White, Walter Francis

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White, Walter Francis 1893–1955

Walter Francis White, born on July 1, 1893, in Atlanta, Georgia, was at the critical age of sixteen when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909. He was positioned to play a vital role in its future. He grew up in a middle-class family; his father, George, a postman, and his mother, Madeline, a school teacher, were both so light in complexion they could pass for white. Walter himself had blue eyes and blond hair, which sometimes belied his African-American ancestry.

His family complexion offered him little comfort: It was considered “too light” by blacks and “suspiciously too dark” by whites. The family often walked rather than ride in public transportation—if they rode in the black conveyances, blacks would mistake them for white, and vice versa. But there was one major advantage for a political activist: White was the perfect person to infiltrate and investigate the atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

Walter White learned about the violence of racism at an early age. At thirteen, he found himself standing in front of his home with his father, with guns cocked trying to protect their property from a white mob intent on burning all the homes in black neighborhoods. This was the Atlanta race riot of 1906.

With no high schools for blacks in Atlanta at the time, Walter attended the private high school established within the campus of Atlanta University. When he graduated from Atlanta University in 1916, his first job out of college was selling life insurance for Standard Life, a major African-American company in Atlanta. He organized the first chapter of the NAACP in Atlanta and used its leverage to force the city of Atlanta to improve public facilities for African Americans. Because of the effectiveness of his efforts in Atlanta, James Weldon Johnson, the first African-American general secretary of the NAACP and author of the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” secured a position for White as assistant to the organization’s chief administrative officer in 1918.

White came to the NAACP with some knowledge and experience of the social situation of blacks in the Deep South. In 1919 White was sent to investigate what was known as the Elaine race riot in Phillips County, Arkansas. White published his undercover findings about the riot in the Daily News, the Chicago Defender, the Nation, and the NAACP’s Crisis magazine. He went on to investigate more than forty-one lynchings, eight race riots, and dozens of KKK cross burnings, posing as a white reporter who wanted to give the South’s side of the story. At one point he was even invited to join the Ku Klux Klan. One southern sheriff gave him a badge and a gun and took him along on hunts for blacks. As the NAACP executive secretary, White tried relentlessly—and unsuccessfully—to persuade congressmen to pass an anti-lynching law. Anti-lynching laws that were proposed in the House of Representatives were reported out of committee, passed by the full House, and ultimately defeated via filibusters in the Senate. Southern senators, in particular, argued that anti-lynching laws violated state’s rights.

In Helena, Arkansas, while White was on his way to interview Negroes jailed for joining a sharecroppers’ union, he learned that a mob planned to ambush and lynch him. The white conductor of the northbound train wondered why White (who was now desperate to get out of town) would leave and thus miss the execution of plans to lynch a Negro passing through town. This episode formed the basis for his book Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch, published in 1929. In 1926 White had published The Fire in the Flint and Flight, and later he wrote What Caused the Detroit Riot? (1943), A Rising Wind (1945), an autobiography, A Man Called White (1948), Civil Rights: Fifty Years of Fighting (1950), and How Far the Promised Land? (1955).

In addition to pushing for anti-lynching measures and writing books, White was involved in various initiatives throughout his tenure as head of the NAACP. He met many of the influential writers of the Harlem Renaissance and assisted in breaking down barriers for them. White also worked tirelessly to bring about civil rights legislation. When President Herbert Hoover nominated John P. Parker, who had publicly renounced voting rights for blacks, to the Supreme Court, White testified before the Senate Judicial Committee and launched a letter-writing campaign against his nomination. Parker’s nomination was defeated in the Senate; Hoover, however, refused to remove Parker from consideration and consequently alienated many blacks. His action contributed to the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s winning the nomination for president in 1932. White developed a strategy to attack racial discrimination at its roots when he started to fight for blacks’ right to vote and to be admitted to professional and graduate schools in state universities, and for equal pay for black teachers in public schools.

White urged President Roosevelt to extend Social Security benefits to agricultural and domestic workers and to amend the National Labor Relations Act to prohibit union discrimination. He supported A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington campaign in 1940 and 1941. He took on racial stereotypes in the entertainment industry and helped to quell race riots in Detroit and Harlem. In the last ten years of his life, White witnessed the outlawing of restrictive covenants in real estate deeds—for which the NAACP had fought for more than thirty years—and the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, which desegregated public schools on May 17, 1954.

His accomplishments notwithstanding, White was not without his critics. He clashed with W. E. B. Du Bois because, like other leading black intellectuals, some of whom were critical of the NAACP, he opposed his notion of “black economic self-determination,” believing it was contrary to the integrationist aims of the NAACP. Other critics argued that White was too close to FDR’s New Deal and was not able to parlay his support for FDR’s initiatives into tangible gains for the NAACP. There were also those who believed White’s autocratic leadership style caused him not to recognize other organizations and leaders as potential allies. However, White’s body of work shows a man dedicated and committed to bringing all blacks fully into the mainstream of American life. Where his efforts failed, it was not because of lack of commitment to his causes but because the obstacles were insurmountable at the time. Congress never had any intention to pass a federal law against lynching, for example, despite the moral clarity of White’s position.

White was the recipient of several awards and honors throughout his long tenure at the NAACP, including a Guggenheim Fellowship early in his career and the 1937 Spingarn Medal. And because of his indefatigable work against lynching, Time magazine named him its “man of the year” in 1938. White died of a heart attack on March 21, 1955, in New York at the age of sixty-two.

SEE ALSO Ku Klux Klan; NAACP.