THE BLACK FAMILY WHO BUILT AMERICA

The head of an eminent Black-owned construction firm recounts her family’s long history in the building trades.

McKissack Daniel opens her memoir, which moves fluently from present to past and back again, with a distant ancestor who, at the age of 11, crossed the Middle Passage and, enslaved, was named Moses. William McKissack, the owner, “trained his slaves to be expert artisans in areas like carpentry and bricklaying,” and they were so much in demand for their skills that, with Moses now a foreman, they traveled with some degree of freedom throughout the South. The following generation of McKissacks relocated to Nashville, with Moses II building the Maxwell House Hotel and, after emancipation, becoming a construction entrepreneur in a time and place where the KKK was vigorous in attacking Blacks who “showed too much independence.” Fast forward to 2002: The author is the head of a firm that, although successful for generations, had to reckon with institutional and societal racism at every level—for example, during the Jim Crow era, when Blacks were barred from building for white customers and were forced to “carefully calibrate their demeanor…to ensure that they projected the proper deference.” By the author’s account, plenty of hurdles still remain. For instance, her firm was “grandfathered” past a New York state requirement that architecture businesses be owned 100% by licensed architects (as hers had long been) but then had its license revoked after white firms objected, angered by another requirement that they give 10% of their contracts to minority- and women-owned businesses. “In America,” she writes, “so-called ‘progress’ often drops you off right where you started.” Undeterred, she writes of pressing on all the same, taking part in a massive Brooklyn rebuilding project, branching into international markets, and bidding on new contracts that promise to keep the company busy for years to come.

A well-crafted story of intergenerational striving on the path “from cruelty to commerce.”