Mixed Race Studies

The Surprising Story of Walter White and the NAACP

Time
2015-07-01

Jennifer Latson

July 1, 1893: Walter Francis White, head of the NAACP for more than 20 years, is born

In the last few weeks, Rachel Dolezal—the Spokane, Wash., NAACP leader who recently left her post after being outed as white though saying that she identified as black—led many to examine the relationship between skin color and racial-justice activism. Writing for TIME, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar noted that, despite her ethnic background, Dolezal “has proven herself a fierce and unrelenting champion for African-Americans politically and culturally.”

Regardless of what one thinks of Dolezal, whose story only grew increasingly complicated, there’s plenty of historical evidence that looks aren’t the most important thing when it comes to championing equality. For proof, look no further than Walter Francis White, who was born on this day, July 1, in 1893. White ushered the NAACP into the Civil Rights era, serving as its leader more than 20 years, from 1931 until his death in 1955…

Read the entire article here.

Walter White, 61, Dies in Home Here

The New York Times
1955-03-22

Walter White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, died last night of a heart attack at his home at his home, 242 East Sixty-eighth Street. He was 61 years old.

Last October he twice entered the New York Hospital for treatment for a heart ailment that had caused him to take a leave of absence from his duties.

Recently he had returned from a month’s leisurely visit in Haiti and Puerto Rico. Yesterday he spent two hours at his office.

Mr. White, the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington, was a Negro by choice.

Only five-thirty-seconds of his ancestry was Negro. His skin was fair, his hair blond, his eyes blue and his features Caucasian. He could easily have joined the 12,000 Negroes who pass the color-line and disappear into the white majority every year in this country.

But he deliberately sacrificed his comfort to publicize himself as a Negro and to devote his entire adult life to completing the emancipation of his people…

Read the entire obituary here.

Before Rachel Dolezal, there was Walter White

The Christian Science Monitor
2015-06-15

Randy Dotinga

The man known as ‘Mr. NAACP’ was blonde, blue-eyed and 5/32nd black, all of which provoked an outcry similar to that over contemporary NAACP official Rachel Dolezal.

Walter White, known as “Mr. NAACP,” didn’t look black. He had blue eyes and blonde hair, and his enemies sought to smear him as an opportunist who lied about his race and couldn’t possibly understand the black experience. But the secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People persevered through much of the 20th century and left a stunning if tarnished legacy.

White energized the refined halls of the NAACP, brought together literary stars of the Harlem Renaissance, and helped craft the partial demise of segregation. He battled lynching, convinced politicians to kill the Supreme Court nomination of a racist and hobnobbed with the famous. Sixty years after his death, White is eclipsed in modern memory by other civil-rights leaders. Few know about his remarkable struggle to be seen as the genuine article by other African-Americans, and his vicious battles with fellow leaders like W. E. B. DuBois.

But this month, the ever-bubbling issue of blackness – who has it, who doesn’t, and why it matters – is on tongues across the country amid the roaring debate over Rachel Dolezal, a NAACP official in Spokane, Wash. White’s story resonates as Dolezal, who may not be black as she’s claimed, faces a national storm.

Here are 5 Things to Know about Walter White and Racial Identity, gleaned from his crisply written 1948 memoir A Man Called White and author Thomas Dyja’s perceptive and often-critical 2008 biography Walter White: The Dilemma of Black Identity in America…

Read the entire article here.

Passing in reverse: What does an NAACP leader’s case say about race?

The Washington Post
2015-06-12

Krissah Thompson, Staff Writer

Passing in this country has usually operated in one direction: black skin passing for white, marginalization traded for privilege, the burden of the minority cast off.

Until now. Enter Rachel Dolezal, 37, the head of the NAACP in Spokane, Wash., who seized headlines and set social media afire this week when relatives claimed that she is a white woman who has been passing as African American.

Her story was a head-scratcher for many, raising questions about the determination to self-identify when it comes to race. Is “passing in reverse” a thing? And what does Dolezal’s supposed decision say about being white in modern America? Was whiteness the weight she cast off?

“In this society, people would prefer to be identified with the race that is least stigmatized,” says Derald Wing Sue, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University, where he has studied racial identity. “It baffles everyone when it goes the other way.”

But it does not surprise Sue, who has studied the ways white Americans become sensitive to racial dynamics…

…Take, for example, Walter White, born in 1893. Blue-eyed and blond-haired with fair skin, the product of Atlanta’s black community had more white ancestors than black, according to some accounts. And he saw himself as black, although he passed as white to enable his travels through the South investigating lynchings and hate crimes. Later in life, he married a white woman and was forced to defend himself against accusations that he was white passing as black — all while serving as the national head of the NAACP from 1931 to 1955.

Read the entire article here.

A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White

University of Georgia Press
1994 (First published in 1948)
392 pages
5.5 x 8.5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-1698-7

Walter White (1893-1955)

Foreword by Andrew Young

The life story of a man who crossed the color line to fight for civil rights

First published in 1948, A Man Called White is the autobiography of the famous civil rights activist Walter White during his first thirty years of service to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. White joined the NAACP in 1918 and served as its executive secretary from 1931 until his death in 1955. His recollections tell not only of his personal life, but amount to an insider’s history of the association’s first decades.

Although an African American, White was fair-skinned, blond-haired, and blue-eyed. His ability to pass as a white man allowed him—at great personal risk—to gather important information regarding lynchings, disfranchisement, and discrimination. Much of A Man Called White recounts his infiltration of the country’s white-racist power structure and the numerous legal battles fought by the NAACP that were aided by his daring efforts.

Penetrating and detailed, this autobiography provides an important account of crucial events in the development of race relations before 1950—from the trial of the “Scottsboro Boys” to an investigation of the treatment of African American servicemen in World War II, from the struggle against the all-white primaries in the South to court decisions–at all levels—on equal education.

Flight: A Novel

Louisiana State University Press
April 1998 (Originally published in 1926)
304 pages
5.50 x 8.50 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780807122808

Walter White (1893-1955)

Published amid controversy in 1926, Flight focuses on the dilemma of Mimi Daquin, a light-complexioned African American woman who passes, for a time, as white. In the New Orleans of her birth, Mimi never encountered the hierarchies of skin color that existed elsewhere. But when her family moves to Atlanta, she embarks on a lifelong lesson about what it really means to belong to a people. From the Atlanta riot of 1906 to her shameful expulsion from black bourgeois society because of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, to her working-class status in Philadelphia and Harlem, Mimi eventually decides to escape her miseries by passing for white in New York City. There, her success exceeds her expectations but even so cannot quell a recurrent yearning.

Walter White (1893–1955), a blond-haired, blue-eyed African American, was a native of Atlanta and an adopted New Yorker. His other works are the novel Fire in the Flint and an autobiography, A Man Called White. He was a major figure in the NAACP for more than three decades.

Consolidated Colors: Racial Passing and Figurations of the Chinese in Walter White’s Flight and Darryl Zanuck’s Old San Francisco

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Volume 37, Number 4, Winter 2012
pages 93-117
DOI: 10.1353/mel.2012.0064

Amanda M. Page, Visiting Assistant Professor of English
Marywood University, Scranton, Pennsylvania

Narratives of racial passing frequently investigate how the boundaries of race can be reimagined. In these texts, the dominant black-white binary construction is often under scrutiny for its failure to accommodate the identifications of people who do not fit easily in either category. Throughout US literary history, many passing narratives have also challenged the logic of the “one-drop” rule, codified into law in the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson. Gayle Wald explains how the “one-drop” principle shapes racial categorization in US culture:

By representing “whiteness” as the absence of the racial sign, [“one-drop”] has perpetuated the myth of white purity (a chimera that colors contemporary liberal language of the “mixed-race” offspring of “interracial” marriages). In a complementary fashion it has rendered the political and cultural presence of Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans invisible (or merely selectively and marginally visible), thereby enabling the hyper-visibility of African Americans as that national “minority” group most often seen as “having” race. (13–14)

This construction presents whiteness as raceless, while the burden of racialized identity is shifted to African Americans. With this belief in white purity comes the expectation that racial impurity is something that visibly marks the black body. The passing subject, however, often challenges the expected hyper-visibility of the African American by subverting the cultural assumption that racial identity is visible. Though “one drop” is legally significant for a mulatta/o subject, the act of passing can resist the confines of legislated racial categorization by crossing the racial barriers meant to deny the full rights of citizenship to nonwhite peoples.

Just as the “invisible” passing subject often threatens the purity of white identity, so, too, does the existence of those other “invisible” peoples Wald describes. Because Native Americans, Latina/os, and Asian Americans do not fit into the black-or-white construction of race as defined in Plessy,1 these groups, like mulatta/o passing subjects, create problems of racial categorization. Authors of passing narratives frequently use characters from other binary-disrupting groups to draw parallels between the racial ambiguity of these groups and the passing subject. In one such passing narrative, Walter White’s novel Flight (1926), a Chinese figure is used to disrupt the conventional trajectory of the passing narrative and to offer an alternative vision of racial solidarity. In Flight, the heroine, Mimi Daquin, crosses the color line to gain the economic opportunity that would be denied to her if she continued to live as a black woman. Instead of permanently “crossing the line” to live as a white woman at the conclusion of the novel, however, White’s mulatta heroine returns to living as a black woman because of an encounter with a radical Chinese intellectual, Wu Hseh-Chuan. This Chinese intermediary, like the mulatta heroine, disrupts the US’s narrative of race as either black or white; White’s strategic deployment of these two characters works as a double challenge to the dominant construction. Furthermore, White draws on the connection of these characters as outsiders with subversive potential when Hseh-Chuan advocates for an international unity of people of color against global white supremacy. This encounter directly leads to Mimi’s racial reawakening, as Hseh-Chuan makes her realize the value of African American culture in its resistance to white racism.

Yet White’s move toward internationalism in his passing narrative does not indicate a trend toward greater inclusiveness in the culture, as even the passing trope—often a tool of African American activist authors trying to undermine racism—continued to serve contradictory agendas. Released only a year after White’s novel, the 1927 Warner Brothers film Old San Francisco puts a unique twist on the usual black-to-white passing narrative by depicting a Chinese American passing subject as a dangerous alien threat to (white) American identity. Written and produced by Darryl F. Zanuck and directed by Alan Crosland, Old San Francisco tells the story of a Spanish…

Why I Remain A Negro

The Saturday Review of Literature
1947-10-11
pages 13-

Walter White, National Secretary
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

THE SCENE was a New York duplex apartment. The people were liberals, economically as well as intellectually well off. They were discussing the race question. I had been invited to speak. One of the women, listening, seemed agitated by something I had said. She scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it to another woman, a woman whose skin was reddish brown,, a woman who was probably colored. “Is Mr. White white or colored?” the message inquired. The other scribbled an answer and passed it back. “I am Mrs. White,” the reply said. The white woman, reading it, became excited. Hastily she penciled a comment: “What a wonderful talk! This is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to hear him.”

I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me. Not long ago I stood one morning on a subway platform in Harlem. As the train came in I stepped back for safety. My heel came down upon the toe of the man behind me. I turned to apologize to him. He was a Negro, and his face as he stared at me was hard and full of the piled-up bitterness of a thousand lynchings and a million nights in shacks and tenements and “nigger towns.” “Why don’t you look where you’re going?” he said sullenly. “You white folks are always trampling on colored people.” Just then one of my friends came up and asked how the fight had gone in Washington—there was a filibuster against legislation for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. The Negro on whose toes I had stepped listened, then spoke to me penitently.

“Are you Walter White of the NAACP? I’m sorry I spoke to you that way. I thought you were white.” I am not white. There is nothing within my mind and heart which tempts me to think I am. Yet I realize acutely that the only characteristic which matters to either the white or the colored race—the appearance of whiteness—is mine. White is the rejection of all color; black is the absorption of  every shade.  There is magic in a white skin; there is tragedy, loneliness, exile, in a black skin. Why then do I insist that I am a Negro, when nothing compels me to do so but myself?…

Read the entire article here.

The blonde, blue-eyed black man who one goal—racial justice

The News-Times
Danbury, Connecticut
2010-02-24

Antoinette Bosco

Barack Obama has already made history in our nation, becoming the first black candidate ever to be elected to the U.S. presidency.

But, in truth, he is following a path that has long been set by black people before him, who believed in justice and equal rights for all, and worked to get these.

This is Black History Month, a special time to remember this.
 
One of these courageous people, too long forgotten, was Walter White, born 117 years ago, called “the man most responsible for the triumph of racial justice” by Maryknoll Father Albert J. Nevins back in the early 1950s.

This priest had put together a book he called “an anthology of Christian literature,” which he hoped would “give you a little more understanding of our complex world, that it will inspire you to a greater appreciation of the principles for which Christ lived and died.”
 
I found this book, fortunately, at one of the great book fairs put on each year by the Danbury Library.
 
In it Father Nevins had included a piece written by Walter White titled “Why I Remain a Negro.” With a title like that, my curiosity took over immediately.
 
His story began, “I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blonde. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.”…

Read the entire article here.

Defending Home and Hearth: Walter White Recalls the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot

Web Source: History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web
Walter White, A Man Called White
1948; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969
pages 5–12

Walter White (1893-1955)

The riots that broke out between 1898 and 1906 were part of a pattern of anti-black violence that included several hundred lynchings each year. One of the most savage race riots in these years erupted in Atlanta on September 22, 1906 after vague reports of African Americans harassing white women. Over five days at least ten black people were killed while Atlanta’s police did nothing to protect black citizens, going so far as to confiscate guns from black Atlantans while allowing whites to remain armed. In this selection from his memoirs, Walter White, the future head of the NAACP recalled how, at age 13, he and his father defended their home from white rioters.

The unseasonably oppressive heat of an Indian summer day hung like a steaming blanket over Atlanta. My sisters and I had casually commented upon the unusual quietness. It seemed to stay Mother’s volubility and reduced Father, who was more taciturn, to monosyllables. But, as I remember it, no other sense of impending trouble impinged upon our consciousness.

I had read the inflammatory headlines in the Atlanta News and the more restrained ones in the Atlanta Constitution which reported alleged rapes and other crimes committed by Negroes. But these were so standard and familiar that they made—as I look back on it now—little impression. The stories were more frequent, however, and consisted of eight-column streamers instead of the usual two or four-column ones.

Father was a mail collector. His tour of duty was from three to eleven P.M. He made his rounds in a little cart into which one climbed from a step in the rear. I used to drive the cart for him from two until seven, leaving him at the point nearest our home on Houston Street, to return home either for study or sleep. That day Father decided that I should not go with him. I appealed to Mother, who thought it might be all right, provided Father sent me home before dark because, she said, “I don’t think they would dare start anything before nightfall.”Father told me as we made the rounds that ominous rumors of a race riot that night were sweeping the town. But I was too young that morning to understand the background of the riot. I became much older during the next thirty-six hours, under circumstances which I now recognize as the inevitable outcome of what had preceded.

…Late in the afternoon friends of my father’s came to warn of more trouble that night. They told us that plans had been perfected for a mob to form on Peachtree Street just after nightfall to march down Houston Street to what the white people called “Darktown,” three blocks or so below our house, to “clean out the niggers.” There had never been a firearm in our house before that day. Father was reluctant even in those circumstances to violate the law, but he at last gave in at Mother’s insistence…

Read the entire text here.