Emma Hamilton Dancing

William Thomas McKnight II was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901 to Etta McKnight, a restroom attendant, and William T. McKnight, a contractor.¹ He was the brother of Ruby McKnight, who helped found an NAACP branch in southern California.

McKnight attended Washburn Rural High School before matriculating to the University of Kansas. As president of Alpha Phi Alpha at the University of Kansas, he fought against segregated tables in the university’s cafeteria. He graduated from the University of Kansas with a bachelor’s degree in 1923 and continued to remain active in his chapter following graduation. He was also a part of the Masons and Elks fraternal order.²

McKnight completed a year at Yale Law School before leaving in 1925. He returned to Topeka, passed the bar exam, and opened his own law firm before moving to Toledo, Ohio.³ In 1934, he won a civil rights case on behalf of three African American women who were discriminated against in a cafe and later helped work with the NAACP legal team.⁴ Throughout his lifetime, he remained an active member and leader at the NAACP, serving in several capacities: on the National Legal Committee, president of the NAACP chapter in Toledo, Ohio, and vice president and later president of the NAACP’s Ohio State Conference.

McKnight was also an active Democrat, being appointed as assistant attorney general of Ohio in 1938, joining Elise Austin as African American trailblazers in Ohio’s Attorney General Office.⁵ In 1939, he was chosen to be a special assistant to the Attorney General of the United States to work with the Department of Labor.⁶ Pursuant to President Roosevelt’s order to prohibit discrimination in the defense industry, McKnight returned to Ohio to lead the Fair Employment Practice Committee regional office in 1943 to investigate cases of discrimination in Ohio, Kentucky, and Michigan.⁷ After the end of the war, McKnight returned to practicing law and remained active in the NAACP and local Democratic party. He mobilized voters for a fellow Yale law alumnus, Estes Kefauver, for the 1952 Democratic National Convention and used his influence to call for Democrats to add civil rights to the national platform during the 1950s. In 1955, he was appointed by the mayor to the Cleveland City Law Department and led a decade-long career where he won twenty-five municipal cases that went before the Supreme Court before resigning in 1969 and returning to private practice.⁸

He married Bella Taylor, who was the Young Women’s Christian Association Girl Reserve Secretary in 1928, but they later divorced. He later remarried in 1954 to Kathryn Helm, a nurse, and remained married to her until her death in 1997.⁹ He died in 1999 at the age of 98.[^10]