Walter Francis White was an African-American civil rights activist. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. He graduated in 1916 from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a historically black college.
Background
Walter Francis White was born on July 1, 1893 in Atlanta, the son of George W. and Madeline Harrison White. His father, a letter carrier, was a native of Augusta; his mother, who came from the cotton-mill town of Lagrange, Ga. , had been a schoolteacher before her marriage. The White household was distinctive for its intense religiosity (the family belonged to the Congregational Church). George White was one-fourth Negro, and his wife one-sixteenth. Walter White was blond, blue-eyed, and like the rest of his family, so fair-skinned that he could easily have passed for white. Yet he chose otherwise. The issue of racial identification was joined in all its terror during the Atlanta riot of 1906, when White crouched beside his father, gun in hand, beneath the darkened windows of their home, as a white mob approached outside. "In that instant there opened up within me a great awareness; I knew then who I was. I was a Negro, a human being with an invisible pigmentation which marked me as a person to be hunted, hanged, abused, discriminated against, kept in poverty and ignorance. .. ".
Education
Because the state of Georgia denied blacks access to public high schools, Walter White attended the preparatory school of Atlanta University and graduated from the college division in 1916.
Career
Declining the principalship of a missionary school in Albany, Ga. , he went to work as a clerk at the Standard Life Insurance Company, where he was quickly promoted to cashier. When the Atlanta Board of Education announced plans to eliminate the seventh grade from black schools in order to finance construction of a new white high school, White became involved in organizing a protest against the move. He took the lead in establishing a branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Atlanta and was elected secretary at its founding in December 1916. The school protest succeeded, and White attracted the attention of NAACP field secretary James Weldon Johnson. On January 31, 1918, he began work as assistant secretary on the national staff in New York. White subsequently investigated more than forty lynchings and eight race riots, often at the risk of his life. His color proved to be an advantage: posing as a white reporter for the New York Evening Post or the Chicago Daily News, he could move freely in southern towns, persuading local whites to speak frankly about racial tensions. These investigations made White an authority on lynching, and while the NAACP tried futilely to win passage of the Dyer bill making lynching a federal crime, White publicized its brutality in magazine articles and in a moving novel, The Fire in the Flint (1924). On the strength of this book and his second novel, Flight (1926), which dealt with the theme of passing for white, White won a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing in 1927-1928. He intended to write a novel chronicling the lives of three generations of blacks but found himself too absorbed in pressing problems and instead produced Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929), a study of the complex forces behind lynching. In 1929, when James Weldon Johnson took a leave of absence from the NAACP, White became acting secretary. He directed the association's successful 1930 fight against the confirmation of John J. Parker, President Herbert Hoover's nominee for the Supreme Court, who had years earlier spoken against black political participation. When Johnson resigned from the association in 1931, White was promoted to executive secretary. During the next quarter-century, White led the association's campaign to secure antilynching legislation. Although the Wagner-Costigan and Gavagan bills won acceptance in the House in 1934 and 1937, respectively, both failed in the Senate. Yet White's ceaseless publicity of the horrors of lynching probably helped to undermine southern acceptance of the practice; in any case lynchings became increasingly rare. In 1937 White won the Spingarn Medal for distinguished achievement among blacks, in recognition of his work in investigating and publicizing racial violence and in lobbying for antilynching legislation. Under White's leadership the NAACP also embarked on its most important legal battles: against white primaries and poll taxes, residential segregation, and segregation and discrimination in education. Acknowledged as "one of the ablest lobbyists in the Capital" and "the most potent leader of his race in the U. S. ," White played a key role in pressing for presidential action on behalf of black rights. Together with union leader A. Philip Randolph, he persuaded Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue an executive order in 1941 prohibiting discrimination in defense industries and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission. In 1946 he led a delegation to the White House to impress upon Harry S. Truman the gravity of the race problem. At White's suggestion, Truman appointed the President's Committee on Civil Rights, whose report formed the basis of the controversial 1948 Democratic platform plank on civil rights. Accredited as a war correspondent by the New York Post, White traveled to the European, North African, and Pacific theaters to investigate discrimination against black soldiers. His findings, published in A Rising Wind (1945), helped to build a case for Truman's 1948 executive order desegregating the armed forces. Convinced that the race problem was not limited to the United States, White also concerned himself with the international situation of colored peoples. He served as a delegate to the Second Pan-African Congress in 1921, as a member of the Advisory Council for the government of the Virgin Islands in 1934-1935, and as an adviser to the United States delegation to the United Nations at its founding conference at San Francisco in 1945 and at the General Assembly meeting in Paris in 1948. He took an active interest in the affairs of the West Indies and India, and he traveled around the world lecturing on race relations. Believing that racial friction stemmed principally from "ignorance of even the most obvious facts about the Negro in the United States, " White published widely in national magazines and wrote two weekly newspaper columns, one for the Chicago Defender and the other syndicated in eight major white papers. The most celebrated conflict pitted White against NAACP founder and longtime Crisis editor W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois used the NAACP's magazine to advocate economic self-sufficiency through racial separatism - ideas that were anathema to White, who believed firmly in full equality and integration and who refused any compromise with segregation. Besides resenting the NAACP's failure to allow Crisis the autonomy he believed it deserved, Du Bois chafed especially at direction from White, whom he accused of confusing his personal interests with the interests of all blacks and of being unable to understand the black problem, since he was not really colored. The result was Du Bois's resignation from the association in 1934 and the strengthening of White's position. When Du Bois's professorship at Atlanta University was abruptly terminated in 1944, he was rehired by the association at White's instigation; but when Du Bois charged publicly that White's political involvements were compromising NAACP policy, he was dismissed by the board in 1948. A second major power struggle in the association in 1949-1950 ended less successfully for White. The long-smoldering discontent of some branch leaders over their limited power and influence erupted in a protest over White's autocratic method of running the association and his self-aggrandizement through lecture tours and column writing - while supposedly working full time for the NAACP. After considerable controversy, the NAACP board retained White as secretary but limited his extensive powers, delegating financial management and supervision of the office to his assistant secretary, Roy Wilkins. White retained the post until his death, in New York City.
Achievements
He led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for almost a quarter of a century, 1931–1955, after starting with the organization as an investigator in 1918. He directed a broad program of legal challenges to racial segregation and disfranchisement. 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.
Sociable, courteous, and warm-hearted in personal relations, White commanded the respect and affection of countless blacks who perceived him as a savior. But as an administrator he could be tough, arrogant, ambitious, prone to vanity and egotism, and autocratic, which generated friction within the NAACP staff.
Connections
He was married twice. He divorced in 1949 from his black wife and the mother of his two children, Leah Gladys Powell, whom he had married on Feburary 15, 1922, and married on July 6, 1949, to Poppy Cannon, a white writer, food editor, and advertising executive.
