Walter Francis White

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For the football player of the same name see Walter White (football player).

Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893, Atlanta, Georgia - March 21, 1955, New York, New York) was a spokesman for blacks in the United States for almost a quarter of a century 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]

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.^[2]

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

1 Personal Life
2 NAACP
- 2.1 Investigating riots and lynchings
3 Literary career
4 Citations
5 External links
6 Further reading

[edit] 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, an 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. For twenty-five years he had been the most influential African American in public affairs.

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." All of his family was light-skinned, and his mother was also blue-eyed and blonde. ^[3] 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.^[4]

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.^[5]

[edit] NAACP

[edit] 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.^[6]

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 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. ^[7]

[edit] 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.