William S. McFeely was a major influence on the reevaluation of the Reconstruction Era in the 1970s and 1980s. McFeely wrote widely read biographies of Ulysses Grant, Frederick Douglass and O.O. Howard. He helped establish Yale University’s Department of African American Studies while he was teaching there in the 1960s. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was one of his students at Yale. From the New York Times obituary:
“Professor McFeely’s riveting lectures brought to life in the most vivid way a world about which most of us had been unaware,” Professor Gates wrote it in an email, “a world of black achievement, sacrifice, resistance and attainment, facts and stores that had been edited out of standard American history textbooks.”
“Inevitably,” he added, “during question period, someone would stand up and rudely ask how a white man like him could dare to teach a black history class. Invariably, he responded, unfazed, that the person was absolutely right, that a black person should be hired, and would be hired one day, soon. But in the meantime, we should study our lecture notes and do next week’s reading for the class! I think even the most militant among us respected him enormously for the courage of that response.”
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