Walter White’s civil rights legacy in Black and white

When Walter White died in 1955, one obit called him “a Negro by choice.”

The way White saw it, it was the only choice an honorable person could make.

The blond, blue-eyed White was, by his math, about “7/8 white.” Away from those he grew up with, in segregated Georgia, he easily could have passed.

Yet White refused. Proudly embracing his Black heritage, he moved to Harlem and went to work for the NAACP. White went undercover to investigate lynchings. He dedicated his life to destroying hate.

“I am one of the two in the color of my skin,” White wrote of his biracial background. “I am the other in my spirit and my heart. It is only a love of both which binds the two together in me.”

A.J. Baime tells White’s remarkable story in “White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret.” Sure, it’s the biography of one man, yet it’s also a history of racism in America.

Born in 1893, White grew up middle-class in Atlanta. At first, life was peaceful. “People in Atlanta were making too much money to have time to worry about race,” Baime writes.

By the early 1900s, though, life changed. When White was 13, there were race riots. He joined his mailman father guarding the family home as white vigilantes prowled the streets. “After that night,” White said, “I never wanted to be a white man. I knew what side I was on.”

White went on to Atlanta University and took a job with the Standard Life Insurance Company. But the fight for freedom drew him.

He started a local chapter of the fledgling NAACP. He fought to keep Black schools open in Atlanta. At age 24, White took a cut in pay to join the NAACP in New York as its assistant secretary. He worked for them for the rest of his life, eventually as the head.

In February of 1918, White had his first real test.

A Black man from Estill Springs, Tenn., Jim McIlherron, had fled after killing two whites in a fight. When a posse finally found him, they shot him three times, putting out his eye. Then they dragged him back to town. They tied him to a tree, tortured and castrated him. And then they burned him alive, slowly, while policemen watched.

No one was ever arrested.

Back in New York, White declared that if the Southern authorities wouldn’t investigate, he would. He took the train down to Estill Springs and checked into the whites-only hotel. White strolled around town, finally finding a group of loafers in the general store. Introducing himself as a traveling salesman, White mentioned that he heard they had a bit of excitement recently.

That was all he needed to say. The men didn’t just confess to McIlherron’s murder, they boasted about it.

Returning to New York, White published his story in the NAACP’s magazine, “The Crisis.” Reports were sent to President Wilson and Tennessee’s governor – and ignored. No investigation was begun. But the NAACP gained new prominence.

And White had a new purpose: Investigating lynchings.

He was reporting on one in rural Arkansas in 1919, when he heard people were asking questions about him, too. No fool, White decided to leave town early. When he arrived at the railroad station, the ticket agent shared some gossip. Folks had found out some stranger was passing for white. “When they get through with him,” the man bragged, “he won’t pass for white no more.”

White politely declined to stick around and “see the fun.”

In 1921, White investigated the Tulsa massacre, a hideous spree of violence that led to the firebombing of a neighborhood known as the Black Wall Street. Eager for extra help, local authorities immediately deputized White as a sheriff. Of his qualifications, “my skin was apparently white, and that was enough,” he wrote.

White used his new authority to do what he always did – gather information.

That summer, his report ran in “The Nation.” It brought him scores of death threats. Yet, once again, the facts failed to bring justice. And, White realized, his reports never would – as long as local authorities were racists themselves, and federal authorities refused to get involved.

So White and the NAACP began pursuing a parallel political strategy.

Although Blacks had long supported the Republican Party, White saw a political shift, particularly as Blacks moved north. “The Republicans will absorb the anti- Negro south and become, through the compromises necessary to gain that end, the relatively anti-Negro party,” he predicted. “The Negro will find refuge in the Democratic party.”

White’s efforts to push that re-alignment took time. He looked for an ally in Al Smith, the 1928 Democratic presidential nominee. But Smith – already facing prejudice as a Catholic – shied away. Later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt also declined to help, needing the support of Southern senators for the New Deal. He wouldn’t even support an anti-lynching bill.

When Harry Truman was elected, White expected even less. The new president was from segregated Missouri. His family had fought for the Confederacy. But he was devoted to the Armed Services, and when White took him a report on Isaac Woodard Jr., – a Black veteran, blinded by a policeman’s beating in Batesburg, S.C.—the President was stunned.

“My God,” Truman exclaimed. “We’ve got to do something.”

Truman did. The next week, the Justice Department filed federal charges against the policeman. He was acquitted, but Truman pressed on. The month after the verdict, he established the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. And in 1947, he addressed the NAACP’s national convention and committed the Federal government to combat racial discrimination.

Southern Democrats were horrified. Roosevelt had promised to fight for civil rights, too. Yet realizing the difference, Sen. Strom Thurmond declared, “but that SOB Truman really means it!” It split the party. And when Truman won re-election anyway — losing the white South, but gaining Black votes in the north — it was the re-alignment White predicted.

But the victory wasn’t something White would have much time to savor. His divorce in 1949, after 27 years of marriage, was a scandal. His immediate remarriage to a white woman sparked outrage.

His family shunned him. Some colleagues abandoned him. Critics called it a betrayal, accusing White of only reaffirming bigoted stereotypes – Blacks couldn’t help lusting after white women.

Under White, the NAACP won in the courts, thanks to Thurgood Marshall, whom White had hired in 1938. In 1954, Marshall won his greatest victory in Brown v. Board of Education. Yet for many in the organization, White’s reputation remained tarnished.

On March 21, 1955, he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 61.

Later that year, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala. As the modern civil rights era began, White’s “legacy faded into obscurity with remarkable speed,” Baime writes. A blond, blue-eyed activist was simply the wrong symbol for Black power.

Yet to the end of his life, White proclaimed there was only one race – the human race.

“I am white, and I am black and know there is no difference,” White said. “Each casts a shadow, and all shadows are dark.”