Black History: WALTER F. WHITE (1893-1955)

Walter Francis White was a leading civil rights advocate of the first half of the twentieth century. As executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1931 to 1955, he was one of the major architects of the modern African American freedom struggle.

White, whose blond hair and blue eyes belied his African American ancestry, was born in Atlanta, Georgia on July 1, 1893, the fourth of seven children. His parents, George W. White, a graduate of Atlanta University and a postal worker, and Madeline Harrison White, a Clark University graduate and school teacher, were solidly middle class at the time when the vast majority of Atlanta blacks were working class.

Walter White graduated from Atlanta University in 1916 and one year later helped establish the Atlanta branch of the NAACP after briefly working as an insurance agent. In 1918, at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson, the NAACP’s executive director, White moved to New York City, New York, and became the assistant secretary for the national organization.

White’s first major racial justice campaign effort in the national NAACP office came when he persuaded the Association to oppose the Atlanta Board of Education’s decision to eliminate seventh grade for African American students as part of an effort to finance a new high school for white students. Between 1918 and 1931, White built a national reputation both within and beyond NAACP circles. He authored a number of books, including Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929), which became a major expose of lynching in the U.S.

At great personal risk, White used his fair skin, blue eyes, and other “white” features, to successfully infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations. His clandestine surveys of these groups and their activities gave the NAACP first-hand knowledge of at least 40 murders of black people.