When Harold Vaughan worked on John F. Kennedy’s US Senate campaigns in the 1950s, the candidate once encouraged him to make sure African-Americans registered to vote to wield power at the polls. But it was a teenage trip to the nation’s capital with a young Malcolm X that made Mr. Vaughan first want to work in government.
Mr. Vaughan, who was 91 when he died Friday, was shining shoes when he met Malcolm X, known at the time by his birth name, Malcolm Little. “When I was 15, after Malcolm and I got friendly, we got jobs for the railroad,’’ Mr. Vaughan told the Globe in 1997.
“He was a train boy with Malcolm, selling sandwiches, coffee, and dessert,’’ said Mr. Vaughan’s daughter, Robin, the clerk-magistrate at Stoughton District Court.
After first working on a train to and from New York City, Mr. Vaughan and Malcolm X switched to a run that brought them to Washington, D.C., where they encountered a kind of racism they hadn’t seen in Boston.
“I remember trying to flag down a cab and they just kept going by me,’’ Mr. Vaughan said in the 1997 interview. “The starter walked up and said, ‘Son, the cabs for colored people are around the corner.’ That was the first time someone told me that because I was colored, I couldn’t have what they had. I remember the flag flying over the buildings, just like in my school books. I just kept saying, ‘This is America.’ I guess I was just so hurt.’’
It was then, Mr. Vaughan said, that he knew he wanted to be “where the decisions were made.’’
He made good on that goal, holding jobs during the administrations of three Boston mayors, for whom he supervised assessors and chaired the tax review board. In his later City Hall years, he also ran a private law practice in the evenings, having returned to college in his 40s to become an attorney.
A pioneering statewide candidate, he was the first African-American “ever to seek election to lieutenant governor on the Democratic ticket in Massachusetts,’’ the Globe reported in 1964.
The second of four children, Harold Lee Vaughan grew up in Roxbury. His father, George D. Vaughan, worked for what was then the Metropolitan Transit Authority, cleaning subway tunnels and trains. His mother, the former Mabel Furman, cleaned houses.
After graduating from Roxbury Memorial High School, Mr. Vaughan worked for a year in Maine at the Bath Iron Works and returned home to work at the Watertown Arsenal.
There he met another worker, Josephine Williams, whom he married in 1947. First, though, he was drafted into the Army and served in Europe near the end World War II with a motor vehicle ordnance company.
When Mr. Vaughan returned home, he attended stenotype school and was a State Police dispatcher before using the GI Bill to attend Boston University, from which he graduated with a bachelor’s degree.
With his wife, Mr. Vaughan worked on Kennedy’s US Senate campaigns and on the presidential campaigns of John and Robert Kennedy. The Vaughans also campaigned for Boston mayors John B. Hynes, John F. Collins, and Kevin H. White.
Mrs. Vaughan, a nurse who specialized in obstetrics and gynecology, died in 2002.
While working on John Kennedy’s Senate campaigns, Mr. Vaughan helped schedule appearances and events in Boston’s African-American community.
In an interview with NECN that was broadcast in 2013, the day before the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, Mr. Vaughan recalled that at times the candidate sought his counsel: “Jack would say to me, ‘What do you think, Harold?’ ’’
Kennedy offered him advice, too, as Mr. Vaughan recalled in the 1997 Globe interview.
“John once told me, ‘What you have to do is make your people register and vote. They may not have the money I have, but keep in mind that I can vote once, they can vote once,’ ’’ Mr. Vaughan said. “He was pointing at me, waving a cigar, which was incidentally the only time I ever saw him smoke. He said that the way the colored – we were ‘colored’ in those days – were coming into Massachusetts, we could wind up with the balance of power. I never forgot that. It irks me now when I see so many young people not caring. There was so much possible back then.’’
Mr. Vaughan, who graduated from Suffolk Law School in 1968, worked in City Hall during the Hynes, Collins, and White administrations. He focused his law practice on probate and real estate and often did extensive pro bono work for people and organizations, including Boston’s NAACP branch, for which he was chairman of press and publicity.
Mr. Vaughan also served the Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World as grand exalted leader and as legal counsel.
“There are people, even to this day, that he helped that we never knew about,’’ said his daughter Robin of Randolph, who is Mr. Vaughan’s only immediate survivor.
Following his lead, she became a lawyer, too, and she said her father was thrilled to live long enough to see an African-American governor preside over the ceremony when she became a clerk-magistrate.
“It was a real big thing for him to have witnessed the elections of Deval Patrick and Barack Obama. He was very excited,’’ she added. “He said, ‘Imagine, I saw them both. I got to see the governor swear in my daughter.’ ’’
Mr. Vaughan, who died of complications from Parkinson’s disease, had divided his time for many years between Randolph and Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., before living more recently in Milton and Needham.
A funeral for Mr. Vaughan will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday in Trinity Episcopal Church in Randolph.
In the 1997 Globe interview, Mr. Vaughan also spoke about the times he faced racism in his City Hall years and how his mere presence helped educate the mayor’s constituents – sometimes when they least expected it.
“One day a woman calls me up, upset about busing, and she says ‘I have got to talk to the mayor. They’re going to send a bus over to my child’s school with all those boogies,’ ’’ Mr. Vaughan recalled.
“I said, ‘Is that right? I know the mayor will be concerned.’ Two days later, I recognize her voice. She’s outside my office, asking to talk to me. Ever seen a person trying to swallow her tongue? She was remembering all those things she said on the phone – and there I was, a ‘boogie,’ working for the mayor. It was a moment, let me tell you.’’
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan. marquard@globe.com.
