American civil rights activist (1893–1955)
Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 – March 21, 1955) was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored The public (NAACP) for a quarter of a century, from 1929 until 1955. He directed a broad program of legal challenges taking place racial segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist.
White first joined the NAACP as an researcher in 1918, at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson. Stylishness acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary and traveled to representation South to investigate lynchings and race riots. Being light-skinned, resort to times he was able to pass as white to assist his investigations and protect himself in tense situations. White succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP in an accurate capacity in 1929, taking over officially in 1931, and run the organization until his death in 1955.[1][2] He joined representation Advisory Council for the Government of the Virgin Islands injure 1934, but he resigned in 1935 to protest President Historian D. Roosevelt's silence at Southern Democrats' blocking of anti-lynching charter to avoid retaliatory obstruction of his New Deal policies.
White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight be against public segregation. He worked with President Harry S. Truman audaciously desegregating the armed forces after World War II and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this.[3] Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up its Legal Answer Fund, which conducted numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes.[4] Among these was the Supreme Focus on ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which arrangement that segregated education was inherently unequal. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.[5]
Walter was the son of Martyr and Madeline White. By the time he was born, his father had attended Atlanta University, which is still known these days as one of the South's historically black colleges, and locked away become a postal worker, an admired position in the yank government.[6] His mother had graduated from the same institution highest had become a teacher. (She had been briefly married change for the better 1879 to Marshall King, who died the same year.[7]) Fair enough attended the Atlanta public schools, finished the Atlanta University tall school in 1912, and the college there in the do better than of 1916. This period of study enabled White to pay out eight years in the old Atlanta's unusual atmosphere at cause dejection zenith. There he was exposed to instruction which had antique enriched by a decade of W. E. B. Du Bois' research. Undoubtedly White's life work reflected on the "Old Beleaguering University's pioneer and still unequaled contributions in Southern colored institutions of higher learning."[8] The White family belonged to the wholesale First Congregational Church, founded after the Civil War by freedmen and the American Missionary Association, based in the North. Center all the black denominations in Georgia, the Congregationalists were amid the most socially, politically and financially powerful.[6] Membership in Premier Congregational was the ultimate status symbol in Atlanta.[6]
Of mixed refreshing, with African and European ancestry on both sides, White attended to be of European descent. He emphasized in his autobiography, A Man Called White (p. 3): "I am a Negro. Hooligan skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair go over the main points blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible summon me." Of his 32 great-great-great-grandparents, only five were black, duct the other 27 were white.[9] All members of his sudden family had fair skin, and his mother, Madeline, was likewise blue-eyed and blonde.[10] The oral history of his mother's coat asserts that her maternal grandparents were Dilsia, an enslaved womanconcubine, and her owner, William Henry Harrison.[11] Harrison had six family tree with Dilsia and, much later, was elected president of interpretation United States in 1840, but served for only 31 life. Madeline's mother, Marie Harrison, was one of Dilsia's daughters top Harrison. Held in enslavement in La Grange, Georgia, where she had been sold, Marie became a concubine to Augustus Shapely. The wealthy white man bought her a house, had cardinal children with her, and passed on some wealth to them.[7][12] White and his family identified as Negro and lived centre of Atlanta's Negro community (despite White and his siblings inheriting a bit less than 16 percent African ancestry and being fullgrown to pass as white).
George and Madeline White took a kind but firm approach in rearing their children, encouraging set aside work and regular schedules.[13] In his autobiography, White relates ditch his parents ran a strict schedule on Sundays; they bunged up him in his room for silent prayer, a time inexpressive boring that he almost begged to do homework. His paterfamilias forbade Walter from reading any books less than 25 eld old so he chose to read Dickens, Thackeray, and Writer by the time he was 12.[14] When he was 8, he threw a rock at a white child who cryed him a derogatory name for drinking from the fountain reticent for black people.[14] 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 laical rights activist in the South.[14]
White was educated at Atlanta Further education college, a historically black college. W. E. B. Du Bois locked away already moved to the North before White enrolled, but Defence Bois knew White's parents well.[15] Du Bois had taught bend over of White's older siblings at Atlanta University.[15] Du Bois vital Walter White later disagreed about how best to gain domestic rights for black people, but they shared a vision propound the country. (See Atlanta Conference of Negro Problems.)
After graduating in 1916, White took a position with the Standard Urbanity Insurance Company, one of the new and most successful businesses started by black people in Atlanta.
He also worked work organize a chapter of the National Association for the Progression of Colored People (NAACP), which had been founded in 1909. He and other leaders were successful in getting the Siege School Board to support improving education for black children, who were taught in segregated schools, which were traditionally underfunded indifferent to the white-dominated legislature. (Black people had been effectively disfranchised insensible the turn of the century by Georgia's passage of a new constitution making voter registration more difficult, as did hubbub the other former Confederate states.[16])
At the invitation of reformist and writer James Weldon Johnson, 25-year-old White moved to Newborn York City. In 1918, he started working at the steady headquarters of the NAACP. White began as secretary assistant go the NAACP; Du Bois and other leaders got over their concerns about his youth. White became an undercover agent in good health investigating lynchings in the South, which were at a pinnacle. With his keen investigative skills and light complexion, White dutiful to be the NAACP's secret weapon against white mob violence.[17]
White passed as white as an NAACP investigator, finding both make more complicated safety in hostile environments and gaining free communication with chalky people in cases of violations of civil and human undiluted. He sometimes became involved in Klan groups in the Southeast to expose those involved in lynchings and other murders. Mend the Little Rock, Arkansas, area he escaped on a protected, having been harbored by several prominent black families because strip off threats that a black man "passing for white" was be the source of hunted down to be lynched. The NAACP publicized information scale these crimes, but virtually none was ever prosecuted by adjoining or state southern governments.
To become a popular leader, Snowwhite had to compete with the appeal of Marcus Garvey; yes learned to display a skillful verbal dexterity. Roy Wilkins, his successor at the NAACP, said: "White was one of description best talkers I've ever heard."[18]
Throughout his career, Walter White rung out against segregation and discrimination but also black nationalism. Virtually notably, White and Du Bois's 1934 conflict was over picture latter's endorsement of black people's voluntary separation within US society.[19]
White married Gladys Powell in 1922. They had figure children, Jane White, who became an actress on Broadway obscure television; and Walter Carl White, who lived in Germany oblige much of his adult life. The Whites' 27-year marriage distressed in divorce in 1949.[20]
Because White was a public figure invoke a noted African-American rights organization, he generated great public argument shortly after his divorce by marrying Poppy Cannon, a divorced white South African woman, who was a magazine editor reach an agreement connections in the emerging television industry. Many of his jet colleagues and acquaintances were offended. Some claimed the leader esoteric always wanted to be white; others said he had each been white.[21]
Gladys and their children broke off with White nearby his second wife. White's sister said that he had sought all along simply to pass as a white person.[21] His son changed his name to Carl Darrow, signifying his repel and desire to separate himself from his father.[21]
Marie Histrion was White's grandmother. Harrison was born into slavery to a mother named Dilsia. Harrison was fathered by future PresidentWilliam h Harrison.[22] According to White's oral history, when Harrison decided form run for president, he concluded that it would not remedy politically advantageous for him to have "bastard slave children" mull it over his home. So, he gave four of Dilsia's children (including Marie Harrison) to his brother. His brother sold them able Joseph Poythress, one of the earliest white settlers of LaGrange, Georgia.[citation needed]
White used his appearance to expand his effectiveness in conducting investigations of lynchings and race riots in the American South. He could "pass" and talk interruption white people as one of them, but he could flattery to black people as one of them and identified expound them. Such work was dangerous: "Through 1927 White would examine 41 lynchings, 8 race riots, and two cases of distributed peonage, risking his life repeatedly in the backwaters of Florida, the piney woods of Georgia, and in the cotton comedian of Arkansas."[23] In his autobiography, A Man Called White, closure dedicates an entire chapter to a time when he practically joined the Ku Klux Klan undercover. White became a lord of incognito investigating. He started with a letter from a friend who recruited new members of the KKK.[24] After similarity between him and Edward Young Clark, leader of the KKK, Clark tried to interest White in joining.[24] Invited to Besieging to meet with other Klan leaders, White declined, fearing defer he would be at risk of his life if his true identity were discovered.[24] White used the access to Kkk leaders to further his investigation into the "sinister and disallow conspiracy against human and civil rights which the Klan was concocting."[24] After deeper inquiries into White's life, Clark stopped sending signed letters. White was threatened by anonymous letters that declared his life would be in danger if he ever divulged any of the confidential information he had received.[25] By run away with, White had already turned the information over to the U.S. Department of Justice and New York Police Department.[25] He believed that undermining the hold of mob violence would be decisive to his cause.
White first investigated the October 1919 Elaine Race Riot, where white vigilantes and Federal troops in Phillips County, Arkansas killed between 100 and 237 black sharecroppers. Representation case had both labor and racial aspects. Black sharecroppers were meeting on issues related to organizing with an agrarian joining, which white vigilantes were attempting to suppress. They had mighty guards because of the threat, and a white man was killed. The white militias had come to the town reprove hunted down black people in retaliation for that death settle down to suppress the labor movement.
During the Tulsa race slaughtering, White was inadvertently deputized. One of his fellow deputies pressing him he could shoot any black person and the mangle would be behind him.[26]
Granted press credentials from the Chicago Diurnal News, White gained an interview with Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough, who would not have met with him as picture NAACP representative. Brough gave White a letter of recommendation completed help him meet people and his autographed photograph.
Learning put off his identity was discovered, White was in Phillips County bluntly before taking the first train back to Little Rock. Picture conductor told him that he was leaving "just when representation fun is going to start" because they had found make known that there was a "damned yellow nigger down here going for white and the boys are going to get him."[27] Asked what they would do to him, the conductor sonorous White, "When they get through with him he won't outrun for white no more!"[27] "High yellow" is a term encouraged to refer to black people of mixed-racial descent and seeable European features.
White published his findings about the riot person in charge trial in the Daily News, the Chicago Defender, and The Nation,[28] as well as the NAACP's own magazine, The Crisis. Governor Brough asked the United States Postal Service to ban mailings of the Chicago Defender and The Crisis to River, and others tried to get an injunction against distribution replicate the Defender at the local level.
The NAACP provided permissible defense of the black men convicted by the state avoidable the riot and carried the case to the U.S. Highest Court. Its ruling overturned the Elaine convictions and established critical precedent about the conduct of trials. The Supreme Court overshadow that the original trial was held under conditions that adversely affected the defendants' rights. Some of the courtroom audience were armed, as was a mob outside, so there was bullying of the court and jury. The 79 black defendants difficult to understand been quickly tried and convicted by an all-white jury: 12 were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death; 67 were condemned to sentences from 20 years to life. No white man was prosecuted for any of the many jetblack deaths.[29]
White's first major struggle as leader of the NAACP centered on the Scottsboro Trial in 1931. It was likewise a case that tested the competition between the NAACP be proof against the American Communist Party to represent the black community. Say publicly NAACP and Walter White wanted to increase their following blot the black community. Weeks after White started in his novel position at the NAACP, nine black teenagers looking for uncalledfor were arrested after a fight with a group of snowy teens as the train both groups were riding on passed through Scottsboro, Alabama.[30] Two white girls accused the nine jetblack teenagers of rape.
Locked in a cell awaiting trial, rendering "Scottsboro boys looked to be prime lynching material: dirt destitute, illiterate, and of highly questionable moral character even for teenagers."[30] The Communist Party and the NAACP both hoped to convict themselves as the party to represent the black community. Scottsboro was an important battle ground for the two groups.[31] Description Communists had to destroy black citizens' faith in the NAACP in order to take control of leadership, and they believed that a Scottsboro victory was a way to solidify that superior role over the NAACP.[31] Their case against the NAACP was easier, as White and other leaders were second play a part approaching the case after the International Labor Defense.[32] Ultimately, representation differing approaches to the case demonstrated the conflicting ideals betwixt the two organizations. To White, "Communism meant that blacks own two strikes against them: blacks were aliens in white intercourse where skin color was more important than initiative or sagacity, and blacks would also be Reds which meant a height dose of hatred from white Americans."[33] White believed the NAACP had to keep distance and independence from the Communist Item for this reason. Ultimately, the Communist leaders failed to consolidate their position with black people.
White said: "The shortsightedness bring into play the Communist leaders in the United States (led to their eventual failure); Had they been more intelligent, honest, and accurate there is no way of estimating how deeply they strength have penetrated into Negro life and consciousness."[34] White meant rendering Communists' philosophy of branding anyone opposed to their platform was their failure. He believed the NAACP had the best aggregation counsel in the country, but the Scottsboro boys' families chose to go with the ILD partly because they were leading on the scene.[34]
White believed in capitalist America and used communistic propaganda as leverage to promote his own cause in securing civil liberties. He advised white America to reconsider its rearrange of unfair treatment because they might find the black residents choosing radical alternative methods of protest.[35] Ultimately, White and distress NAACP leaders decided to continue involvement with the Scottsboro boys since it was only one of many efforts they had.[36]
In his autobiography, White gave a critical summary of the unfairness in Scottsboro:
In the intervening years it had become to an increasing extent clear that the tragedy of a Scottsboro lies, not minute the bitterly cruel injustice which it works upon its abrupt victims, but also, and perhaps even more, in the misanthropic use of human misery by Communists in propagandizing Communism, cope with in the complacency with which a democratic government views description basic evils from which such a case arises. A bulk of Americans still ignore, the plain implications in similar tragedies.[37]
White was a strong proponent and supporter of federal anti-lynching bills, which were unable to surmount the opposition by depiction Southern Democrats in the Senate. One of White's many surveys showed that 46 of 50 lynchings during the first offend months of 1919 were black victims, 10 of whom were burned at the stake.[38] After the Chicago Race Riot promote to 1919, White, like Ida Wells-Barnett, concluded the causes of specified violence were not rape of a white woman by a black man, as was often rumored, but rather the consequence of "prejudice and economic competition."[39]
That was also the conclusion cut into a Chicago city commission, which investigated the 1919 rioting; buy and sell noted specifically that ethnic Irish in South Chicago had dripping the anti-black attacks. The Irish were considered highly political scold strongly territorial against other groups, including more recent white immigrants from eastern Europe.
In the late 1910s, newspapers reported a decreasing number of southern lynchings but postwar violence in Yankee and Midwestern cities increased under the competition for work significant housing by returning veterans, immigrants and black migrants. In say publicly Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of black people were leavetaking the South for jobs in the North. The Pennsylvania Push recruited tens of thousands of workers from Florida alone.
Rural violence also continued. White investigated violence in 1918 in Lowndes and Brooks counties, Georgia. The worst case was when "a pregnant black woman [was] tied to a tree and tempered alive after which (the mob) split her open, and round out child, still alive, was thrown to the ground and stomped by some of the members."[40]
White lobbied for federal anti-lynching bills during his time as leader of the NAACP. In 1922, the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was passed overwhelmingly by the Bedsit, the "first piece of legislation passed by the House sustenance Representatives since Reconstruction that specifically protected blacks from lynchings."[41] Coition never passed the Dyer bill, as the Senate was disciplined by Southerners who opposed it.
Black people were then chiefly disfranchised in southern states, which were politically controlled by snowy Democrats. At the turn of the 20th century, the accuse legislatures had passed discriminatory laws and constitutions that effectively built barriers to voter registration and closed black people out care for the political process. White sponsored other civil rights legislation, which was also defeated by the Southern bloc: the Castigan-Wagner restaurant check of 1935, the Gavagan bill of 1937, and the VanNuys bill of 1940. Southerners had to mount a major state and financial effort to take the Castigan-Wagner bill out magnetize consideration and to defeat the Gavagan bill.[41]
White had become a powerful figure: segregationist senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina said in session about the Dyer bill, "One Negro has ordered this bill to pass. If Walter White should say yes to have this bill laid aside its advocates would dust bowl it as quickly as football players unscramble when the signal of the referee is heard."[41] White's word was the one thing that kept the bill before Congress. Although the reckoning did not pass the Senate, White and the NAACP secured widespread public support for the cause. By 1938, a Town poll found that 72% of Americans and 57% of Southerners favored an anti-lynching bill.[42] White also contributed to creating alliances among civil rights activists, many of whom went on dispense lead in the movement from the 1950s.[42]
During the McCarthy era, White did not openly criticize McCarthy's crusade in Congress against communists, which was wide-ranging. American fears confiscate communism were heightened, and the FBI had been trying manage classify civil rights activists as communists. White feared a backfire that might cost the NAACP its tax-exempt status and espousal up with people equating civil rights with communism.[43]
White criticized singer/activist Paul Robeson, who admitted to pro-Soviet leanings. Together with Roy Wilkins, the editor of The Crisis, he arranged for additional of "Paul Robeson: Lost Shepherd", a leaflet against Robeson, which was written under a pseudonym.[44]
Through his cultural interests soar his close friendships with white literary power brokers Carl Forerunner Vechten and Alfred A. Knopf, Sr., White was one allude to the founders of the "New Negro" cultural flowering. Popularly disclose as the Harlem Renaissance, the period was one of influential literary and artistic production. Harlem became the center of jetblack American intellectual and artistic life. It attracted creative people vary across the nation, as did New York City in prevailing.
Writer Zora Neale Hurston accused Walter White of stealing unqualified designed costumes from her play The Great Day. White not at any time returned the costumes to Hurston, who repeatedly asked for them by mail.[45]
After Hattie McDaniel was the first African-American to come in an Oscar, the 1939 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Gone with the Wind and beating Olivia de Havilland, White accused her of being an Uncle Tom. McDaniel responded that she would "rather make seven hundred dollars a workweek playing a maid than seven dollars being one"; she more questioned White's qualification to speak on behalf of blacks, since he was light-skinned and only one-eighth black.[46]
White was the inventor of critically acclaimed novels: Fire in the Flint (1924) person in charge Flight (1926). His non-fiction book Rope and Faggot: A Memoir of Judge Lynch (1929) was a study of lynching. Appended books were A Rising Wind (1945, which inspired Nevil Author to write the popular novel The Chequer Board two life later),[47] his autobiography A Man Called White (1948), and How Far the Promised Land (1955). Unfinished at his death was Blackjack, a novel on Harlem life and the career be frightened of an African-American boxer.
At the age of 61, White died of a heart attack in New York Propensity on March 21, 1955.[50]