THE CONGRESS: Black’s White

THE CONGRESS: Black’s White

TIME Magazine
1938-01-24

To Negro Lee Jones, a 31-year-old mill-hand of Greensboro, Ala., last week’s doings in the U. S. Senate were good news. Negro Jones had been arrested, charged with jumping on the running board of a car to kidnap Mrs. Robert Knox Greene, wife of a white planter. When Mrs. Greene’s friends began to gather he did not need to be told what familiar, ugly thought they had in mind. At the crucial moment when Sheriff Calvin Hollis was trying to calm the crowd, up stepped Planter Robert Knox Greene himself. How Planter Greene, a cousin of Alabama’s Representative Sam Hobbs, persuaded the mob to disperse he was soon explaining to the Associated Press. “I told them I was the aggrieved person,” said he, with some self-satisfaction, “and I ought to have the final say. I also reminded them our Southern Senators were fighting an anti-lynching bill in Washington and violence might hamper them…

…But Jimmy Byrnes dropped the first real bomb. Pointing straight at a small man seated quietly in the gallery, his voice tense with passion, the wiry South Carolinian cried: “The South may just as well know , . . that it has been deserted by the Democrats of the North. . . . One Negro . . . has ordered this bill to pass and if a majority can pass it, it will pass. . . . If Walter White,” and Jimmy Byrnes was fairly shouting his angry tribute, “should consent to have this bill laid aside, its advocates would desert it as quickly as football players unscramble when the whistle of the referee is heard.”

Paleface-The Negro who did not acknowledge this extraordinary attention was Secretary Walter Francis White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Not the least reason for Southern hatred of antilynching bills is that for the past decade they have been inextricably associated with Walter White, and that the gradual growth of the anti-lynching movement had by last week made spunky, dapper, 44-year-old Negro White the most potent leader of his race in the U. S.

Son of a fair-skinned Georgia postman and his fair-skinned wife, Walter White is blond and palefaced. He himself does not know how much Negro blood runs in his veins; Harvard’s far-ranging Anthropologist Earnest Alfred Hooton computes it at 1/64. But despite a skin that last week fooled fellow guests at Washington’s Hay-Adams House, Walter White has always regarded himself as a Negro. He remembers that his father’s house was almost burned down during an Atlanta race riot in his childhood. He recalls too that his father died in agony when the surgeons of the white ward of an Atlanta hospital, to which he had been mistakenly taken for an emergency operation, balked upon learning his race and insisted on shipping him in the rain to the Negro ward across the street…

…In 1935, Walter White was able to get the ear of Franklin Roosevelt. Secretary Marvin Mclntyre refused him an appointment with the President, but the President’s Negro Valet Irvin H. McDuffie who sometimes leaves notes on his employer’s pillow and tactfully gets unofficial callers in through the White House kitchen, was able to arrange a private meeting. What effect Walter White’s address to the President may have had Washington last week was not sure…

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