Walter Francis White

White, Walter (1893–1955), novelist, essayist, civil rights leader, writer and patron of the Harlem Renaissance, and executive secretary of the NAACP. The son of a mail carrier and one of seven children, Walter Francis White grew up in Atlanta on the border between white and African American neighborhoods. During the Atlanta race riots of September 1906, a white mob nearly burned down his family's home. The event was formative for White, then thirteen, inaugurating his awareness of the meaning of racial identity and influencing his subsequent political and literary careers.

A 1916 graduate of Atlanta University, White worked for Atlanta's Standard Life Insurance Company until 1918, when James Weldon Johnson, then NAACP field secretary, invited him to join the NAACP staff as assistant secretary at its New York City headquarters. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, White was easily able to pass for white and often risked his life to conduct undercover investigations of lynchings. Twelve days into his NAACP job, White was sent to research the circumstances of a lynching in Estill Springs, Tennessee; he himself narrowly escaped being lynched on a trip to Arkansas in 1919. In 1922, the year White married NAACP staff member Leah Gladys Powell, he met writer H. L. Mencken, who encouraged White to try his hand at fiction. White completed the manuscript of Fire in the Flint, about a northern-trained African American physician who returns to his native small-town Georgia, in twelve days. Published by Knopf in 1924, the novel, which ends with the doctor's lynching, was praised for its realistic portrayal of southern life, went through several European editions, and became a modest best-seller. Flight (1926), White's second, less critically acclaimed novel, centers around a young New Orleans woman who crosses over the color line, then later relinquishes racial passing. White's literary accomplishments earned him a 1926 Guggenheim Fellowship, and he moved to southern France intending to produce a third novel; instead, however, he wrote Rope and Faggot: The Biography of Judge Lynch (1929), an important study of the various political, economic, social, and sexual influences of lynching.

White's literary career and his NAACP work were closely intertwined, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s he continued to toil for federal anti-lynching legislation and civil rights while aiding and inspiring Harlem Renaissance artists. Not only did White combine cultural and political leadership, but he also viewed cultural production in a political framework. An advocate of Alain Locke's New Negro metaphor, White helped start the Negro Fellowship Fund to support young writers and used his NAACP contacts to further their careers. In 1931, he replaced Johnson as the NAACP's second African American executive secretary and oversaw the organization through the crucial years following World War II and the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of May 1954. In addition to a column for the Chicago Defender, White's nonfiction includes A Rising Wind (1945), about African American soldiers during World War II, and his 1948 autobiography, A Man Called White, which details the history of the NAACP under his direction.

Bibliography

• Edward E. Waldron, “Whiter White and the Harlem Renaissance: Letters from 1924–1927,” CLA Journal 16 (June 1973): 438–457

Gayle Wald

Walter Francis White (1893-1955), general secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for 24 years, was an outspoken critic of lynching and racial injustice in America.

Walter White was born in 1893 in Atlanta, Georgia. His father, George, was a postman, and his mother, Madeline, a former school-teacher. The younger of two sons in a family of seven children, all light enough to pass for white, he was raised in an eight room, two story house on the edge of the ghetto. Their light complexion caused them a variety of problems. Aboard Atlanta's Jim Crow cars, the family found that if they sat in the "white" section, African Americans accused them of passing; if they sat in the African American section, they faced embarrassing stares and rude remarks. To avoid humiliation, the children walked everywhere or rode in the surrey their father had purchased.

When he was 13, Walter learned "that there is no isolation from life." In 1906 Atlanta was engulfed in a race riot and Walter and his father found themselves in the midst of an angry white mob. But their color shielded them from violence as white rioters bypassed them in search of victims to kill or maim. Back in the African American section father and son stood guard as whites invaded their neighborhood. With guns cocked they waited as whites planned to torch their home. Shots from a neighboring building scared away the would-be arsonists.

The Atlanta public school system was "separate" but decidedly "unequal." White attended school from eight to two in the afternoon in a poorly staffed, "double shifted" elementary school. His father sent him to the private high school department of an Atlanta African American college because there were no high schools for African Americans in Atlanta.

After graduation from Atlanta University in 1916, he worked for a time for Standard Life, a major African American insurance company, and helped organize the Atlanta National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As secretary of the new branch, he led the drive to force the city to improve its public facilities for African Americans and attracted the attention of James Weldon Johnson, the first African American general secretary of the organization. A year later Johnson secured White's appointment as assistant to the organization's chief administrative officer. While visiting Chicago, he narrowly escaped an ambush during the 1919 race riot. This time the assailant was an African American man who fired at what he thought was a white man walking through the ghetto.

Twelve days after his appointment, White volunteered to go to Tennessee to investigate a lynching on Lincoln's birthday. An African American sharecropper had been slowly burned by a white mob for defending himself against a beating by his employer. White learned that the employer was widely disliked by the townspeople, but that they figured African Americans might get out of hand if any African American, no matter what his justification, resisted any white authority.

In the next few years White personally investigated a dozen race riots and two dozen lynchings. Posing as a white reporter who wanted to give the South's side of the story, he was invited to join the Ku Klux Klan, and one southern sheriff pinned a badge on him, gave him a gun, and took him along on a hunt for African Americans.

In Helena, Arkansas, on the way to interview Negroes jailed for joining a sharecroppers' union, an African American man whispered that a mob had planned to ambush him. On a northbound train, he talked to a conductor who told him that he was leaving too soon. The townspeople, he was told, were preparing a surprise lynching for an African American who was passing through town. White's observations formed the basis for Rope and Faggot: The Biography of Judge Lynch, published in 1929.

White was assistant secretary of the NAACP from 1918 to 1929, when he replaced Johnson as acting secretary. In 1931 Johnson decided not to return to active leadership and White replaced him, presiding over the organization during the Depression, New Deal, World War II, and the Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board of Education decision out-lawing school segregation.

During his tenure White faced several crises. He opposed W. E. B. DuBois' call for "black economic self-determination" as contrary to the integrationist aims of the organization. Younger African American intellectuals such as Abram Harris, Ralph Bunche, and E. Franklin Frazier, while critical of the organization, joined White in criticizing DuBois' plan for an economic "Negro Nation Within a Nation" scheme. DuBois, the longtime editor of the organization's Crisis magazine, resigned in protest in 1934.

The young intellectuals supported, however, a 1934 internal report by Abram Harris on "Future Plans and Programs of the NAACP" which called for greater decentralization, more direct action, and class and labor alliances between African Americans and white workers. White weathered these criticisms of the traditional legal, political, and educational strategies of the organization, and after 1935 he focused much of the organization's energies toward a long, hard-fought, but ultimately fruitless campaign to pass a national anti-lynching bill.

Yet, as Ralph Bunche observed, White showed increased responsiveness to the economic problems facing African Americans. He supported the establishment of the Joint Committee on National Recovery, an umbrella organization of several civil rights organizations monitoring the impact of New Deal programs on African American life. Although a confidant of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and sympathetic to the social vision of the New Deal, he criticized National Recovery Administration (NRA) and Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) policies and called for a congressional investigation of racial discrimination in government programs. In 1938 he urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to extend social security benefits to agricultural and domestic workers and to amend the National Labor Relations Act to prohibit union discrimination. He opposed the creation of a segregated African American division in the United States Army and endorsed A. Phillip Randolph's March on Washington Movement in 1940 and 1941.

Critics charged that White was too close to the New Deal, that he failed to build a mass base for his organization, and that his autocratic style led him to view other African American organizations and leaders as rivals rather than as potential allies. But it is clear that White was devoted to bringing African Americans into the mainstream of American life and that he shared the liberal, reformist aspirations of his age. When he died, ten months after the historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision (1954), he had lived long enough to see the legal basis of that exclusion overturned. He was a consistent and articulate spokesman in the cause of human rights.

Further Reading

A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (1948) is the best introduction to the NAACP leader's career. Brief biographical sketches also appear in the Dictionary of American Negro Biography (1983) edited by Rayford Logan and Michael Winston and in A Biographical History of Blacks in America Since 1528 by Edgar A. Toppin (1969). White himself was the author of Fire in the Flint (1924); Flight (1926); Rope and Faggot: The Biography of Judge Lynch (1929); A Rising Wind: A Report of Negro Soldiers in the European Theatre of War (1945); and How Far Is the Promised Land (1955).

Additional Sources

Waldron, Edward E., Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance, Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978.

White, Walter Francis, A man called White: the autobiography of Walter White, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

civil rights leader; writer

Personal Information

Born Walter Francis White, July 1, 1893, in Atlanta, GA; died of a heart attack, March 21, 1955; son of George (a mail carrier) and Madeline White; married Leah Gladys Powell (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] staff member) February 15, 1922 (divorced, 1949); married Poppy Cannon (a writer), July 6, 1950.
Education: Atlanta University, B.A., 1916; graduate study at City College of New York, 1920s.

Career

Standard Life Insurance Co., Atlanta, GA, clerk, cashier, and salesman, 1916-1917; NAACP, New York City, assistant secretary, 1918-1931, executive secretary, 1931-1955. Writer, 1924-55.

Life's Work

In August of 1906, when Walter White was 13 years old, a race riot broke out in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. A mob of angry white men surrounded the house where he and his family crouched in darkness, the teenager and his father holding guns, prepared to defend themselves. Before the mob could begin its assault, however, it was driven off by gunfire from a neighboring house. White found himself relieved of the necessity of killing; as he wrote in his 1948 autobiography, A Man Called White, he was also filled with an intense awareness of his identity as an African-American. "I was glad I was not one of those who hated.... I was glad I was not one of those whose story is in the history of the world, a record of bloodshed, rapine, and pillage. I was glad my mind and spirit were part of the races that had not fully awakened, and who therefore had still before them the opportunity to write a record of virtue as a memorandum to Armageddon." But White was also aware of a strange irony: his skin was as light as those of his attackers.

This irony followed him throughout his career. He was a pale-skinned, blue-eyed, blond black man named White, who headed the nation's leading civil rights organization. In a time when many light-skinned African-Americans "passed" if they could get away with it, Walter White insisted on his racial identity--except when he went undercover, posing as a white man to investigate lynchings. In nearly four decades of working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he helped lift the organization from obscurity to a position of influence in which its support was sought even by U.S. presidents. As a writer and friend to writers, White was a major force in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s that created a distinctive black voice in American literature.

Walter Francis White was born into a middle-class family that lived on the boundary between a black and a white neighborhood in Atlanta. His father had grown up poor but had attended college for one year before taking the civil service examination and getting one of the few good jobs open to blacks in the South at that time, as a mail carrier. The family was comfortable enough to send Walter to Atlanta University, where he played football, was a member of the debate team, and was elected president of the class of 1916. He also worked part-time for the Standard Life Insurance Company, selling policies in rural Georgia and preparing actuarial tables. After graduation he worked for the company full-time as a clerk, cashier, and salesman, which, he wrote, "disproved, I hoped, the prediction which had been freely made that I was too young and too much interested in having a good time to do a good job satisfactorily."

In the autumn of 1916 the black community of Atlanta heard disturbing news: the local school board had decided to build a new high school for white students--there were no public high schools for blacks--and to pay for it with money saved by eliminating seventh grade education for black students. Though many wanted to resist the board's action, the community was unsure how to proceed. It was decided that the New York headquarters of the NAACP would be contacted with a request for help and advice, and White was delegated to write the letter.

At that time, the NAACP was only seven years old, with fewer than 9,000 members, only a handful of staff, and a tiny budget. There was no branch of the organization in Atlanta, but one was hastily organized, with White as its secretary. The campaign to save the black schools lasted over a year, inspiring tactics that would later become standard in the civil rights movement, including boycotts and a mass voter registration drive. These efforts succeeded not only in saving the seventh grade, but in winning a black high school and repairs to black elementary schools. The NAACP sent James Weldon Johnson, the distinguished black playwright who had joined its staff as field secretary, to speak at a mass meeting. White also spoke at the meeting, and Johnson was so impressed that on his return to New York City he wrote to White offering him a job at NAACP headquarters.

Though the NAACP's future seemed uncertain and the pay offered by the organization was less than what he was earning with Standard Life, White accepted the position. He reported for work in New York on January 31, 1918, to what both he and his superiors assumed would be an office job. The nature of his duties changed dramatically within weeks. On February 12, a brutal lynching occurred in Estill Springs, Tennessee, during which a black sharecropper was slowly burned to death for defending himself against a beating. White offered to travel to Tennessee to investigate in person, and Johnson reluctantly agreed.

Though White had often been mistaken for a white man, this was the first time he deliberately tried to "pass." His ploy was successful, and he not only uncovered many details of the lynching, but got the participants to admit that the beating that prompted it had been unprovoked and that the white man who had started the incident was generally disliked. Nevertheless, one of the locals told White, as he remembered in his autobiography, "Any time a nigger hits a white man, he's gotta be handled or else all the niggers will get out of hand."

White returned to New York and published his findings; he also traveled to Washington to tell senators and congressmen the gruesome details, hoping to encourage them to support the antilynching laws that were regularly proposed and defeated during the 1920s. It was only the first of many such undercover investigations White carried out, some of which led to narrow escapes, as when he left Phillips County, Arkansas, only minutes before a mob planned to ambush him. When he boarded the train out of town, the conductor informed him that he was leaving just as "the fun" was about to start. White disclosed in A Man Called White: "In answer to my question about the nature of the 'fun,' he replied, 'There's a damned yellow nigger down here passing for white and the boys are going to get him.' 'What'll they do with him?' I asked. Shifting his cud of tobacco, he shook his head grimly and assured me, 'When they get through with him he won't pass for white no more!...' Late that evening in Memphis I learned that news had been circulating there that I had been lynched in Arkansas that afternoon."

Life for White was not always so grim, however. The Harlem Renaissance was getting under way, and James Weldon Johnson was at the heart of it. As African-American culture exploded, New York City's Harlem became the center of the new vitality in black literature, poetry, theater, and music. Johnson introduced White to Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and other black writers, as well as white notables like composer George Gershwin and writers Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, and H. L. Mencken.

It was Mencken who recommended White try his own hand at writing. Mencken asked for White's comments on a novel featuring black characters that had been written by a white writer. In his autobiography, White praised the book for its portrayal of blacks as "human beings instead of menials or buffoons," but he also said that the depiction of educated blacks was inadequate. Mencken in turn suggested that White write a novel about educated African-Americans. White had never contemplated becoming a writer, but with encouragement from Johnson and others he took a typewriter to a friend's cottage in Massachusetts and completed a first draft in 12 days.

The resulting novel, The Fire in the Flint, told the story of Kenneth Harper, a young black doctor who returns to his hometown after training in a northern medical school determined to improve conditions for his people. He comes into conflict with both blacks and whites and is finally lynched by the local Ku Klux Klan when he goes to a white woman's house at night to operate on her seriously ill daughter. Years later White admitted that The Fire in the Flint was melodramatic and of modest literary merit. Robert Bone, writing in The Negro Novel in America, called it "a series of essays strung on an unconvincing plot," a judgment that Edward E. Waldron pronounced "too severe"in Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance.

The manuscript got immediate attention from publishers; the first to express an interest was George Doran and Company after editor John Farrar read the first draft and was impressed by it. The company eventually rejected the book, however, on the grounds that it was too one-sided in its harsh portrayal of whites and that the black characters were not what readers would expect.

White refused to make the changes Doran requested and instead submitted The Fire in the Flint to Alfred A. Knopf, who accepted it quickly and published it in the autumn of 1924. It sold moderately well and stirred up some controversy--something White encouraged by sending review copies to the most notoriously racist newspapers in the country in hope of provoking denunciations. One such appeared in the Savannah Press, which called The Fire in the Flint, "the worst libel we have seen on the South and Southern men and women." But most critical response was positive, and White was widely viewed not only as a promising young author, but as the precursor of a new generation of black writers. As Waldron wrote, Fire "helped open doors for works on subjects that before had been taboo by showing that such works could sell, and ... enabled [White] to help other black artists make the contacts they needed to bring their work to the public eye."

Heartened by the success of The Fire in the Flint, White began another novel almost immediately. Flight, his second work of fiction, however, was not a commercial success. In 1926 White was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to write a third novel--a chronicle of three generations of a black family; he traveled to France to write it but found himself unable to do so. Instead he began work on a book about lynching, and about Charles Lynch, who gave his name to vigilante murder. Rope and Faggot was published in 1929 and, as White remembered in A Man Called White, "was cordially received by reviewers, including many in the South, as the first attempt to analyze the causative factors of lynchings."

From then on White's writing was limited to books and articles on racial issues, but it was by no means the end of his involvement with the black literary community. He was both mentor and friend to many young black novelists and poets and worked tirelessly to bring their work to the attention of publishers and readers. His most important contribution to the Harlem Renaissance, wrote Waldron, "was not his writing, but his aid to artists who were at the core of that movement."

Throughout this time White also continued his work for the NAACP. During the mid-1920s the association worked successfully to integrate the staff of the hospital for black veterans at Tuskegee, Alabama; organized the successful defense of the Sweet family, accused of murder in Detroit for shooting a member of a white mob that was storming their house; and began a long campaign to establish the right of blacks to vote in primary elections. The NAACP also continued to lobby for a federal antilynching law, though even White's reports of the horrors he found in his investigations could not overcome the resistance of southern senators to a law that they claimed would violate states' rights. A near-success in 1938 was stymied by filibusters, but the debate brought national attention to the problem of lynchings and put White on the cover of Time magazine.

A major test of the NAACP's influence came in 1930, when John J. Parker, a federal circuit court judge from North Carolina, was nominated to the Supreme Court by president Herbert Hoover. Parker was an unknown entity at first, but the NAACP soon unearthed newspaper reports revealing that he had supported laws intended to prevent blacks from voting and had described black participation in politics as "a source of evil and danger to both races," as White revealed in his autobiography. The NAACP asked Parker whether he had been quoted correctly and whether he still held the same views. When Parker did not respond, the association decided to actively oppose the nomination, even though, White wrote, "the consensus of Washington opinion was that the inquiry would be a matter of form and that confirmation was inevitable."

White testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and organized a letter-writing campaign. "At first a trickle," he recalled, "the telegrams, letters, petitions, long distance telephone calls, and personal visits to senators in Washington grew to an avalanche.... Senators who had at first been apathetic or contemptuous began to pay attention to the unprecedented articulateness of Negroes." The fight was a bitter one, but when the vote was taken on May 7, 1930, the tally was 39 votes for confirmation and 41 against--proving, to the dismay of the white establishment, that blacks could no longer be disregarded as a political force. The point was driven home over the next few years as the NAACP was instrumental in defeating several senators who had voted to confirm Parker. Hoover's intransigence in championing his nominee also played a substantial role in alienating blacks from the Republican party and so contributed to the election of Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.

In 1931 James Weldon Johnson's health forced him to resign as secretary of the NAACP, and White, who had been serving as acting secretary since 1930, was chosen to replace him. Under White's leadership, the association began to develop a broad strategy for attacking discrimination at its roots, rather than simply reacting to individual cases as they arose. It fought for the right to vote, the right of blacks to be admitted to professional and graduate schools in state universities, and for equal pay for black teachers in public schools. In these areas blacks won a steady series of victories in the courts and in public opinion. The goal of a law against lynching remained out of reach, however, and dozens of blacks continued to be murdered by mobs each year.

The NAACP's influence continued to grow throughout the 1940s, and for many people, Walter White was the NAACP. During World War II he traveled widely overseas in support of the war effort, at the same time fighting discrimination in the U.S. Armed Forces. He also took on racial stereotypes in the entertainment industry and tried to ease tensions when riots broke out in Detroit and Harlem in the summer of 1943. After the war the pace of reform accelerated, with the desegregation of the Armed Forces and many trade unions, the 1948 Supreme Court decision outlawing restrictive covenants in real estate deeds--something for which the NAACP had fought for over 30 years--and, finally, the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision that desegregated public schools on May 17, 1954.

White's second wife, Poppy Cannon, in her memoir A Gentle Knight, recalled the speech White gave at a party the day the decision was handed down: "I can't help thinking of the number of times in the last thirty-five years," he said, "when some of my very closest friends told me that I was a damn fool--for believing that within a reasonable period of time we could really smash segregation in America.... Yet we together ... have created a miracle.... But this is not the end.... There are some of us who will not be around much longer.... But there will be new people coming into the struggle and they will have to complete the fight in which today we won possibly the greatest victory that has been won since the infamous Dred Scott decision."

Walter White did not live to see the flowering of the civil rights movement in the second half of the 1950s. He died of a heart attack on March 21, 1955. More than 3,000 people attended his funeral, and President Eisenhower praised him in Time as "a vigorous champion of justice and equality." The magazine's obituary for White noted, "The year White was born ... 152 U.S. citizens, mostly Negroes, were murdered by mobs. In his lifetime, 3,017 men and women were lynched in the U.S., but when Walter White died ... there had been no lynchings for four years.... As Walter White died, his old enemy Jim Crow was dying too."

Awards

Guggenheim fellowship, 1926; Spingarn Medal from the NAACP, 1937.

Works

Writings

• The Lynchings of May, 1918, in Brooks and Lowndes Counties, Georgia: An Investigation by Walter White, NAACP, 1918.
• The Fire in the Flint, Knopf, 1924.
• Flight, Knopf, 1926.
• Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch, Knopf, 1929.
• (With Thurgood Marshall) What Caused the Detroit Riot?, NAACP, 1943.
• A Rising Wind, Doubleday, 1945.
• A Man Called White (autobiography), Viking, 1948.
• Civil Rights: Fifty Years of Fighting, Pittsburgh Courier Publishing Company, 1950.
• How Far the Promised Land?, Viking, 1955.
• Contributor to periodicals, including American Mercury, Crisis, Nation, and New Republic.

Further Reading

Books

• Cannon, Poppy, A Gentle Knight: My Husband, Walter White, Rinehart, 1956.
• Waldron, Edward E., Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance, Kennikat Press, 1978.
• White, Walter, A Man Called White, Viking, 1948.

• Nation, January 29, 1949; April 23, 1955.
• New Yorker, September 4, 1948; September 11, 1948.
• Saturday Review, October 2, 1948.
• Time, January 24, 1938; April 4, 1955.

— Tim Connor

For the football player of the same name see Walter White (American football). For the fictional character see Breaking Bad.

Walter Francis White
Born	July 1, 1893(1893-07-01) Atlanta, Georgia
Died	March 21, 1955 (aged 61) New York City
Nationality	USA
Known for	civil rights leader

Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893, Atlanta, Georgia - March 21, 1955, New York, New York) was an African American who became a spokesman for his community in the United States for almost a quarter of a century, and served as executive secretary (1931-1955) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He graduated from Atlanta University in 1916 (now Clark Atlanta University). In 1918 he joined the small national staff of the NAACP in New York at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson. White acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary. In 1931 he succeeded him at the helm of the NAACP.

White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. Under his leadership, the NAACP set up the Legal Defense Fund, which raised numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal. He was the virtual author of President Truman's presidential order desegregating the armed forces after the Second World War. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.^[1]

In addition to his NAACP work, White was a journalist, novelist, and essayist, and influential in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Contents 1 Personal life 2 NAACP 2.1 Investigating riots and lynchings 3 Attacks on Paul Robeson 4 Literary career 5 Awards and honors 6 References 7 External links 8 Further reading

Personal life

White was the fourth of seven children born in Atlanta to George W. White and Madeline Harrison. George had graduated from Atlanta University and was a postal worker. Madeline had graduated from Clark University and became a teacher. They belonged to the influential First Congregational Church, founded by freedmen and the American Missionary Association after the Civil War. They were among the new middle class and ensured that Walter and all their children got an education. After graduating in 1916 from Atlanta University, a historically black college, White's first job was with the Standard Life Insurance Company, one of the new and most successful businesses started by African Americans. He also worked to organize an NAACP chapter in Atlanta. He and other leaders were successful in getting the Atlanta School Board to support improving education for black children. At the invitation of James Weldon Johnson, White moved to New York and in 1918 started working with at the national headquarters of the NAACP.

He married Gladys Powell in 1922, divorcing her in 1949. They had two children, actress Jane White and Walter Carl Darrow White. White then married a white magazine editor, Poppy Cannon, with whom he lived until his death in 1955.

White appeared white, a point he emphasized in his autobiography A Man Called White (p. 3): "I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me." Five of his great-great-great-grandparents were black and the other 27 were white. All of his family was light-skinned, and his mother was also blue-eyed and blonde. ^[2] Her maternal grandparents were Dilsia, a slave, and William Henry Harrison, the future President. Her mother Marie Harrison was one of Dilsia's daughters and her father Augustus Ware was also white.^[3]

Sinclair Lewis' 1947 novel, Kingsblood Royal, about a man who appears to be white but learns late in life that he is black, has characters based in part on White and his professional circles. In fact, Lewis consulted White on the novel. While some white critics found the novel contrived, the prominent African-American magazine Ebony named it the best novel of the year.^[4]

NAACP

Investigating riots and lynchings

White used his appearance to increase his effectiveness in conducting investigations of lynchings and race riots. He could "pass" and talk to whites, but also manage to identify himself as black and talk to the African-American community. Such work was dangerous, but he investigated 41 lynchings and eight race riots while working with the NAACP.^[3]

One of the first riots he investigated was that of October 1919 in Elaine, Arkansas, where more than 200 sharecropper farmers had been killed by white vigilantes and Federal troops in Phillips County. The case had both labor and racial issues. The white militias had come to the town and hunted down blacks after one white man was killed in a shootout at a church where black sharecroppers were meeting on issues related to organizing with an agrarian union.

White was granted credentials from the Chicago Daily News. That enabled him to obtain an interview with Governor Charles Hillman Brough of Arkansas, who in turn gave him a letter of recommendation and his autographed photograph.

White was in Phillips County for only a brief time before his identity was discovered; he took the first train back to Little Rock. The conductor told him that he was leaving "just when the fun is going to start", because they had found out that there was a "damned yellow nigger passing for white and the boys are going to get him." Asked what they would do to him, the conductor told White that, "[W]hen they get through with him he won't pass for white no more!"

White published his findings about the riot and trial in the Daily News, the Chicago Defender and The Nation, as well as the NAACP's own magazine The Crisis. Governor Brough asked the United States Postal Service to prohibit the mailing of the Chicago Defender and Crisis to Arkansas, while others attempted to enjoin distribution of the Defender at the local level.

Later the NAACP put together a legal challenge carried to the Supreme Court that overturned the Elaine convictions and established important precedent. The Supreme Court found that the original trial was held under conditions that adversely affected the defendants' rights. Some of the courtroom audience were armed, as were a mob outside, so there was intimidation of the court and jury. The seventy-nine black defendants had been quickly tried: twelve were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death; 67 were condemned to sentences from 20 years to life. No white man was prosecuted for the many black deaths. ^[5]

Attacks on Paul Robeson

During the Joseph McCarthy era of political repression and persecution, White did not criticize McCarthy’s actions in Congress, as he believed there would be a backlash that would cost the NAACP their tax-exempt status and lead to equating Civil Rights with Soviet Communism.^[6]Yet he also attacked black civil rights forerunner Paul Robeson and alongside Roy Wilkins, editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP), arranged for a ghost-written leaflet to be printed and distributed in Africa; it was called Paul Robeson: Lost Shepherd,^[7], and was penned under the false name of "Robert Alan", whom the NAACP claimed was a "well known New York journalist." Another article by White and Roy Wilkins, called "Stalin's Greatest Defeat", denounced Robeson as well as the Communist Party of the USA in terms consistent with the FBI's information.^[8]

Literary career

Through his cultural interests and his close friendships with white literary power brokers Carl Van Vechten and Alfred A. Knopf, White was one of the founders of the "New Negro" cultural flowering, more popularly known as the "Harlem Renaissance." White was the author of Fire in the Flint (1924), Flight (1926), Rope and Faggot (1929), A Rising Wind (1945), A Man Called White (1948), and How Far the Promised Land (1955). White left unfinished Blackjack, a novel on Harlem life and the career of an African-American boxer.

Awards and honors

In 2002, Molefi Kete Asante listed Walter Francis White on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.^[9]

In September of 2009, it was announced that White would be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.^[10]

References

1. ^ William Jelani Cobb, Past Imperfect: Post Mfume
2. ^ Walter White, A Man Called White
3. ^ ^{a b} Kenneth Robert Janken, Walter White: Mr. NAACP, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006, p.2
4. ^ Brent Staples, Kingsblood Royal:When the Bard of Main Street Turned the Kingsbloods Black, The New York Times, 18 Aug 2002, accessed 12 Apr 2008
5. ^ Walter White, A Man Called White, Reprint, 1995, p.49, accessed 12 Apr 2008
6. ^ Mark Newman, "Civil Rights and Human Rights", review of Carol Andersen's Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, accessed 12 Apr 2008
7. ^ Duberman, Martin. Paul Robeson, 1989, pg 395.
8. ^ Duberman, Martin. Paul Robeson, 1989, pg 396.
9. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.
10. ^ "Writers hall picks four inductees". Online Athens (Athens Banner Herald). September 19, 2009. http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/091909/uga_494743547.shtml. Retrieved 20 September 2009. 

External links

• African American World

Further reading

• Cortner, Richard, A Mob Intent On Death, ISBN 0-8195-5161-9
• Kluger, Richard Simple Justice, ISBN 0-394-72255-8.

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