Walter White

American civil rights leader

• Born: July 1, 1893
• Birthplace: Atlanta, Georgia
• Died: March 21, 1955
• Place of death: New York, New York

As the chief administrator of the NAACP during many of its formative years, White helped pave the way for the monumental changes that advanced U.S. civil rights and race relations in the second half of the twentieth century.

Early Life

Walter White, born in Atlanta, Georgia, had in many ways a youth that differed from that of Atlanta’s other black children. One of seven children born into a religiously devout middle-class family, he apparently experienced few material hardships. His father, who worked as a mail carrier, provided for his family a commodious and well-maintained home not far from Atlanta’s downtown area. A family library exposed Walter to many of the great books and gave him an appreciation for literature that influenced him throughout his life. Attending grade school at Atlanta University afforded him an opportunity for formal education beyond the eight grades of public schooling open to the city’s other black youths. He graduated college at the same institution in 1916.

In other ways, life for White in Atlanta paralleled that of other southern black people. Although White was blond, blue-eyed, and so fair-skinned that he could pass for white, he refused to do so and was himself subjected to Jim Crow indignities. Raised in an era when color and race truly mattered, White witnessed daily how the system emasculated black people. More traumatic, he experienced the terror of violent racism so frequently experienced by black people in the early twentieth century South.

In 1906 tensions in Atlanta erupted into bloody racial conflict. White Atlantans were already on emotional edge because of demagogue politicians who blatantly raised the “Negro question” for political advantage, and the effects of a rivalry for subscription between daily newspapers that preyed on their fears with sensational or fabricated stories of the so-called black rapist did not help matters. Whites vented their anger after the showing of D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation further charged the atmosphere. During the evening of the outbreak, White had accompanied his father on his mail route and witnessed several black people being victimized in the rioting. The two escaped the wrath of the mob because of their near-white skin color and thus moved through the streets unmolested. More knowledgeable Caucasians, however, knew that they were African Americans, and, on a subsequent night of rioting, a mob gathered in front of their home to burn them out. However, thirteen-year-old White and his father had armed themselves and came close to firing on the frenzied crowd before neighbors interceded to prevent the Whites from losing their home or killing someone in the mob.

This violent outbreak deeply affected White. The Atlanta riot helped him through an identity crisis largely caused by his white physical features in what was “legally” a black body. After the event, White claimed to have understood and willingly accepted the reality of who he was. More important, the riot awakened in him a desire to prevent similar acts of lawlessness against African Americans. In many ways, this event, punctuated with subsequent random acts of violence against black people, helped to lay the foundation for a lifetime of service to the cause of civil rights.

Life’s Work

White’s accomplishments in this regard essentially began in 1919 when he accepted National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) executive secretaryJames Weldon Johnson’s offer of a job in the were chosen headquarters as his assistant. White had impressed Johnson as someone possessing good administrative skills and leadership potential during a recent visit to Atlanta in support of a local campaign to improve black education conditions. Although White had played only a minor role in the campaign, he quickly gained recognition as a gifted speaker and talented organizer.

From the outset of his association with the organization, White’s work involved efforts to eradicate lynching. One of the nation’s most disgraceful practices, especially prevalent in the South, lynching had been a perennial problem since the Reconstruction era. Between 1900 and 1919, nearly thirteen hundred African Americans had been victims of this form of vigilante justice; seventy-six lynchings occurred during the year that White joined the NAACP staff. As a Georgian, White was already sensitized to the problem. His antilynching efforts virtually became a personal crusade and easily dovetailed with years of NAACP campaigning to end the practice. He visited dozens of sites of some of the more horrific crimes and came close to becoming a victim himself while investigating the Helena, Arkansas, race riot during the 1919 Red Summer. He also spent a considerable amount of official time assisting in the drafting of legislative bills, testifying before congressional committees, and lobbying Congress for passage of federal antilynching laws. He influenced the introduction and passage of bills in the House of Representatives in 1935 and 1940, only to see them die in the Senate.

White’s crusade against lynching failed to produce federal legislation outlawing the practice, though he worked doggedly for it until 1949. Gradually, however, lynching declined nationally as the appeal to the reason of potential vigilantes by numerous antilynching advocates, including journalists and organizations, began to pay off. In 1929, for example, seven black people were murdered by lynchers, the lowest number since systematic record-keeping began in 1882 at the Tuskegee Institute. By then White had become a leading authority on lynching, as was made evident by his 1929 book Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch . Although its focus was an analysis on the causes of lynching causes that White maintained included economic, political, social, religious, and sexual factors his book was a telling, though predictable, indictment against the practice. Its publication, however, reflected a lifelong interest in literature. Prior to the appearance of Rope and Faggot, White had already published two novels, Fire in the Flint (1924) and Flight (1926). The two books, which dealt with themes consistent with the literary outpouring of the 1920’s Harlem Renaissance race conflict, color, and identity brought White international recognition as a talented fiction writer. In the last decade of his life, three other books followed, one of which was an autobiography.

White’s novels helped to validate his place in the black intellectual movement, but they were merely interludes in his larger civil rights career. Even the weekly newspaper columns and numerous journal articles that he published largely concerned improving the status of black Americans. White’s opportunity to play a broader, more significant role in this regard began in 1930 when he served as the NAACP’s acting executive secretary and permanently succeeded Johnson the next year. Only the second African American to hold the NAACP’s top position, White led the organization until his death in 1955.

White’s tenure encompassed some of the organization’s greatest civil rights accomplishments and certainly its most significant judicial triumphs. Almost from the outset in his new position, White orchestrated a national campaign that prevented confirmation of President Herbert Hoover’s appointee, Judge John J. Parker, a North Carolina segregationist and opponent of black voting rights, to the U.S. Supreme Court. The success helped to enhance White’s reputation as a persuasive leader capable of influencing Congress in areas besides lynching. His involvement in formulating strategy in the support and legal defense of the nine famous Scottsboro boys falsely accused in two 1932 Alabamarape cases helped to focus international attention on southern injustice and prevented their execution and perhaps lynching if not their release from jail.

White guided the NAACP to the courts in its larger efforts to resolve racial discrimination and civil rights violations. A string of legal assaults addressing voting rights, which actually began prior to White’s administration, culminated with a major Supreme Court decision in 1944 to declare all forms of the white Democratic primary unconstitutional. During much of White’s tenure, the NAACP devoted considerable attention to breaking barriers of Jim Crow education, an area of interest that initiated his involvement in civil rights. The organization launched and won numerous lawsuits in the 1930’s and 1940’s that mandated pay equalization for black teachers in the South. During the same period, several cases backed by White’s behind-the-scene management and litigated by a team of talented NAACP lawyers (including Charles Houston, William Hastie, and Thurgood Marshall) won decisions that opened professional and graduate education for black students in southern white universities. The most notable victories were Thomas Hocutt’s 1933 right to enter the University of Maryland’s Pharmacy School, a 1938 Supreme Court decision to admit Lloyd Gaines into the University of Missouri Law School, and Ada Lou Sipuel’s similar admission into the University of Oklahoma in 1948. These education advances set the stage for the most far-reaching legal decision under White’s tenure, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that declared segregated public schools unconstitutional and affected virtually every aspect of American life.

Politically, White supported Democrats Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. He saw in Roosevelt’s New Deal program real opportunity for black progress. However, as a part of the NAACP’s dual agenda to fight for social welfare and economic justice for all people as well as black civil rights, he lobbied against some New Deal legislation that clearly excluded or discriminated against African Americans in employment, housing, and social security programs. Understandably, he played a leading role in the effort to acquire fair employment for black people in World War II defense plants, pushed for greater involvement of black soldiers as combatants in the war, and supported Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces.

Significance

More than any other organization, the NAACP changed the South and thereby the state of U.S. race relations. Among the many leaders identified with this group, perhaps none played a more significant role in facilitating these changes than White. He worked with other national and political leaders, managed behind the scenes, and used any available public forum to advance the rights of all Americans, especially African Americans. His interests, however, transcended the plight of black people in the United States as he supported ideas of Pan-Africanism, championed economic development in the Western Hemisphere, urged decolonization and independence movements in parts of West Africa, and served as an adviser to the United Nations delegation of the United States between 1945 and 1948. In many ways White was a precursor to the later reformers who sought to advance international human rights. It was, however, his stable and dedicated leadership of the NAACP, often overshadowed by the courtroom successes of his legal teams, that ultimately paved the way for many of the important civil rights gains that black people achieved during the twentieth century and that solidified his name as an enduring legacy.

Bibliography

Berg, Manfred. The Ticket to Freedom: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Berg chronicles the NAACP’s contributions to the cause of civil rights and describes the efforts of White and other association leaders.

Hamilton, Dona Cooper, and Charles V. Hamilton. The Dual Agenda: Race and Social Welfare Policies of Civil Rights Organizations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. A valuable study of the efforts of civil rights organizations, especially the NAACP, to insure economic justice and social welfare for the poor, regardless of race.

Janken, Kenneth Robert. White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP. New York: New Press, 2003. This is the first book-length biography of White, and it is a comprehensive account of his life and career, portraying White in all his complexity.

Jonas, Gilbert. Freedom’s Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle Against Racism in America, 1909-1969. New York: Routledge, 2005. This history of the NAACP includes discussion of White and his tenure with the organization.

Schneider, Mark. We Return Fighting: The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002. This history of the civil rights movement during the 1920’s contains information on White and other NAACP leaders.

Sitkoff, Harvard. A New Deal for Blacks; The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. A path-breaking book when it was published, Sitkoff’s book contains numerous references to White, the NAACP, and New Deal issues.

Tushnet, Mark V. The NAACP Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925-1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. A law professor’s brief look at how the NAACP legally undermined segregated public education prior to the momentous 1954 Supreme Court decision.

White, Walter. A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White. Reprint. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Although this book is a good beginning to understanding White, especially the influences on his early life, it lacks real details on some of the major issues that consumed him.

Wilkins, Roy, with Tom Matthews. Standing Tall: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins. New York: Da Capo, 1994. A revealing account of the life and times of White’s longtime subordinate and eventual successor as NAACP executive secretary.

Zangrando, Robert. The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. Zangrando’s book is one of the best publications detailing the work of the NAACP, and hence the efforts of White, on the subject of lynching. Contains valuable statistical data on lynchings.