NAACP. White's final bill would have carried a federal death penalty for any participants in Witchings. And in one early draft, it sought to establish a precursor of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. To handle Witching investigation, that language was struck, however, in an affirmative, broad support, in an uncertain cover. What state-level office was held by both President McKinley and Congressman White? This is a tough one, I admit. Both men, however, had once served as the elected prosecutors. McKinley's first elected office, where he had a Congress. White had been a district prosecutor in North Carolina, the only Black elected solicitor in the country for eight years, in fact. And he had no problem with the death penalty in theory, as long as it was administered after a fair trial. But White was adamantly opposed to vigilante justice. Postmaster forage for Baker's murder affected him deeply, possibly because Baker lived less than 100 miles from White's birthplace. And he was a fellow school teacher just a few years younger than White. They were not personally acquainted. But White's fault, unsuccessfully, to obtain federal compensation for the Baker family. The bill failed, in part, due to a technical dispute between George White and Ida Wells-Barnett. They took equally passionate interest in the case. A year later, after the mistrial of Baker's killers, White's anti-Witching bill then took center stage among Black and American women. But the most direct result of Baker's murder was creation of the first truly nationwide civil rights organization. This was the National Afro-American Council, founded by A.M.E.'s Zion Bishop Alexander Walters and journalist P.T. Thomas Fortune. More than 150 African-American leaders assigned Walters his national call for such a called Black organization, citing Baker's murder and other racial violence and lynchings, and formally established it in Rochester, New York in September of 1898. It lasted until 1908. People remember the NACC, but most remember its successor, the NAACP, founded in 1909 and 1910, open to Whites and Blacks. It endures today, but it would never have succeeded without the NACC Black NAACP leaders, members, along to the NACC first, and cut their organizational teeth. The council, however, was important for another reason. Its leaders regularly consulted with President McKinley at the White House before and after their annual meetings, and they brought their annual addresses to the nation directly to him, seeking his assistance on major civil rights issues, lynching Southern disenfranchisement and other forms of racial discrimination against American blacks. The relationship was anything but perfect. Many council members, including Fortune, openly criticized McKinley for not acting more forcefully in resolving such issues, and for attempting to conciliate Southern Democrats who were the major culprits in America's ongoing racial battle. Most, but not all of the members of the NACC were Republicans, many independents, and Democrats joined the officially nonpartisan council, which often fragmented along philosophical lines. But never again was the White House a regular gathering place for such an impressive gathering of black leadership, freedom of the cross that were lawyers, clergymen, professors, and journalists, and no president after McKinley would ever provide such personal encouragement on the issues they raised. The anti-lynching bill, which George White drafted and introduced appears to have enjoyed McKinley's personal backing, although other factors intervened to kill the bill itself. The tide in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee was outreaching a form of vote. Perhaps the single most crucial factor was the death in November of 1899, or vice president of House Hobart, the man who would almost certainly have wed the fight for the bill in the Senate. But no one else could shepherd the bill through the Senate and avoid a filibuster by Southern Democrats. George White must have realized that when he was attending Hobart's funeral in New Jersey, along with McKinley, his cabinet, most of the Supreme Court, and dozens of congressmen and senators and all the government officials, which he used to give up. With Griggs' help, he finalized the bill's language and introduced it in the House in January 1900. But earlier in December, President McKinley's annual message to Congress restated his personal opposition to lynching, as stated in his inaugural address, not towards the death. And indirectly tacitly encouraged George White in his mission, but White made tactical errors in the House, including a fatal error, as it turned out, by not obtaining any cosponsors for such a controversial bill. There were other obstacles, of course. There was no Republican consensus that the bill was introduced. And 1900 was a re-election year. McKinley's hopes of carrying one or more Southern states in the fall would not be helped by a public endorsement of the bill, no matter how strongly he might have favored it. And by this time, George White was a marked man in North Carolina called him an angry public battle with the publisher of the state's largest Democratic newspaper, Josephus Daniels. As North Carolina prepared to vote on a constitutional amendment, literacy restriction for voters. And aimed squarely at blocking black Republicans from exercising their right to vote. There's also another severing congressional issue. This one was plans by a group of Republican House members led by Indiana's judge, Edgar Cumpacker, to punish Southern states by reducing their representation in Congress accordingly. When reapportionment, based on the 1900 census, was discussed. This bill was quietly opposed by McKinley, who believed such a move both unfairly unfair and politically dangerous. It would be the death knell for the Republican Party in the South if it was passed. Meanwhile, a really white Republican movement, preparing for a future with only handfuls of black voters, other than the large numbers once enjoyed, infuriated white and other black Republicans across the South and beyond. McKinley did not favor the willy-white movement, I should say. The point to me at least is that the political situation was a very complicated one, and President McKinley, whatever he felt privately, was rarely willing to get out in front of his own party on issues that he could not be sure would succeed. There were no guarantees. This was not his style. He worked behind the scenes. But according to one estimate, he took the lead on jobs. McKinley radically increased black American employment at all levels by the federal government during four years in office, up to 12,000 according to the Wichita Kansas Searchlight in early 1901. That figure might be somewhat inflated. Included in that number are more than 100 black postmasters, including at least two in Ohio. If that number is accurate, he appointed more black office holders than all predecessors combined, or exceeding Benjamin Harrison, whose administration hired at least 2,000, and who appointed about as many black postmasters as William McKinley. He did not overpromise, especially to the hundreds of requests he received for appointments to the federal workforce, but he listened patiently. Not surprisingly, more African-Americans received federal appointments in his first seven months than all presidents before him had ever granted in that period. And according to a New York Times article in October 1897 dealing with jobs in Washington, they see that number was 179 plus another 125 promotions for existing workers. The Times article did not cover federal appointments given black Americans as local postmasters. In his first seven months in office, McKinley nominated at least 43 black U.S. postmasters folks, temporarily after the special session of Congress adjourned in July 1897, and they still needed formal Senate approval. Now, a pointless of white postmasters did not require a white congressman or even a Republican congressman. In states with neither, party leaders recommended black appointees as in both South Carolina and Georgia. Two black postmasters already appointed by McKinley there, Isaiah Lofton and Hopkinsville, Georgia, countable about 3,000, and Frazier Baker and Lake City, a tiny owl-white village of 400, wanted to become national figures if for violent reasons. Lofton was shot, was survived in September 1897, and continued working as postmaster. And Baker, as recounted earlier, was murdered six months later in 1898. McKinley, like Harrison, went on appointing black postmasters. Each named roughly 100 African American men and women as postmasters during four years in office, about four times as many as per equivalent in two terms, 23. My research shows at least 330 individual appointments of white postmasters between 1865 and 1901. Some appointed more than once, at least 12 appointed by McKinley, three appointed by McKinley, were recycled from Harrison's administration or that of another Republican. One named more famous over a later president was Minnie Cox of Indianola Pacific, one of the nation's early female. Black appointed by Harrison in 1891, replaced by Cleveland, three appointed by McKinley in 1897. She finally resigned in 1903 in a scandalous episode that ended only when theater was about closed for post office, rather than accept for resignation under pressure from white supremacists. Yet notable as they were, white postmasters were simply the most visible presidential appointments. High ranking state level appointments went to blacks under McKinley, across the south in Central, in the U.S. Treasury Department, especially in the U.S. Customs Office Service and Internal Revenue Service. It's still not clear just how many federal white officials McKinley appointed directly, but he encouraged appointments for many more indirectly by allowing an atmosphere of racial tolerance to the included new and lower levels in Washington and beyond. So it's time for a break. One last talk. Who is the first president to speak at four different historically black colleges? Bonus points that you can name any of those schools and its leaders. Okay, whoever said McKinley Tuskegee Institute and the Booker T. Washington gets the prize. That was his first speech at an HBCU, historically black college or university as president in December 1898 during McKinley's peace tour of the south. On that same tour McKinley also spoke at another historically black school now known as Savannah State University. In 1901 on his last Southern tour he also spoke at two historically black colleges, two well-known colleges, the original Southern University in New Orleans, later moved to Scotlandville, now closed, and the teacher training school now known as Prairie View A&M University in Texas. At almost every stop in every speech he encouraged African American students to make the most of their education, to earn a trade or a profession and to continue participating in U.S. economic life as productive citizens. No other president took such regular pains to reach out to black citizens on their own ground. He also praised their past achievements, his most widely publicized address to a black audience was at Quinn Chapel A&M Church in Chicago where 3,000 Sunday worshipers heard him in October 1899 as he warmly praised the patriotism of black soldiers. Race has demonstrated its patriotism by its sacrifices and its love of the flag by dying for it. That is the greatest test of fidelity and loyalty. The nation has appreciated the valor and patriotism of the black men of the United States. They not only fought in Cuba but in the Philippines and they are still carrying the flag as the symbol of liberty and hope with our fresh people. And McKinley acted on those sentiments. Just a month earlier he commissioned the largest number of black army officers ever named at one time to that date, more than 17 one day. All went to the Philippines in the 48th and 49th volunteer regiments to lead white soldiers, white volunteer soldiers who were fighting Filipino rebels in that territory's bitter civil war. McKinley had already encouraged, excuse me, encountered opposition in his own war department over allowing black officers to lead black troops in wartime volunteer regiments but he insisted that state regiments be allowed to make their own decisions. As a result, several states including Ohio selected black commanding officers. North Carolina and Illinois are just two more examples. The post-war 1899 commissions were controversial but McKinley was determined to reward exemplary black soldiers at least as long as Philippines volunteers were needed until 1902. There's not a large number by today's standards or even those of World Wars 1 or 2 but still more than under any other president before him. That's it. No more pop quizzes. Your ears and eyes are probably put closing over now. I do have a closing gulf on history in general. It's often said that history is written by the victors, never by the vanquish. It was certainly that way when I was growing up. I never knew who George Henry White was until I came across his name in a press release from the North Carolina Museum of History in 1975. When the first exhibit honoring him and his black 19th century fellow congressman was unveiled at Raleigh, three quarters of a century after he left Congress. I was a newspaper reporter back then and I wanted more facts, not fewer. It started me thinking long and hard about the accuracy of what I had always been taught. All those missing facts covered up by all those louder but often far less accurate opinions that eventually to my first book, the biography of White, the deserve to have history told far more completely than he had ever experienced instead of the trouble-making militant that he had always been painted as the seat of sentence and other apologists for White's supremacy. In Jim Crow's segregation, he was actually a principal statesman who tried and failed in Congress but never gave up at trying to save his race from oppression. As a lawyer, banker, and land developer, the town of Whitesboro in New Jersey is his most lasting achievement. I should add a note or two about my research. I did quite a bit of this for all my books and two or three rooms of the National Archives, the Microfield Readers Room among others, as well as in the Library of Congress and in both settings never failed to fill an integral part of the history I was helping to refresh. I am a former journalist although a good friend and fellow print reporter corrected me once saying we are forever journalists in mentality and commitment. She said, and studying old newspapers as an intrinsic part of my worldview whether for pleasure or academic research. I'm hopelessly old-fashioned about journalism. Injecting myself into the story is just taboo except under very limited and my opinion is rarely acknowledged. After all, I'm not the story and probably one reason why I never returned to active journalism leaving it over the three decades ago. Today's agenda-driven reporting mostly by sincere broadcast journalists other than our sadly fast-dying newspapers. The stream of consciousness accounts are alien to me. They place the writer squarely in the middle of the story. I prefer to give out as many of the facts as I can neutrally and let them read or straw their own conclusions. But my use of newspaper research here, seven or more, led almost inexorably to this book which attempts to tell the complete story of another man, a famous leader that few people seem to know very much about today. Even after several excellent biographies that have been published in recent years. By George White, William McKinnon deserves so much more attention. Much more complete. And I am happy to have been the catalyst for a new conversation about it. If I have done anything worthwhile with my book Forgotten Legacy, I hope it is to help kickstart that new conversation. Excuse me, that new conversation. Through a new congregation, there's always something new to learn if you only know where to start digging and always something more to fight. It's been my pleasure to join you here today on a subject close to my academic heart. If you'd like to hear more, be sure to write to me. I have given the National Archives my email address that I promised.