Gooseneck Bill McDonald, Negro Ex-GOP Leader, Dies
Dallas Morning News
6 Jul 1950

FORT WORTH, Texas, July 5 (AP) – William M. (Gooseneck Bill) McDonald, 84, the Negro who dominated the Texas Republican party for years, is dead.

Political sagacity and the friendship of Col. E.H.R. Green, son of the eccentric New York multimillionairess, Hetty Green, made him a dominating figure in Texas from 1896 to 1912. He was Texas campaign manager for Republican national candidates. Before the turn of the century, Negroes who voted in Texas almost all were Republicans.

Last August, McDonald said in an interview that “the colonel (Green) didn’t know any more about politics than that girl,” pointing to a housemaid. “I made him chairman of the Republican state committee in 1904.”

McDonald’s platform appearances were so effective that at one state GOP convention he was carried to the platform on the shoulders of white Republicans.

The McDonald-Green hold on the Texas GOP was broken in 1912 by a “lily-white” faction. Their political fortunes never recovered.

Funeral services will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday at Mount Pisgah Baptist Church. Burial will be beside a tall monument he erected several years ago as the most imposing part of Trinity Colored Cemetery here.

His long, thin neck led political observers to dub him “Gooseneck Bill” and the name stayed with him for life.

After McDonald’s political fall, R.B. Creager of Brownsville rose to leadership of the Texas GOP and he still retains that power.

See also:
William Madison McDonald’s Biography: http://www.historicforney.org/archive/online-archives/biographies/william-madison-mcdonald/