Walter Francis White
(1893-1955)
NAACP LEADER, JOURNALIST, NOVELIST, AND ESSAYIST.
Walter White served as chief secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1929 to 1955. During the twenty-five years preceding the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, White was one of the most prominent African American figures and spokespeople in the country. Upon his death in 1955, the New York Times eulogized him as “the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington.”
He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. He graduated in 1916 from Atlanta University.
In 1918, White joined the small national staff of the NAACP in New York at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson. He acted as Johnson’s assistant national secretary and traveled to the South to investigate lynchings and riots. Being fair-skinned, at times he passed as white to facilitate his investigations and protect himself in tense situations. White succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP, leading the organization from 1929 to 1955. He joined the Advisory Council for the Government of the Virgin Islands in 1934 and resigned in 1935 to protest President Roosevelt’s silence at Southern Democrats’ blocking of anti-lynching legislation to avoid retaliatory obstruction of his New Deal policies.
White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. He worked with President Truman on desegregating the armed forces after the Second World War and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this. Under White’s leadership, the NAACP set up its Legal Defense Fund, which conducted numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.