Dr. Charles McKinney, associate professor of history and director of African American Studies at Rhodes, has published a column in USA TODAY about African Americans in the Republican Party during the 1950s and 1960s with focus on George Washington Lee, a stalwart in black Republican circles.
McKinney writes, “Much like Michael Steele and others black moderates who struggle to strike a racial balance in the GOP today, Lee fought to maintain an increasingly tenuous balance between racial moderates and conservatives.”