White, Walter Francis

Impact on the world

Joined the NAACP's national staff in 1918 at age 25 and spent the next decade conducting undercover investigations of more than 40 lynchings and eight race riots across the South, using his blond hair, blue eyes, and fair complexion to pass as a white journalist or salesman and extract candid confessions from lynch mob participants that the NAACP then publicized nationally, work that contributed directly to a documented decline from 67 lynchings the year he joined the organization to just three in the year of his death; he became the NAACP's executive secretary in 1931, leading the organization for 24 years through the Scottsboro case, the successful 1941 push for President Roosevelt's executive order banning discrimination in defense industries, the founding of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund under a young Thurgood Marshall he personally hired, and the litigation strategy that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education, decided the year after his death.

Life & background

Born in Atlanta in 1893 to a postal worker father and former schoolteacher mother, both of mixed racial ancestry that left their son with blond hair, blue eyes, and skin pale enough to pass as white, White later wrote plainly in his own autobiography that he was a Negro despite every visible trait of his race being absent from his appearance; his own racial identity was settled decisively at age 13, when a white mob descended on Atlanta during the 1906 race riot specifically targeting Black homes, and White stood in his family's front parlor holding a shotgun beside his father, prepared to defend his home against the same crowd that, by his own account, would have killed him without hesitation had they known what he actually was. After graduating from Atlanta University in 1916 and organizing a local NAACP chapter to fight school funding cuts affecting Black students, he caught the attention of executive secretary James Weldon Johnson and joined the national staff in New York in 1918, almost immediately undertaking the dangerous undercover investigative work that would define his career; on more than one occasion, mobs that discovered his true racial identity came close to lynching him personally, and during Chicago's 1919 race riot he was nearly shot by a Black man who mistook him, in the chaos, for a white intruder. He successfully blocked the U.S. Senate confirmation of an openly segregationist federal judge to the Supreme Court in 1930, wrote two novels and a widely cited 1929 study of lynching's underlying causes, 'Rope and Faggot,' that earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, and helped organize Marian Anderson's historic 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert after she was barred from a whites-only concert hall. As NAACP executive secretary from 1931 until his 1955 death, he built close personal ties to Eleanor Roosevelt, who joined the organization's board and twice intervened to protect his position, including when his 1949 marriage to a white South African-born woman, following his divorce from his first wife, provoked internal NAACP calls for his resignation that Roosevelt's threat to resign herself ultimately overcame; he maintained throughout that one's choice of spouse was a private matter unrelated to his lifelong public commitment to integration. He personally hired Thurgood Marshall, already profiled in this collection, to lead the NAACP's legal strategy and persuaded President Truman to establish the civil rights commission whose 1947 report directly shaped the legal arguments that would culminate, the year after White's own death, in the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; New Georgia Encyclopedia; NPR (How One Civil Rights Activist Posed as a White Man); History.com; Library of Congress Information Bulletin; Encyclopedia.com; Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project (George Washington University)