Nathan Kellogg McGill papers

Biographical note

Nathan Kellogg McGill was born in Florida, 1888, and grew up in a house on Eighth Street and History Avenue in the Georgetown community of Sanford, Florida. His stepfather was a minister and a shoemaker who maintained a workshop behind the family home. Nathan McGill graduated from the Cookman Institute in Jacksonville in 1909; graduated from law school at Boston University in 1912. His older brother, S.D. McGill, was a prominent Florida attorney who worked on many NAACP cases. In the 1920s, Nathan McGill moved to Chicago; 1925-1934, he worked as General Counsel and Secretary to the Robert S. Abbott Publishing Company, Inc. (publisher of the major African American newspaper, the Chicago Defender). McGill was active in the Republican Party and was a Republican candidate for various judicial positions in the 1920s-1930s. He served as Cook County's first African American Assistant State's Attorney (1925-1926), and he served on the Chicago Public Library board in the mid-1930s. He died in Chicago, 1946 May 8.