Todd McGhee: ‘There’s a gap in leadership’ | Local News

Will Todd McGhee be the next Attleboro candidate who appears to come out of nowhere to beat a popular incumbent and become mayor?

McGhee fought hard – door to door. This is how campaigns work in most small towns and cities.

“I knew I had to do that,” he said in a recent interview.

It takes a lot of time and energy, but it works.

In 2003, Kevin Dumas came out of nowhere to beat six-year-old incumbent Judy Robbins, who was the second-longest incumbent mayor in city history at the time, surpassed only by Cyril Brennan, who served eight terms in the 1950s and 1960s.

But Dumas, whose childhood dream was to become mayor, sensed a weakness and fatigue in the electorate, so he organized a campaign committee and ran.

He served seven terms before State Representative Paul Heroux, who had no problem getting elected three times at Beacon Hill, defeated Dumas in 2017 after fighting door-to-door – by bike.

Dumas was the first openly gay mayor and if McGhee wins he will become the city’s first black mayor.

Heroux is now running for his third and final term as mayor.

McGhee dates his decision to take over Heroux on June 2020 when a demonstration was held in Capron Park to protest the death of George Floyd, a black man murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Chauvin was jailed for the crime.

The demonstration was organized by a student from Bishop Feehan High School and had nothing to do with the Black Lives Matter group, even though those three words were sung.

McGhee, a member of Feehan’s Board of Trustees, shared his 23 years of law enforcement experience.

Newspaper reports said Heroux, the last speaker of the day, caused a backlash from the crowd when he began promoting the local police department.

McGhee said Heroux had started talking about his own accomplishments, which angered the 300 protesters.

“I saw a leadership gap at this rally,” said McGhee. “It is difficult to determine which lens he was looking through, but he took the opportunity to talk about his own accomplishments and things quickly went very badly.”

“The message he delivered changed the tone of the rally,” said McGhee. “They didn’t want to hear that.”

McGhee said Heroux was not good at “reading the room,” and then the seeds were sown for his own mayoral campaign.

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While the phrase “came out of nowhere” is used to mean the unexpected appearance of someone or something, nobody comes out of nowhere – and that goes for Todd McGhee.

At least half of his family history has grown out of the rigors of slavery, and between himself and his father, James, the two of them served the nation and law enforcement for more than half a century.

Subsequent generations have, as the protest song says, first “overcome” the chains, then segregation and prejudice, and pursued and realized their own American dreams.

McGhee was born in a naval hospital in Philadelphia, the birthplace of American freedom in 1776, 85 years before the Civil War that would eventually free those shackled by slavery.

His father served in the US Navy for 22 years before embarking on a career as a police officer.

McGhee was a middle child of six years old and grew up in a coal mining town called Fairchance, Pennsylvania.

He says it was and is a city so small that if you blinked while driving through it, you’d miss it. It is on Route 857, also known as Morgantown Street.

When McGhee’s father graduated from high school, he had three options for his future.

“He could get into trouble and go to jail, he could work in the coal mines and die young from lung disease, or he could join the military,” said McGhee.

So he joined the military.

His rank was 1st Class Petty Officer Gunners Mate and, among his other duties, served two tours of Vietnam on a gunboat patrolling rivers. He was injured and received a Purple Heart.

He later urged his son Todd not to join the military based on his experience in Vietnam and encouraged him to go to college instead.

When James retired from the Navy, he joined the Federal Protective Service, and after the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, he became responsible for all uniformed security operations around what, in McGhee’s words, was “a huge crime scene.” .

This job lasted a year.

McGhee’s mother, Florida J. McGhee, was raised in Fayette, Miss, to a tenant.

Born in 1932, just 67 years after the end of the Civil War, she grew up in the racist South, where war veterans still walked and statues of Confederate heroes abounded.

She was the youngest of 12, many of whom would later become successful business owners, doctors, and judges, McGhee said.

The ancestry on the mother’s side is known.

“My great-great-grandfather was born into slavery and valued at $ 300 as a child,” said McGhee. “His father, Delaney Jackson, was valued at $ 1,350 and both belonged to Samuel Scott, who owned four plantations and over 130 slaves.”

His mother told him stories of the racial segregation that ruled her life when she was growing up.

Sadly, his mother died on September 21, aged 89, the day her son won the city’s primary and the right to stand against Heroux in the November 2 elections.

“I’ll carry her with me,” he said, and took out a photo of her funeral that was on the program.

His father died a few years ago, as did an older brother, Carlton.

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McGhee didn’t really become aware of the world around him until the 1970s, after the race riot, violence, and fighting of the 1960s. During that decade, President John F. Kennedy, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, and civil rights activist Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were all assassinated. In 1972 there was the attempted murder of Alabama Governor George Wallace, a segregationist.

In the late 1960s, the family moved to the Academy Homes Project on Jackson Square in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.

James was still in the Navy but sent money to Florida to save for the family’s first home, which was at 481 Broadway in Lynn.

The McGhee family moved there in 1972, an all-white neighborhood. Todd McGhee, born in 1964, was 7 years old when they moved in.

He said he never experienced racism in Academy Homes or in Lynn, with one exception.

“A car full of kids drove by and one day used the N word,” he said. “But that was it.”

Everyone got along on the project and the neighbors in Lynn were great, he said.

“Lynn was so diverse that we didn’t have any problems with the race,” he said. “Everyone got along.”

It was a great place to live.

“Lynn was good to me,” said McGhee. “Lynn was good to my family.”

Recovery wasn’t far.

“There was a nice pond across the street where we went fishing,” he recalls.

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Like Attleboro, Lynn is an old mill town. But instead of jewelry, they made shoes.

There were four high schools: two public, St. Mary’s Parish and one vocational high school.

McGhee graduated from St. Mary’s in 1982, where he played four sports – baseball, football, track and field, and basketball.

In his senior year, he was a second-team all-star on the basketball team that won the state championship for his region.

He followed in his father’s footsteps and went to Northeastern University in Boston and enrolled in the criminal justice program.

It was a five-year collaborative program that offered job opportunities upon graduation.

He graduated in June 1987 and in July completed a six-month training program for a position in the Police of the Motor Vehicle Register.

That was the beginning of McGhee’s law enforcement career.

Eventually the civil police and other police authorities were incorporated into the national police.

One of the most dangerous duties McGhee had as a registrar was stopping cars in the Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan during a period of high gang and drug activity that often resulted in violence.

He and his colleagues routinely seized illegal drugs and weapons.

At other stages of his career he was an accident reconstructor, fire investigator and trainer at the training academy for city police officers.

His father first taught him about extremism and terrorism, and after 9/11 it became his professional focus.

He spent the last 10 years of his law enforcement career in the counterterrorism work at Logan International Airport in Boston and became the senior trainer on that mission.

On patrol, he and his colleagues carried MP5 machine guns.

“This is the first time I’ve seen police militarization,” he said.

McGhee’s education and experience at Logan eventually led him to a private consultancy on counterterrorism methods in the United States and abroad.

He worked for the US State Department and has traveled to eleven different countries since 2015 as part of anti-terror training missions.

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About 20 years ago he moved to Attleboro with his wife Nicole (also his campaign manager) and his then young family.

His daughter Brianna graduated from New York University in 2016 and works for PBS in Providence.

His son Kendall is studying at Regis College in Weston.

And now he has a new goal in mind, and that is the corner office in the town hall.

That leadership void he felt in demonstrating to protest the murder of George Floyd more than a year ago is something he believes he can fill.

There are also quality of life issues that are not being addressed and that need to be addressed, he said.

He cited the rat infestation reported across the city, the creation of affordable housing another.

He wants to prevent the loss of security personnel in the police and fire brigade and expand the school department to include adaptation advisors.

His style of governance will be that of collaboration, McGhee said.

He said his extensive experience in the public, private and street sectors will be a boon to Attleboro.

He laments the loss of respect in discussions about political issues and hopes to bring it back.

“We are at a time when we have lost civil discourse,” said McGhee. “It’s awful.”

He said his business will be “put on hold” as he deals with city affairs all day.

And he has something else with him that he hopes to be able to spread.

“My parents taught me that there is no place for racism in our homes or hatred of other people,” he said. “Everyone deserves dignity and respect.”