Stories · Life · 1918
Walter Francis White
A civil-rights leader whom strangers mistook for white, and who used that mistake to investigate lynchings for the NAACP.
Walter White was born in Atlanta in 1893. He had blond hair and blue eyes, and strangers routinely took him for white. When he was thirteen, during the Atlanta race massacre of 1906, a white mob came toward his family's house. He later wrote that this was the night he learned which side of the line he was on.
He joined the NAACP as assistant secretary in January 1918. In his first ten years he investigated forty-one lynchings and eight race riots, including the killings at Elaine, Arkansas, and the violence in Chicago during the Red Summer of 1919. He often traveled as a white reporter or businessman, and people told him things they would never have told a Black investigator. The work was extremely dangerous, and his reports informed the NAACP's campaigns against lynching.
He became the organization's executive secretary in 1929 and led it until his death in 1955. He also wrote novels, The Fire in the Flint (1924) and Flight (1926), a study of lynching, Rope and Faggot (1929), and an autobiography, A Man Called White (1948).
Why it still matters
White's story turns the usual story of passing around. He never crossed over. He let other people's certainty about what he was do the work, and he wrote down what they said.