The Black Family Who Built America: The McKissacks, Two Centuries of Daring Pioneers

A foundation of expertise and excellence first laid 200 years ago continues to shape a Black family’s groundbreaking legacy in this tenacious debut memoir from Daniel, president of McKissack & McKissack, America’s oldest minority-owned construction firm. The author’s Ashanti great-great-grandfather was enslaved and brought to America in 1790. At age 11, he was purchased in Charlotte, N.C., by William McKissack, an Irish builder who named him Moses McKissack and trained him as an expert artisan in carpentry and bricklaying; Moses eventually rose to foreman of McKissack’s building crew. Just before the Civil War, McKissack’s son moved to Tennessee and brought Moses’s son to work as his own foreman. After Emancipation, the Nashville-area Black McKissacks went on to build college and university campus buildings, a Carnegie library, and Nashville’s famous Maxwell House Hotel. Notable moments in her forebears’ history and the author’s career as a building professional are told in parallel: in 1866, Moses’s son faced down the Ku Klux Klan; in 2002, Daniel faced down competition for a contract to work on Brooklyn’s Barclays Center arena. Throughout, Daniel divulges intimate details about her personal and professional life, from relying on alcohol to deal with work stress to her struggles with the white “old boys’ network” that dominates the construction industry. The result shines best as a candid career guide for Black professionals. (Aug.)