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White, Walter Francis
African American civil rights leader and influential author of the Harlem Renaissance.Walter White grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood and, as a light-skinned, blue-eyed man, was able to pass for white. He credited a 1906 race riot in Atlanta, during which he defended his family's home from fire, as the incident that ignited his race consciousness as a black man. From that point on, he chose to live as an African American fighting for political and social justice.After graduating from Atlanta University in 1916, White began a career in activism with the Atlanta branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1918 he moved to New York to serve as assistant to NAACP executive secretary James Weldon Johnson. He was an invaluable researcher for the NAACP's work in the Antilynching Movement; passing for white, he investigated lynchings and other racially-motivated crimes without hindrance. White's reports for the NAACP were fodder for his fiction; his two novels, The Fire in the Flint (1924) and Flight (1926), both concern the responses of educated blacks, or “New Negroes,” to racial injustice. Although the novels sometimes sacrifice plot and characterization to political message, they earned White a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1926. White used money from the fellowship for support while writing a seminal investigation of lynching, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929).As executive secretary of the NAACP from 1931 to 1955, White worked with A(sa) Philip Randolph to secure the establishment of the Fair Employment Practices Committee in 1941; his efforts also helped produce the executive orders banning discrimination in war-related industries that same year and in the entire United States military in 1948. A delegate with W. E. B. Du Bois and Mary McLeod Bethune to the founding of the United Nations in 1945, White also became involved with seeking justice for the African diaspora. One of White's most lasting achievements as NAACP executive secretary was the recruitment of Charles Hamilton Houston to serve as the NAACP's first fulltime chief counsel. Under Houston's leadership and fueled by White's tireless fund-raising efforts, the NAACP undertook a series of legal challenges to segregation, culminating in 1954's historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, which toppled segregated education in the United States.See also Lynching; Military, Blacks in the American; Passing in the United States.Sign up to recieve email alerts from African American Studies Center
