Dr. Fred L. McGhee's Bio

Fred L. McGhee is a maritime archaeologist and historical anthropologist whose area of expertise encompasses the maritime dimension of the African Diaspora, particularly the role of both African and African-American slave trading in the conquest and colonization of the Americas. He is the author of The Black Crop: Slavery and Slave Trading in Nineteenth Century Texas an interdisciplinary investigation which is the first major academic study of both African and African-American slave trading in the Lone Star State during this important time period told from an African-American perspective. He is also an urban anthropologist and is an authority on the history of African Americans in public housing and on community development issues. In addition to conducting historic preservation research, he has conducted grassroots organizing in conjunction with public housing resident councils, civic organizations, and various nonprofit organizations in several cities. He is a noted public housing preservationist and is a former employee of the Austin Housing Authority and served as the last Mike Hogg Fellow with the Urban Issues Program at the University of Texas at Austin.

A native of Karlsruhe in the Federal Republic of Germany, Dr. McGhee received a B.S. degree in Linguistics (with a focus on American Sign Language and German) from Northeastern University in Boston, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. He also attended Norwich University in Vermont, Fachhochschule Karlsruhe in his hometown, and Asnuntuck Community College in his American hometown of Enfield, Connecticut. A German and American national, Dr. McGhee is of African, European, and Indigenous ancestry.

As far as he knows he is not related to the civil rights activist Fred L. McGhee of Minnesota (via Tennessee and Mississippi) the first African-American attorney to practice law in the state, and one of the members of the Niagara Movement, the precursor to the NAACP. It is likely that he is a descendant of the well-known nineteenth century German geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel.

Dr. McGhee's military career began in 1984 when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. A graduate of the Broadened Opportunity for Officer Selection and Training (BOOST) program, he was commissioned an Ensign in the Navy's Special Operations community in 1991. He is one of the first African-American naval officers to become a U.S. Navy Deep Sea Diver.

Dr. McGhee served on two ships and was honorably discharged in 1997 with the rank of Lieutenant. Between 2001 and 2003 Dr. McGhee served as the Chief Archaeologist for the U.S. Air Force in Hawaii, based at Hickam Air Force Base and managed nationally significant historic resources related to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, as well as sensitive Native Hawaiian sites. Hickam received the 2004 Secretary of Defense Annual Environmental Award as having the best cultural resource management program in the Department of Defense.

Dr. McGhee is affiliated with numerous professional organizations, including the Society for Historical Archaeology, Society for Applied Anthropology, the World Archaeological Congress, the Society for Hawaiian Archaeology (Life Member), the Council of Texas Archaeologists, and the National Maritime Historical Society. He has taught anthropology, archaeology, and sociology at various colleges and universities including the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Huston-Tillotson University, Hawaii Pacific University, Park University, Central Texas College, and with the University of Houston Department of African-American Studies.

He is HAZWOPER certified, EPA Environmental Justice trained (by EPA Region 10 staff), Trimble GPS certified, ArcGIS certified, and is also a University of Hawai'i Scientific Diver with full NOAA reciprocity. In keeping with the practice oriented education he received as an undergraduate, he chooses to affiliate with the Society for Applied Anthropology instead of with the Register of Professional Archaeologists.