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Kathleen McGhee-Anderson: The Color of Courage

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Kathleen McGhee-Anderson

The Color of Courage: Sipes vs. McGhee

1999 USA Network Movie

Kathleen McGhee-Anderson is an American television and film writer, producer, playwright, and poet. Among the first African Americans to write for the screen, she is a graduate of Spelman College and Columbia University. Raised in Detroit, Michigan, she has worked as a journalist, film editor and assistant professor of Film at Howard University.

They Built a Home in Which All Could Live

By Lynne Heffley, The Los Angeles Times

It was family lore when writer Kathleen McGhee Anderson was growing up: How, in the turbulent ’40s, her reserved grandparents, Orsel and Minnie McGhee, were sued and harassed for buying a home across the invisible segregation line in an all-white Detroit neighborhood. How they came to be represented by a young NAACP lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, and how their fight became a landmark U.S. Supreme Court civil rights case challenging restrictive housing covenants. After the case was over and the McGhees’ right to live in their home had been upheld, they and the couple who had brought the suit against them, neighbors Benjamin and Anna Sipes, became lifelong friends.

It was that friendship–transcending fear, threats, anger and heartache–that inspired Anderson, the consulting producer for the critically acclaimed Lifetime series “Any Day Now” to write “The Color of Courage,” a USA Network movie premiering Wednesday.

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“My grandparents were very quiet people, very soft-spoken,” Anderson said. “They never sought notice for their role in history. They just wanted to buy a house for themselves and their growing children.” Anderson “grew up hearing about it at Sunday dinner at my grandparents” and was intrigued when she came to realize that despite “white flight that had pretty much turned the whole neighborhood into a black neighborhood, the couple who had brought the case against them lived there till the end of their lives."

“The human aspect, with the black and white couples who were able to transcend this vicious, bitter battle and become friends–that was the story I wanted to tell.”