Mixed Race Studies

Before Rachel Dolezal, there was Walter White

The Christian Science Monitor
2015-06-15

Randy Dotinga

The man known as ‘Mr. NAACP’ was blonde, blue-eyed and 5/32nd black, all of which provoked an outcry similar to that over contemporary NAACP official Rachel Dolezal.

Walter White, known as “Mr. NAACP,” didn’t look black. He had blue eyes and blonde hair, and his enemies sought to smear him as an opportunist who lied about his race and couldn’t possibly understand the black experience. But the secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People persevered through much of the 20th century and left a stunning if tarnished legacy.

White energized the refined halls of the NAACP, brought together literary stars of the Harlem Renaissance, and helped craft the partial demise of segregation. He battled lynching, convinced politicians to kill the Supreme Court nomination of a racist and hobnobbed with the famous. Sixty years after his death, White is eclipsed in modern memory by other civil-rights leaders. Few know about his remarkable struggle to be seen as the genuine article by other African-Americans, and his vicious battles with fellow leaders like W. E. B. DuBois.

But this month, the ever-bubbling issue of blackness – who has it, who doesn’t, and why it matters – is on tongues across the country amid the roaring debate over Rachel Dolezal, a NAACP official in Spokane, Wash. White’s story resonates as Dolezal, who may not be black as she’s claimed, faces a national storm.

Here are 5 Things to Know about Walter White and Racial Identity, gleaned from his crisply written 1948 memoir A Man Called White and author Thomas Dyja’s perceptive and often-critical 2008 biography Walter White: The Dilemma of Black Identity in America…

Read the entire article here.

Walter White: The Dilemma of Black Identity in America

Ivan R. Dee
October 2008
224 pages
Electronic ISBN: 1-56663-815-1 / 978-1-56663-815-9
Cloth ISBN: 1-56663-766-X / 978-1-56663-766-4
Paper ISBN: 1-56663-865-8 / 978-1-56663-865-4

Thomas Dyja

The day Walter White was buried in 1955 the New York Times called him “the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington.” For more than two decades, White, as secretary of the NAACP, was perhaps the nation’s most visible and most powerful African-American leader. He won passage of a federal anti-lynching law, hosted one of the premier salons of the Harlem Renaissance, created the legal strategy that led to Brown v. Board of Education, and initiated the campaign demanding that Hollywood give better roles to black actors. Driven by ambitions for himself and his people, he offered his entire life to the advancement of civil rights in America.

Table of Contents

• A World of His Own
• The Life Insurance Temperament
• Undercover Against Lynching
• At the Center of the Harlem Renaissance
• Conflict, Control, and the Making of Mr. NAACP
• Fighting on All Fronts
• “I am white and I am black”