Fort Worth millionaire. Republican. Black icon. He was “Gooseneck Bill” McDonald
It was the summer of 1950, and the modern civil rights movement was still four or five years in the future. Yet sad events on both sides of the Trinity River offered a foreshadowing of what was to come.
In Fort Worth, William Madison McDonald died on Tuesday, July 11, at the age of 84. Better known to whites and blacks alike as “Gooseneck Bill,” he was an African-American leader in social, political, educational, and fraternal circles for more than 60 years.
Reportedly, he was the first black millionaire in Texas and certainly one of the first in the nation. He first came to Fort Worth about 1908, and with other Prince Hall Masons organized the Fraternal Bank & Trust, the first black-owned bank in Texas. For years it was the only bank in Fort Worth that would loan money to blacks.
McDonald was a leader in the Republican coalition of blacks and whites known as the Black & Tan Alliance, having a voice in national conventions. It was at one of those conventions in 1896 that he was given the name “Gooseneck Bill” by a Dallas Morning News reporter. The party elected him chairman of its state committee in 1904, a singular honor since he got both black and white votes.
He was a spellbinding platform speaker, giving public speeches until four years before his death when he took ill. One of his last was at I.M. Terrell high school. As “kingmaker” of the black (Prince Hall) Texas masons, he exerted enormous influence and also made a lot of money. Part of his legend is that when all the Fort Worth white banks were going bust in the Depression, they came to McDonald’s Fraternal Bank & Trust to borrow money.
In his last years McDonald lived with his fifth wife in a magnificent home in Terrell Heights. After standing-room-only funeral services at Mount Pisgah Baptist Church on July 16, 1950, he was buried in the (segregated) Trinity section of Oakwood Cemetery.
His death left a huge hole in the leadership of the black community, not just in Fort Worth but in all of Texas. He was the rare black man able to sit down and talk with white leaders, working out compromises that kept the peace and helped keep blacks safe in their neighborhoods. It wasn’t equality, but it was better than the alternative.
The peaceful relations he oversaw in Fort Worth for so many years would carry over after his death, paving the way for Martin Luther King’s historic visit in 1959 and school desegregation in the 1960s.
On the other side of the Trinity, even as the black-owned Dallas Express newspaper mourned the passing of McDonald, the same issue (July 15) expressed outrage over a recent series of bombings of African-American residences in south Dallas, aimed at keeping black homeowners out of white neighborhoods.
Six houses had been dynamited in the previous six months, the most recent on Friday night, July 7. This brought the total number of bombings to 25 since they started in 1941, and to date, Dallas police had not made a single arrest. Thankfully, no one had been killed.
The police investigation was literally clueless. The Texas Rangers had declined repeated requests to come to town to assist the police, saying local law enforcement had things under control, and besides, local authorities had not invited them in.
The local chapter of the NAACP begged Gov. Allan Shivers to do something, and he flatly refused to even so much as offer a reward. It was Dallas’ problem, he said. The Dallas Express warned ominously, “If Dallas authorities don’t stop these bombings, we’ll awake one morning with one of the worst kind of riots. ...There will be killing.”
The spate of bombings ceased, and peace returned to south Dallas. The authorities breathed a sigh of relief.
Racial violence was averted in both Fort Worth and Dallas for a few more years. But as Bob Dylan would sing in the next decade, “The times they are a-changin’.”
We were four years from the Brown Supreme Court decision and five years from the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott.