Background
McGinty was born in Bienville Parish in north Louisiana between Ringgold and Bienville to Alonzo Eugene McGinty and the former Maude Leshe.
McGinty was born in Bienville Parish in north Louisiana between Ringgold and Bienville to Alonzo Eugene McGinty and the former Maude Leshe.
He was educated in local schools and attended Baptist-affiliated Louisiana College in Pineville and received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Northwestern State University in Natchitoches. He also studied at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and the University of Chicago in Illinois before he received his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin.
He procured the Master of Arts degree from Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee. The United States. Congress declared war on Germany one day after McGinty"s seventeenth birthday. He was hence part of the Student Army Training Corps during World War I.
Early in his academic career, McGinty was the principal of elementary schools in Red River, Claiborne, and Pointe Coupee parishes.
He was also the principal of a secondary school in De Soto Parish south of Shreveport.
McGinty taught at the college level for a half-century, having served at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Northwestern State (then known as Louisiana Normal College), Louisiana Technical (then Louisiana Polytechnic Institute), and the University of Montevallo in Montevallo in central Alabama. He headed the social sciences, later history, department at Louisiana Technical for thirty-five years.
He was succeeded in the history chairmanship by William Y. Thompson, a native of Baton Rouge who specialized in Civil War and southern studies. McGinty also served for a year as the acting president of NSU, his alma mater.
Upon his retirement from Louisiana Technical, he was appointed professor emeritus.
The McGinty Chair of History was established by Louisiana Technical in his honor. Similar chairs honor Thompson and John Doctorate. Winters, another specialist in the Civil War. Scholarships are also named for McGinty as is the Louisiana Technical publications division.
In 1971, three years prior to the opening of Louisiana Downs in Bossier City, McGinty published "Horse-racing in North Louisiana, 1911–1914," in the journal, North Louisiana History, a twice-annual publication of the North Louisiana Historical Association, an organization which he formerly headed.
During his 50-year teaching career, McGinty wrote forty essays and articles, fifty book reviews, and five books His A History of Louisiana was used as a college textbook for two decades.
Another popular work is Louisiana Redeemed: The Overthrow of Carpetbag Rule, 1876–1880, a 1941 study of the Reconstruction era, which ends with the triumph of the Redeemers, the southern Democrats who defeated the Radical Republican administrations across the South. On July 15, 1932, McGinty married the former Zoé Heard (1902–1976) of Ruston.
The couple had no children.
McGinty had a brother, Thomas Guice McGinty (1893-1983) of Sibley, a state government employee who twice ran for sheriff of his adopted Webster Parish.
