Walter (Francis) White - Investigating the Elaine Race Riot

Civil-rights leader and writer, born in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Fair-skinned, blond, and blue-eyed, though part black, he could pass for white but chose to champion the cause of the black race after experiencing a race riot in Atlanta, GA (1906). In 1926 he published his novel Flight based on his experiences of ‘passing’. As an insurance company cashier, he took the lead in establishing a branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Atlanta (1916), and was appointed assistant secretary (1918–31) and executive secretary (1931–55).

One of the most ardent anti-lynching proponents in America, he investigated more than 40 lynchings and eight race riots. As a Guggenheim Fellow he conducted a study of lynching in the USA, the basis of his work Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929). He became acting secretary of the NAACP the same year and continued to promote his anti-lynching efforts, along with launching campaigns against segregation in public facilities, white primaries, and the poll taxes, and against educational discrimination. Author of several other books and many articles, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal (1937) in recognition of his efforts on behalf of African-Americans.

Because of his efforts and those of A Philip Randolph, President Franklin Roosevelt prohibited discrimination in the defence industries and established the Fair Employment Practices Commission (1941). He conducted journalistic research in Europe, published as A Rising Wind (1945), that influenced President Harry Truman's decision to desegregate the armed forces. In 1946 he pressured President Truman to set up the President's Committee on Civil Rights, and this led the Democrats to adopt the divisive civil-rights platform in 1948. Also concerned with worldwide prejudice, he was less successful on this front, and was criticized as an autocrat inside the NAACP. Although he retained his post until his death, from 1949 on his powers were limited.

Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893, Atlanta, Georgia - March 21, 1955, New York, New York) was a spokesman for blacks in the United States for almost a quarter of a century and executive secretary (1931-1955) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. As Johnson's assistant national secretary and then as his successor at the helm of the NAACP, White waged a long and ultimately unsuccessful campaign for federal anti-lynching legislation in the United States House and Senate. He appeared white, a point he emphasized in his autobiography A Man Called White (p. Sinclair Lewis' novel, Kingsblood Royal, about a man who appears to be white but learns late in life that he is black, is usually, but erroneously, assumed to be based in part on White's life. In fact, Lewis consulted White on the novel but White found its realization flawed.

White was, in addition to his NAACP work, a journalist, novelist, and essayist. White married a white magazine editor, Poppy Cannon, with whom he lived until his death in 1955.

Investigating the Elaine Race Riot

White faced Southern justice first-hand in October, 1919, when the NAACP sent him to investigate the violence known as the Elaine Race Riot in Phillips County, Arkansas. More than two hundred African American sharecroppers were killed by marauding white vigilantes and federal troops after a shootout in an attack on a church where the farmers were meeting left a white man dead.

White, who was of mixed race (five of his great-great-great-grandparents were black and the other 27 were white) and was blonde and blue-eyed and able to pass for white, was granted credentials from the Chicago Daily News.

White was only in Phillips County for a brief time before his identity was discovered; The conductor told him that he was leaving "just when the fun is going to start", because they had found out that there was a "damned yellow nigger passing for white and the boys are going to get him". Asked what they would do to him, the conductor told White that "when they get through with him he won't pass for white no more!"

White published his findings in the Daily News, the Chicago Defender and The Nation, as well as the NAACP's own magazine Crisis. White left unfinished "Blackjack," a novel on Harlem life and the career of an African American boxer.