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Biography: Walter White (1893-1955)
By Don Schwartz
Walter White, an African American with blond hair and blue eyes, was born on July 1, 1893 in Atlanta Georgia. He experienced the brutality of racism when, at age 13, he confronted a mob of whites who threatened to invade his home. White graduated from Atlanta University in 1916 and two years later, became an executive secretary to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1931 he became chief executive of the organization, a position he held until his death in 1955.
During his tenure he investigated lynchings and race riots in the years between the world wars. During World War II he spearheaded NAACP efforts to desegregate the armed forces and to promote fair employment in defense industries. As a result of those efforts, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 which created the Fair Employment Practice Committee and which barred racial discrimination in defense industry employment. That measure, adopted on June 25, 1941, represented the first time a president acted to end racial discrimination.
In 1945 White, along with other prominent black leaders, represented the NAACP at the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco. In the years that followed he fought against negative racial stereotyping in the motion picture industry, he opposed the poll tax and other devices used to keep blacks from the voting booth, he promoted residential integration and an end to segregation in public education. In addition to his role as director of the NAACP, White was active in other fields as well. He served as a war correspondent, he was a journalist for two newspapers, and he wrote two novels and an autobiography.
However, his tenure as head of the NAACP was not without controversy. Critics accused him of amassing too much power, of becoming too concerned with his own celebrity, and of using his position for personal gain. He was particularly attacked for divorcing his wife, an African American, and subsequently marrying a white woman. He weathered these criticisms and, under his direction, the NAACP became the dominant force in the struggle to end racial inequality in the United States. He died of a heart attack in 1955, soon after the NAACP's greatest victory in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas case that ended racial discrimination in education and launched the civil rights movement in the decade that followed.
This essay was submitted by Don Schwartz, a history professor at California State University at Long Beach.
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