"Gooseneck Bill" McDonald
The tallest obelisk in Oakwood Cemetery on Fort Worth’s North Side sits on the plot that houses the remains of Fort Worth businessman William "Gooseneck Bill" McDonald, a pioneer in every sense of the word, a leader of the Texas Republican Party for more than 10 years as the founder of its “Brown and Tan" faction that sprung to life in the late 1890s.
That the obelisk faces the former Ellis Pecan Co., a former Ku Klux Klan hall, is no accident, at least according to lore. It was intentional, the placement of the monument, which he built some years before his death in 1950 at age 84.
The city of Fort Worth, by action of the City Council, has proclaimed today — June 22 — as William Madison “Gooseneck Bill” McDonald Day, on what would have been this business and political legend’s 156th birthday.
“Gooseneck Bill” is a man who should never be forgotten, the legacy of this son of a freed slave made permanent in the minds of white children and Black children alike.
HERU Community Development Corporation and Black Wall Street Fort Worth are in the midst of a weeklong series of events honoring McDonald. Some, including those organizations, have called McDonald the most important Black man in the history of Fort Worth.
He might well be. He was that important and remains so. (The Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society produced an informational YouTube video on McDonald's life.)
“Anything that he took his hand to prospered,” Opal Lee once said about him. “And he was showing others that you can do this too.”
Cecil Johnson, a former reporter and editorialist with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, once wrote of McDonald: “His life testifies to the abiding truth that a determined person, given less than half a chance, can achieve anything that he or she desires sufficiently.”
McDonald is widely believed to be Texas’ first Black millionaire. He was quite accomplished by the time he moved to Fort Worth in 1906. It was here that he established the Fraternal Bank & Trust a few blocks east of where the Fort Worth Convention Center stands today. Notable is that the bank survived the Great Depression.
John Henry
McDonald's burial place at Oakwood Cemetery on the North Side.
One story told is from that early period of panic, when unnerved customers marched on the bank to withdraw and save their assets. McDonald is said to have met them outside the bank at Ninth and Jones.
“The money is here,” he said. “If you don’t believe it, come in here and get it.”
The crowds dispersed.
A mural in the Fort Worth Intermodal Transportation Center commemorates his and other Black businesses that stood nearby there.
He preached self-reliance and independence, most notably saying in a speech: “Do you wish to have grocery stores? Go and establish such stores. Do you wish to have Negro bank clerks and cashiers? Go and establish a bank.”
Politics was his first love.
Born in 1866 in Kaufman County, McDonald was sent to school in Nashville by a white friend, Capt. Jed Adams of Kaufman who was later a player in the Democrat Party. When McDonald returned to Texas, he plunged into the political stage as a very young man, meeting Col. Ned Green, son of an eccentric New York heiress who sent young Green to Texas to manage the Texas Midland Railroad, which she had a considerable interest in.
McDonald met Green in 1896. Together they captured the reins of the Texas Republican Party on the “black and tan” platform, which sought the support of Black voters.
“The colonel didn’t know any more about politics than that girl,” McDonald told a reporter in 1949, pointing to a housemaid. “I made him chairman of the Republican state committee in 1904.”
McDonald was a great speaker, his platform appearances so effective that at one state GOP convention he was carried to the platform on the shoulders of white Republicans. It was his long, thin neck that led political observers to nickname him “Gooseneck Bill.”
He was a regular delegate at the party’s state and national conventions.
“I want to tell you that Taft’s nomination was no Carnegie gift nor a base on balls,” said McDonald, a Taft man in the contentious nomination process of 1912 with Teddy Roosevelt. “There were 67 Negroes at the convention [in Chicago]. Seven of the devils, together with 15 white men ‘sold out bodily.’ The 60 Negroes stood pat for the king of them all. Just you fellows deduct those 60 remaining votes from the number Taft received. See now, tell me, who nominated Taft?
“Don’t you think for a minute there were no inducements handed out to the rest of us. You simply had to tell those bribers ‘to get behind thee.’”
Roosevelt announced later that he would continue to challenge Taft in the general election as a third-party candidate.
When asked about Roosevelt at the convention he said: "By, golly, now that you mention the name, there was some such being with a name like that in Chicago. Yes, I remember, but that fellow's dead now. I heard them announce his funeral would be held in November and as I recollect it was somewhere near the date of the fall election."
McDonald and Green were defeated in the state that year, losing to a faction called the “Lily Whites,” a movement begun in the late 1880s by state Republicans to oust Blacks from positions of party leadership. It's leader was a man named Cecil Lyon of Sherman. McDonald went after him.
"Cecil Lyon is all right personally, but he's a mighty poor politician. Why, that man seems to think the Republican Party is a social organization. Cecil is just like a cat without claws turned into a room with a lot of rats. When those rodents learn the absence of claws they will beat him to death."
He never regained power in Texas, but he remained a presence into the 1920s.
“‘Gooseneck Bill’ is Star at Convention,” the headline blared.
“Gooseneck Bill McDonald was easily the star here Saturday of the Texans before the National Committee,” the report read.
McDonald’s denunciation of the Lily Whites, although failing to land him a seat at the convention, “caused all present to sit up and take notice of the Fort Worth” man.
The nominee and eventual president, Warren Harding, might well have taken notice. He is a forgotten friend to Black citizens, telling delegates at the convention: “I believe the Negro citizens of America should be guaranteed their full measure of citizenship ... their sacrifices in blood on the battlefields of the republic have entitled them to all of freedom and opportunity, all of sympathy and aid that the American spirit of fairness and justice demands.”
Later in his presidency, Harding delivered the most impassioned Civil Rights address by any American president up to that time, going to the Deep South, in Birmingham, and declaring: “Democracy is a lie” if Blacks are deprived of their rights.
Happy No. 156, Gooseneck Bill. Your spirit lives on in Fort Worth.
