McNeely was a scholar, advocate for underprivileged
In 2010, lawyer James Hall was running to be president of Milwaukee’s NAACP. He had just finished a town hall when someone from the back of the room, a physically formidable man with a deliberate, rich baritone, went to him and said he’d like to help.
That was the first time Hall met R.L. McNeely.
Hall would come to know McNeely as an intellectual, a foodie and a scholar with a dry wit. Hall also knew McNeely as one of the city’s most respected advocates for justice, education and racial equity.
McNeely, 74, died Dec. 9 of a heart attack, leaving behind his partner, Georgette Williams, and what many have called an incalculable legacy of scholarship and activism.
From athlete to scholar
Williams was surprised by McNeely’s death. “I’m still coming to terms with that and figuring out the way forward without him,” she said.
She was introduced to McNeely by an aunt who thought the two would make a good couple. For nearly 20 years, Williams
said, they did.
She was working at Xerox as part of the sales management team, and he was a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor. She immediately found him impressive. “He was quite accomplished, very charismatic and real outgoing and friendly.”
McNeely was committed to keeping in touch with his friends and even regularly called old football buddies from college just to check in, Williams said. He had played defensive end for one season at Eastern Michigan University.
McNeely was just as committed to his community as a scholar and an activist, and the seeds of his activism were planted early in life.
His father was a barber, so he often visited his father’s shop, where he learned his earliest lessons on civics and community engagement.
But while attending Flint Northern High School — where he was also a star athlete of the football team — McNeely spotted a stack of scholarship offers for several Black players in his coach’s drawer and realized they had been hidden intentionally.
It was a searing moment for McNeely, Williams said, and it changed his trajectory in life.
Instead of going to work in a factory, which was a good option in Michigan
during those years, McNeely chose to try college out for a year and liked it so much, he stayed. McNeely ended up pursuing his master’s degree at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and earning a doctorate in social work at Brandeis University.
By 1975, McNeely was teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he eventually became a full professor and worked to highlight racial and economic disparities in the city of Milwaukee.
Stan Stojkovic, the former dean of UWM’s Helen Bader School of Social Work, said that McNeely, whom he first met in the fall of 1983, was a role model for students who were not used to seeing Black professors on campus.
“There were very few professors of color in those days,” he said. “He was one of those initial trailblazers on campus.”
He also described McNeely as a serious professional and pioneer in his field.
“He had produced an anthology with Carl Pope on race and crime and to my knowledge, that was the first book of its kind,” Stojkovic recalled. “With race and crime and segregation, he was one of the first guys to document that at UWM.”
McNeely was an advocate on various issues
Despite holding a doctorate in social work, McNeely wasn’t done learning. He attended Marquette University’s law school at night, earning a degree in 1994. At the same time, McNeely continued to expand his role in the community, becoming a full time advocate after his retirement from UWM in 2012.
Among his many accomplishments, McNeely started a mentoring program called the Careers in Law and Justice project, published works highlighting elder abuse, served as a domestic violence consultant for the U.S. Army and was granted multiple scholarly fellowships for his research.
He supported establishment of a prerelease facility for the formerly incarcerated. Hall recalled that, at the time, no one wanted the pre-release facility in their community.
McNeely had a different attitude.
“He was really a voice of reason, and he represented someone who was willing to bring a thoughtful approach to issues affecting our neighborhoods and our communities. Because of his background as a researcher and an academic and social activist, he was trying link actions to outcomes.” James Hall former president of NAACP Milwaukee Branch
“He was really a voice of reason, and he represented someone who was willing to bring a thoughtful approach to issues affecting our neighborhoods and our communities,” Hall said. “Because of his background as a researcher and an academic and social activist, he was trying link actions to outcomes.”
McNeely came to co-chair a committee on the facility called the Felmers O. Chaney Advocacy Board, or “FCAB.”
The successful reintegration of formerly incarcerated people was a high priority for McNeely, according to Milwaukee NAACP First Vice President Fred Royal.
“When you talk about reentry, he wasn’t talking about just changing the disparities,” Royal explained. “He wanted to change the lives of individuals that were re-entering by bringing educational opportunities and giving folks meaningful opportunity to gain economic achievement while they had excess time on their hands.”
Royal worked with McNeely when he was on the Concerned Citizens for Quality Policing advocacy group, also called CC4QP. During that time, he got to know McNeely’s dry sense of humor and his more playful side.
“He was an avid lover of good food, and that’s where most of our serious discussion and strategies would take place,” Royal said, recalling that McNeely was often considered the group’s “scribe.”
McNeely was a man who knew his own strengths and those of others.
The last time he talked to McNeely, the two were working together to draft a letter to the Fire and Police Commission recommending that Malik Aziz be the next chief, Royal said.
“The last thing he said to me, he called me and said, ‘Fred, you’re a thinker and not a writer.’ He said, ‘Let me do the writing, you do the thinking.’ “
As Royal put it, McNeely was a “linguistic guru — language was his thing.”
McNeely was persistent, despite disappointment
Although McNeely received individual recognition, colleagues said he was unhappy with conditions in Milwaukee’s Black community.
“To his chagrin and disappointment, things haven’t improved in the quality of life for Black Milwaukeeans, and he was very depressed by that,” Stojkovic said.
At home, Williams recalled that he would often be frustrated by the lack of progress he was making on a number of projects.
“He worked for a long time on education for prison but ... that never quite materialized,” she said. “He never gave up on it.”
That was McNeely, she said. “I think he believed that because it was important enough, he couldn’t just walk away from it, he had to find a new way to tackle it. He wasn’t going to give up on something that was important,” she said.
Darryl Morin, the president and board chairman of Forward Latino, was also there during the formation of the Concerned Citizens for Quality Policing advocacy group, and met McNeely roughly four years ago.
“He wanted to do what was right for others,” Morin recalled in describing McNeely. “He was committed to serving others.”
Last year, Morin — on behalf of LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens) — presented McNeely with a partner of the year award.
“I’m grateful, I am blessed to have known him, to have worked with him and to have considered him a dear friend,” Morin said. “He was a very special spirit. A big man with an even bigger and a tremendous sense of humor.
“I’m not sure Milwaukee will truly appreciate what he’s done to make it a better place and a safer place for all,” Morin added.
R.L. was survived by his partner Georgette L. Williams, granddaughter Amanda E. Tobias, mother Ruth Bradley McNeely Wells and sister Tracey Louise McNeely. The family is requesting that instead of flowers, people provide a memorial contribution to the Marquette University Law School, R.L. McNeely Endowed Scholarship.