Walter F. White:  “U.S. Department of (White) Justice”

About the Author

Walter White was an influential journalist and civil rights activist who led the NAACP from 1929 until his death in 1955. Born on July 1, 1893, to a light-skinned Atlanta mail collector and his equally fair-complexioned wife, White enjoyed a relatively privileged upbringing among the city’s black middle class. But this did not shield White from the racial violence that swept Atlanta in 1906. During the three-day race riot, White watched as marauding whites assaulted hundreds of African Americans and destroyed black property.

White never forgot that mob. After graduating from Atlanta University in 1916, the young insurance salesman threw himself into a local campaign to increase funding for black schools. Later that year, White wrote directly to the national headquarters of the NAACP, asking for its help in organizing an Atlanta chapter. Impressed by the young leader’s energy and organizing skills, the NAACP executive secretary James Weldon Johnson invited White to join the national staff.

Thanks to his blond hair, blue eyes, and remarkable courage, White became the NAACP’s secret weapon in its antilynching campaign. Less than two weeks after moving to New York to work at the national headquarters, White traveled south to investigate a lynching firsthand. Posing as a traveling salesman, White gathered gruesome details from local whites who had no idea they were speaking with a man of African ancestry. Over the next decade, White investigated dozens of lynchings and race riots at great personal risk. By the late 1920s he was one of the country’s foremost authorities on lynching. He recounted his investigations in northern newspapers and national magazines. An active figure in the Harlem Renaissance, White published a novel, The Fire in the Flint (1924), and a nonfiction book, Rope and Faggot (1929), both based on his firsthand investigations of southern lynchings.

When Johnson retired from the NAACP in 1929, White assumed leadership of the organization as acting secretary. Two years later the NAACP made White’s promotion permanent. During his long tenure as executive secretary, White enlisted powerful allies in NAACP campaigns against racial violence, discrimination, and segregation. The antilynching campaign was always close to White’s heart, and he spent much of the 1930s lobbying Congress and federal officials to take action against mob violence. White died on March 21, 1955, after leading the NAACP for nearly three decades.