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American civil rights activist (1893–1955)

others with the same name
Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 – March 21, 1955) was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for a quarter of a century, from 1929 until 1955. He directed a broad program of legal challenges to racial segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. White first joined the NAACP as an investigator in 1918, at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson. He acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary and traveled to the South to investigate lynchings and race riots. Being fair skinned, at times he was able to pass as white to facilitate his investigations and protect himself in tense situations. White succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP in an acting capacity in 1929, taking over officially in 1931, and led the organization until his death in 1955. He joined the Advisory Council for the Government of the Virgin Islands in 1934, but he resigned in 1935 to protest President Franklin D. Roosevelt's silence at Southern Democrats' blocking of anti lynching legislation to avoid retaliatory obstruction of his New Deal policies. White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. He worked with President Harry S. Truman on desegregating the armed forces after World War II and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this. Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up its Legal Defense Fund, which conducted numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.

Walter was the son of George and Madeline White. By the time he was born, his father had attended Atlanta University, which is still known today as one of the South's historically black colleges, and became a postal worker, an admired position in the federal government. His mother had graduated from the same institution and became a teacher. (She had been briefly married in 1879 to Marshall King, who died the same year. The White family belonged to the influential First Congregational Church, founded after the Civil War by freedmen and the American Missionary Association, based in the North. Of all the black denominations in Georgia, the Congregationalists were among the most socially, politically and financially powerful. All members of his immediate family had fair skin, and his mother, Madeline, was also blue eyed and blonde. The oral history of his mother's family asserts that her maternal grandparents were Dilsia, an enslaved woman concubine, and her owner, William Henry Harrison. Harrison had six children with Dilsia and, much later, was elected president of the United States in 1840, but served for only 31 days. Madeline's mother, Marie Harrison, was one of Dilsia's daughters with Harrison. Held in enslavement in La Grange, Georgia, where she had been sold, Marie became a concubine to Augustus Ware. The wealthy white man bought her a house, had four children with her, and passed on some wealth to them. White and his family identified as Negro and lived among Atlanta's Negro community (despite White and his siblings inheriting a bit less than 16 percent African ancestry and being able to pass as white). George and Madeline White took a kind but firm approach in rearing their children, encouraging hard work and regular schedules. In his autobiography, White relates that his parents ran a strict schedule on Sundays; they locked him in his room for silent prayer, a time so boring that he almost begged to do homework. His father forbade Walter from reading any books less than 25 years old so he chose to read Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope by the time he was 12. When he was 8, he threw a rock at a white child who called him a derogatory name for drinking from the fountain reserved for black people. Du Bois had taught two of White's older siblings at Atlanta University.) At the invitation of activist and writer James Weldon Johnson, 25 year old White moved to New York City. In 1918, he started working at the national headquarters of the NAACP. White began as secretary assistant of the NAACP; Du Bois and other leaders got over their concerns about his youth. White became an undercover agent in investigating lynchings in the South, which were at a peak. With his keen investigative skills and light complexion, White proved to be the NAACP's secret weapon against white mob violence. White passed as white as a NAACP investigator, finding both more safety in hostile environments and gaining free communication with white people in cases of violations of civil and human rights. He sometimes became involved in Klan groups in the South to expose those involved in lynchings and other murders. In the Little Rock, Arkansas, area he escaped on a train, having been harbored by several prominent black families because of threats that a black man "passing for white" was being hunted down to be lynched. The NAACP publicized information about these crimes, but virtually none was ever prosecuted by local or state southern governments. To become a popular leader, White had to compete with the appeal of Marcus Garvey; he learned to display a skillful verbal dexterity. Roy Wilkins, his successor at the NAACP, said, "White was one of the best talkers I've ever heard." Throughout his career, Walter White spoke out against segregation and discrimination but also black nationalism. Most notably, White and Du Bois's 1934 conflict was over the latter's endorsement of black people's voluntary separation within US society.

White married Gladys Powell in 1922. They had two children, Jane White, who became an actress on Broadway and television; and Walter Carl White, who lived in Germany for much of his adult life. The Whites' 27 year marriage ended in divorce in 1949. Because White was a public figure of a noted African American rights organization, he generated great public controversy shortly after his divorce by marrying Poppy Cannon, a divorced white South African woman, who was a magazine editor with connections in the emerging television industry. Many of his black colleagues and acquaintances were offended. Some claimed the leader had always wanted to be white; others said he had always been white. Gladys and their children broke off with White and his second wife. White's sister said that he had wanted all along simply to pass as a white person. According to White's oral history, when Harrison decided to run for president, he concluded that it would not be politically advantageous for him to have "bastard slave children" in his home. So, he gave four of Dilsia's children (including Marie Harrison) to his brother. His brother sold them to Joseph Poythress, one of the earliest white settlers of LaGrange, Georgia.

White used his appearance to increase his effectiveness in conducting investigations of lynchings and race riots in the American South. He could "pass" and talk to white people as one of them, but he could talk to black people as one of them and identified with them. Such work was dangerous: "Through 1927 White would investigate 41 lynchings, 8 race riots, and two cases of widespread peonage, risking his life repeatedly in the backwaters of Florida, the piney woods of Georgia, and in the cotton fields of Arkansas." In his autobiography, A Man Called White, he dedicates an entire chapter to a time when he almost joined the Ku Klux Klan undercover. White became a master of incognito investigating. He started with a letter from a friend who recruited new members of the KKK. After correspondence between him and Edward Young Clark, leader of the KKK, Clark tried to interest White in joining. By then, White had already turned the information over to the U. S. Department of Justice and New York Police Department. Granted press credentials from the Chicago Daily News, White gained an interview with Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough, who would not have met with him as the NAACP representative. Brough gave White a letter of recommendation to help him meet people and his autographed photograph. Learning that his identity was discovered, White was in Phillips County briefly before taking 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 down here passing for white and the boys are going to get him." Asked what they would do to him, the conductor told White, "When they get through with him he won't pass for white no more!" as well as the NAACP's own magazine, The Crisis. Governor Brough asked the United States Postal Service to prohibit mailings of the Chicago Defender and The Crisis to Arkansas, and others tried to get an injunction against distribution of the Defender at the local level. The NAACP provided legal defense of the black men convicted by the state for the riot and carried the case to the U. S. Supreme Court. Its ruling overturned the Elaine convictions and established important precedent about the conduct of trials. 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 was a mob outside, so there was intimidation of the court and jury. The 79 black defendants had been quickly tried and convicted by an all white jury: 12 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 any of the many black deaths.

White was a strong proponent and supporter of federal anti lynching bills, which were unable to surmount the opposition by the Southern Democrats in the Senate. One of White's many surveys showed that 46 of 50 lynchings during the first six months of 1919 were black victims, 10 of whom were burned at the stake. After the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, White, like Ida Wells Barnett, concluded the causes of such violence were not rape of a white woman by a black man, as was often rumored, but rather the result of "prejudice and economic competition." That was also the conclusion of a Chicago city commission, which investigated the 1919 rioting; it noted specifically that ethnic Irish in South Chicago had led the anti black attacks. The Irish were considered highly political and strongly territorial against other groups, including more recent white immigrants from eastern Europe. In the late 1910s, newspapers reported a decreasing number of southern lynchings but postwar violence in Northern and Midwestern cities increased under the competition for work and housing by returning veterans, immigrants and black migrants. In the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of black people were leaving the South for jobs in the North. The Pennsylvania Railroad recruited tens of thousands of workers from Florida alone. Rural violence also continued. White investigated violence in 1918 in Lowndes and Brooks counties, Georgia. The worst case was when "a pregnant black woman [was] tied to a tree and burned alive after which (the mob) split her open, and her child, still alive, was thrown to the ground and stomped by some of the members." White lobbied for federal anti lynching bills during his time as leader of the NAACP. In 1922, the Dyer Anti Lynching Bill was passed overwhelmingly by the House, the "first piece of legislation passed by the House of Representatives since Reconstruction that specifically protected blacks from lynchings." Congress never passed the Dyer bill, as the Senate was controlled by Southerners who opposed it. Black people were then largely disfranchised in southern states, which were politically controlled by white Democrats. At the turn of the 20th century, the state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws and constitutions that effectively created barriers to voter registration and closed black people out of the political process. White sponsored other civil rights legislation, which was also defeated by the Southern bloc: the Castigan Wagner bill of 1935, the Gavagan bill of 1937, and the VanNuys bill of 1940. Southerners had to mount a major political and financial effort to take the Castigan Wagner bill out of consideration and to defeat the Gavagan bill. White also contributed to creating alliances among civil rights activists, many of whom went on to lead in the movement from the 1950s. White criticized singer/activist Paul Robeson, who admitted to pro Soviet leanings. Together with Roy Wilkins, the editor of The Crisis, he arranged for distribution of "Paul Robeson: Lost Shepherd", a leaflet against Robeson, which was written under a pseudonym.

Through his cultural interests and his close friendships with white literary power brokers Carl Van Vechten and Alfred A. Knopf, Sr., White was one of the founders of the "New Negro" cultural flowering. Popularly known as the Harlem Renaissance, the period was one of intense literary and artistic production. Harlem became the center of black American intellectual and artistic life. It attracted creative people from across the nation, as did New York City in general. Writer Zora Neale Hurston accused Walter White of stealing her designed costumes from her play The Great Day. White never returned the costumes to Hurston, who repeatedly asked for them by mail. After Hattie McDaniel was the first African American to win an Oscar, the 1939 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Gone with the Wind and beating Olivia de Havilland, White accused her of being an Uncle Tom. McDaniel responded that she would "rather make seven hundred dollars a week playing a maid than seven dollars being one"; she further questioned White's qualification to speak on behalf of blacks, since he was light skinned and only one eighth black. White was the author of critically acclaimed novels: Fire in the Flint (1924) and Flight (1926). His non fiction book Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929) was a study of lynching. Additional books were A Rising Wind (1945, which inspired Nevil Shute to write the popular novel The Chequer Board two years later), his autobiography A Man Called White (1948), and How Far the Promised Land (1955). Unfinished at his death was Blackjack, a novel on Harlem life and the career of an African American boxer.

1927 – White received the Harmon Award (William E. Harmon Foundation Award for Distinguished Achievement among Negroes) for his book Rope and Faggot: An Interview with Judge Lynch, a study of lynching. 1937 – Awarded the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP, for outstanding achievement by an African American. 2002 – Molefi Kete Asante listed Walter Francis White on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans. 2009 – White was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

At the age of 61, White died of a heart attack in New York City on March 21, 1955.