For Walter White, growing up as black and being able to “pass” as white allowed him to take on two identities that helped him in his work with the NAACP to speak out against racial injustice in the United States.
White was born with blond hair and blue eyes in 1893 in Atlanta, Georgia to a family descended from enslaved blacks and white plantation owners. He grew up in a time when the “one drop” rule was enforced – a law that categorized anyone with a drop of black blood in the family line as a black person, even if they had a much higher percentage of black blood. European ancestry. Despite his European lineage, the future civil rights activist grew up as an African-American man. His mother and father, both born into slavery, became middle class, earning college degrees and working as a teacher and postman respectively.
White came to realize that, despite his pale skin, he was “a Negro, a human being with invisible pigmentation that made me a person to be hunted, hanged, abused, discriminated against, kept in poverty and ignorance so that those whose skin was white would have proof of their superiority easily at hand,” as he wrote in his 1948 autobiography, A man called white.
White’s family faces attack in Atlanta race massacre
His identity as a black man was never clearer than on September 22, 1906, the first day of the Atlanta Race Massacre. The carnage unfolded when a white mob, increasingly fearful that ascendant mobile black residents were threatening the Jim Crow social order, killed dozens of African Americans following unsubstantiated allegations of assaults on white women by black men.
White, in his memoirs, recalled his father being told that a white mob was heading for the house where “it [n—] the postman lives” to burn it. While his mother and sisters hid in the back of the house, White, 13, held a shotgun in the living room with his father, ready to target any intruders. The mob retreated before attacking White’s home, but after the riot White swore he would always resist racial oppression.
Jelani Cobb, New Yorker writer and professor at Columbia Journalism School, says White’s identity was shaped by a long tradition of “willing Negroes”, a term coined by black history scholar David Levering Lewis. “White was shaped by his background in Atlanta, his black neighborhood and his black church,” says Cobb. “Her family has also made a political choice never to hide or dodge her identity or treat her as shameful.”
White investigates the lynchings
After graduating from Atlanta University, White lobbied to save a black public high school and started a local NAACP chapter, when his work caught the attention of NAACP founder WEB Du Bois and of Executive Secretary James Weldon Johnson. He was soon offered a job as assistant secretary at NAACP headquarters in New York.
The United States was in the midst of a lynching plague when White arrived in New York in 1918. The NAACP had recorded 3,224 lynchings between 1889 and 1918, mostly targeting African Americans. White barely had two weeks to settle into her new job before leaving for Tennessee to investigate a lynching. From there, White, as he writes, “began a phase of work for the association which neither she nor I had contemplated when I was employed”.
Investigating the riots was a dangerous mission. To go unnoticed, White often pretended to be a white salesman or a white reporter, depending on the circumstances. For one of his first operations, investigating the hangings of 10 men, as well as the brutal lynching of a pregnant black woman, White casually hired a local shopkeeper whom he suspected of having participated in the murder.
“As his manners became more and more friendly, I dared to mention the recent lynchings with caution. He became instantly cautious – until I hinted that I had great admiration for the manly spirit shown by the men of the city,” White recalled in a 1929 article for American Mercury. Once the shopkeeper felt in good company, he freely shared his racist beliefs and his joy at the woman’s lynching, White added.
During the Red Summer of 1919, White posed as a white Chicago reporter while investigating a racial massacre in Arkansas when he received a warning from a fellow black man who knew his true identity. Word had spread, he was told, and a white mob was pursuing him. White caught the next train out of town. Staff at the NAACP office, who had heard that White had been lynched, sighed with relief when they saw him return.
A complicated legacy
Walter White, former executive secretary of the NAACP, gives his opinion on an anti-lynching bill before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, circa 1940.
Bettmann/Getty Images
In 1931, White took over as executive secretary of the NAACP, urging President Franklin D. Roosevelt and later President Harry Truman to issue statements against lynching and segregation. Most notably, White launched an ambitious agenda during his tenure that aimed to turn the tide for black Americans through Congress and the courtrooms.
He hired a young Thurgood Marshall to defend wrongfully accused blacks against charges of inciting race riots, empowering Marshall to create the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, filing lawsuits to desegregate government offices, the army and public schools, eventually leading to the revolutionary affair. Brown v. Board of Education.
In 1955, White died aged 61 of a heart attack, leaving behind a complicated legacy. He may have made strides in racial justice, but his ability to straddle both racial lines at his convenience has remained controversial among some African Americans.
“Soon after White’s death, a new generation of African-American leaders emerged, and for these leaders his pale complexion was an inconvenience,” AJ Baime wrote in White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret. But the impact of White’s civil rights work was reflected in the many tributes he received upon his death.
As New York’s African American newspaper Amsterdam news wrote: “White’s arrogant aggression stayed with him as long as he lived, as did his childhood vanity. But it’s those same qualities that have helped make him the best lobbyist our race has ever produced, and one of the best of any race.”
