"Walter-Francis White" (July 1 1893-March 21 1955)

Civil rights leader,was born in Atlanta,Georgia,to George White, a mail carrier,and Madeline Harrison,a former school teacher.The fourth of seven children,George whose parents had been born in slavery,grew up entrenched in African-American Atlanta's leading and most respected institutions:his family attended the prestigious First Congregational Church,and received his secondary and collegiate education at Atlanta University,from which he graduated in 1916.(His siblings enjoyed similar religious training and educational opportunities.)With blond hair,blue eyes,and a light complexion,Walter was a "voluntary Negro," a person who could pass for white yet chose not to do so.His African-American racial identity was annealed by the Atlanta riot of September 1906.For three days white mobs rampaged through African-American neighborhoods,destroying property and assaulting people;the thirteen-year-old Walter realized,as he put it in his autobiography,that he could never join a race that infected with such toxic hatred.

Upon graduation from college,Walter became an executive with the Standard Life Insurance Company,one of the largest African-American-owned businesses of its day.Part of Atlanta's "New Negro" business elite,Walter was a founder of a real estate and investment company looked forward to a successful business career.He also participated in civil affairs:In 1916 he was a founding member and Secretary of the Atlanta branch NAACP.The branch experienced rapid growth,largely because,in 1917,it stopped the school board from eliminating seventh grade in the African-American public schools.Walter was an enegetic organizer enthusiastic speaker,qualities that attracted the attention of NAACP Field secretary James Weldon Johnson.The association's board of directors,at James behest,invited Walter to join the national staff as assistant secretary.Walter accepted,and in January 1918 he moved to New York City.

During Walter's first eight years with the NAACP,his primary responsibility was conduct undercover investigations of lynching and racial violence,primarily in the South.Putting his complexion in service of the cause,he adopted a series of white male incognitos-among the cleverer ones were intinerant patent-medicine salesman,land speculator,and newspaper reporter intent on exposing the libelous tales being spread in the North about white southerns- and fooled mob members and lynching spectators into providing detailed accounts of the recent violence.Upon Walter returning to New York from his investigative trips,the NAACP would publicize his findings,and Walter eventually wrote several articles on the racial carnage of the post-World War I era that appeared in the Nation the New Republic,the New York Herald-Tribune,and other prestigious journals of liberal opinion.By 1924 Walter had investigated forty-one lynchings and eight race riots.Among the most notorious of these was the 1918 lynching in Valdosta,Georgia,of Mary Turner,who was set ablaze.Mary was nine month pregnant,her womb was slashed open,and her fetus was crushed to death.Walter also investigated the bloody race riots that left hundereds of African-Americans dead in Chicago and in Elaine Arkansas,during the "red summer" of 1919,and the 1921 riot in Tulsa,Oklahoma,that resulted in the leveling of the African-American business district and entire residential neighborhoods.Walter's investigations also reveled that prominent and respected whitesparticipated  in racial violence,the mob that perpetrated a triple lynching in Aiken,South Carolina,in 1926,for example,included local offcials and relatives of the governor.

Walter wrote of his undercover investigations in the in the July 1928 American Mercury and in Rope and Faggot (1929),a detailed study of the history of lynching and its place in American culture and politics that remains indispensable.His derring-do in narrowly escaping detection and avoiding vigilante punishment was also redered in verse in Langston Hughes's "Ballard of Walter" (1941).

At the time he was exposing lynching,Walter emerged as a leading light in the Harlem Renaissance.He authored two novels.The Fire in the Flint (1924)was the second novel to be published by a New Negro,appearing just after Jessie Fauset's There IS Confusion.Set in Georgia after World War I and based on Walter's acuaintance with his native state,The Fire in the Flint tells the story of the racial awakening of Kenneth Harper,who pays for his new consciousness when a white mob murders him.The novel was greeted with critical acclaim and was translated into French,German,Japanese,and Russian.His second work of fiction,Flight (1926),set in New Orleans,Atlanta, and New York,is both a work about the great Migration of African-Americans to the North and story about "passing." Flight's reviews were mixed.Walter's response to one of the negative reviews-by the African-American poet Frank Horne,in Opprtunity magazine-is instructive.He complained to the editor about being blindsided and parlayed his dissatisfaction into a debate over his book's meriits that stretched over three issues.To Walter there was no such thing as bad publicity-in art or in politics.The salient point was to keep a topic- a book or a political cause-firmly in public view,which would eventually create interest and sympathy.

Walter's dynamism and energy was central to the New Negro movement.He was a prominent figure in Harlem's nightlife,chaperoning well-connected and sympathetic whites to clubs and dances.He helped to place the works of Langston Hughes,Countee Cullen,and Claude McKay with major publishers,and promoted the careers of the singer and actor Paul Robeson,the tenor Roland Hayes,and the contralto Marian Anderson.

When James Weldon Johnson retired from the NAACP in 1929,Walter,who had been looking to assume more responsibility,succeeded him.As the association's chief executive,Walter had a striking influenced on the civil rights movement's agenda and methods.In 1930 he originated and orchestrated the victorious lobbying campaign to defeat President Hoover's nomination to the Supreme Court of John J.Parker,a North Carolina politician and jurist who had publicly stated his opposition to black suffrage and his hostility to organized labor.During the next two election cycles,the NAACP worked with substantial success to defeat senators with significant African-American constituencies who had voted to confirm John.The NAACP became a recognized force in national politics.

During Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal,Walter raised both the NAACP's public profile and its influence
on national politics.Walter's success owned much to his special knack for organizing the more enlightened of America's white elite to back the NAACP's programs.Over the decade of the 1930s,he won the support of the majority of the Senate and House of Representatives for a federal anti lynching law;only southern senator's filibusters prevented its passage.His friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt likewise gave him unparalleled access to the White House.This proved invaluable when he conceived and organized Marian Anderson's Easter Sunday 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial,which was blessed by the president and had as honorary sponsors cabinet members,other New Deal officials,and Supreme Court justices.As NAACP secretary and secretary and head of the National Committee against Mob Violence,Walter convinced,President Truman in 1946 to form a presidential civil rights commission,which the following year issued its groundbreaking antisegregationist report,To secure these rights.
In 1947 he persuaded Truman to address the closing of the NAACP's annual meeting,held at the Washington Monument;it was the first time that president had spoken at an association event.

As secretary,Walter oversaw the NAACP's legal work,which after 1934 included lawsuits seeking equal education opportunities for African Americans.He was also instrumental in convincing the liberal philanthropists of the American Fund for Public Service to commit $100,000 to fund the endeavor,though only a portion was delivered before the fund became insolvent.After 1939 the day-to-day running of the legal campaign against desegregation rested with Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall's NAACP legal Defense Fund,but Walter remained intimately involved in the details of the campaign,which culminated with the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that declared the doctrine of "separate but equal" unconstitutional.

Walter married Gladys Powell,a clerical worker in the NAACP national office,in 1922.They had two children,Jane & Walter Carl Darrow, and divorced in 1948.In 1949 he married Poppy Cannon,a white woman.This interracial union provoked a major controversy within both the NAACP and African-Americans at large,and there was widespread sentiment that Walter should resign.In response,Walter,was always an integrationist,claimed the right to marry whomever he wanted.He weathered the storm with the help of NAACP board member Eleanor Roosevelt,who threatened to resign should Walter be forced from office.Though Walter maintained the title of secretary,his powers were reduced,with Roy Wilkins taking over administrative duties.Walter continued to be the association's public spokesperson until his death.In declining health for several years,he suffered a fatal heart in his New York apartment.

Unlike other NAACP leaders such as W.E.B.Du Bois and Charles Houston,Walter was neither a great theoretician nor a master of legal theory.His support for the NAACP agenda among persons of influence in and out of government and to persuade Americans of all races to support the cause of equal rights for African-Americans.