Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 – March 21, 1955) was [a visually white Black] American civil rights activist who led the
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#blackmen #blackpeople #blackamerican #visuallywhite #blacktivists #blackessayists #blackjournalists #blacknovelists #blackmastodon
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for a quarter of a century, from 1929 until 1955. He directed a broad program of legal challenges to racial segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist
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White first joined the NAACP as an investigator in 1918, at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson. He acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary and traveled to the South to investigate lynchings and race riots. Being light-skinned, at times he was able to pass as
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white to facilitate his investigations and protect himself in tense situations. White succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP in an acting capacity in 1929, taking over officially in 1931, and led the organization until his death in 1955. He
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joined the Advisory Council for the Government of the Virgin Islands in 1934, but he resigned in 1935 to protest President Franklin D. Roosevelt's silence at Southern Democrats' blocking of anti-lynching legislation to avoid retaliatory obstruction of his New Deal
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policies.
White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. He worked with President Harry S. Truman on desegregating the armed forces after World War II... Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up its Legal Defense Fund,
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which conducted numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal...
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Early life
He attended the Atlanta public schools, finished the Atlanta University high school in 1912, and the college there in the class of 1916. This period of study enabled White to spend eight years in the old Atlanta's unusual atmosphere at its zenith. There he was
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exposed to instruction which had been enriched by a decade of W. E. B. Du Bois' research...
Of mixed race, with African and European ancestry on both sides, White appeared to be of European descent. He emphasized in his autobiography, A Man Called White: "I am a Negro.
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My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me." Of his 32 great-great-great-grandparents, only five were [Black], and the other 27 were white. All members of his immediate family had fair skin, and his mother,
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Madeline, was also blue-eyed and blonde. The oral history of his mother's family asserts that her maternal grandparents were Dilsia, an enslaved woman concubine, and her owner, William Henry Harrison. Harrison had six children with Dilsia and, much later, was elected
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president of the United States in 1840, but served for only 31 days. Madeline's mother, Marie Harrison, was one of Dilsia's daughters with Harrison. Held in enslavement in La Grange, Georgia, where she had been sold, Marie became a concubine to Augustus Ware. The
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wealthy white man bought her a house, had four children with her, and passed on some wealth to them. White and his family identified as Negro and lived among Atlanta's Negro community (despite White and his siblings inheriting a bit less than 16 percent [Black] African
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ancestry and being able to pass as white).
George and Madeline White took a kind but firm approach in rearing their children, encouraging hard work and regular schedules. In his autobiography, White relates that his parents ran a strict schedule on Sundays; they locked
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him in his room for silent prayer, a time so boring that he almost begged to do homework. His father forbade Walter from reading any books less than 25 years old so he chose to read Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope by the time he was 12. When he was 8, he threw a
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rock at a white child who called him a derogatory name for drinking from the fountain reserved for [Black People]. Events such as this shaped White's self-identity. He began to develop skills to pass for white, which he used later to preserve his safety as a civil rights
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activist in the South.
Career
White was educated at Atlanta University, a historically [Black College]. W. E. B. Du Bois had already moved to the North before White enrolled, but Du Bois knew White's parents well. Du Bois had taught two of White's older siblings at
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Atlanta University. Du Bois and Walter White later disagreed about how best to gain civil rights for [Black People], but they shared a vision for the country...
After graduating in 1916, White took a position with the Standard Life Insurance Company, one of the new and
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most successful businesses started by [Black People] in Atlanta.
He also worked to organize a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been founded in 1909. He and other leaders were successful in getting the
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Atlanta School Board to support improving education for [Black Children], who were taught in segregated schools, which were traditionally underfunded by the white-dominated legislature. (Black [People] had been effectively disfranchised at the turn of the century by
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Georgia's passage of a new constitution making voter registration more difficult, as did all the other former Confederate states.)
White in 1918
At the invitation of activist and writer James Weldon Johnson, 25-year-old White moved to New York City. In 1918, he started
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working at the national headquarters of the NAACP. White began as secretary assistant of the NAACP; Du Bois and other leaders got over their concerns about his youth. White became an undercover agent in investigating lynchings in the South, which were at a peak.
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With his keen investigative skills and light complexion, White proved to be the NAACP's secret weapon against white mob violence.
White passed as white as an NAACP investigator, finding both more safety in hostile environments and gaining free communication with
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white people in cases of violations of civil and human rights. He sometimes became involved in Klan groups in the South to expose those involved in lynchings and other murders. In the Little Rock, Arkansas, area he escaped on a train, having been harbored by
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several prominent [Black Families] because of threats that a [Black Man] "passing for white" was being hunted down to be lynched...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_White_(NAACP)
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Audubon Ballroon (he/him)