{"id":63635,"date":"2022-04-01T02:58:53","date_gmt":"2022-04-01T02:58:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=63635"},"modified":"2022-04-01T02:58:53","modified_gmt":"2022-04-01T02:58:53","slug":"a-vigorous-examination-of-mr-naacp-who-passed-as-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=63635","title":{"rendered":"A vigorous examination of \u2018Mr. NAACP,\u2019 who passed as White"},"content":{"rendered":"

A vigorous examination of \u2018Mr. NAACP,\u2019 who passed as White<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/a>
\n2022-03-25<\/p>\n

Kevin Boyle<\/strong><\/a>, William Smith Mason Professor of American History
\nNorthwestern University, Evanston, Illinois<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>
Walter White<\/a> was executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People<\/a> in June 1942. (Gordon Parks\/Farm Security Administration\/Library of Congress) (Gordon Parks \/Farm Security Administration\/Library of Congress<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When Walter White<\/a> joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People\u2019s<\/a> New York<\/a> staff in 1918, he had a thin record of civil rights activism. But he quickly made himself into the association\u2019s indispensable man, particularly skilled at communicating the terror of racial violence to White audiences. It was a talent built partly on his limitless courage, partly on his incessant charm, and partly on a family inheritance that set him apart from most of Black America. \u201cI am a Negro,\u201d he wrote late in life. \u201cMy skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the marks of slavery were. The sexual exploitation that ran through the antebellum South<\/a> coiled tightly round White\u2019s maternal line: Both his great-grandfather and grandfather were prominent White men; his great-grandmother and grandmother, enslaved women powerless to resist them. His mother was born into bondage, too, just as the Civil War<\/a> was about to bring the slave system down. Over the decades of freedom that followed, she and the light-skinned man she married pulled their family into the Black middle class, where their color carried a great deal of cachet. There White was born and raised, wrapped in the Victorian virtues of turn-of-the-century Atlanta\u2019s most prestigious Black neighborhood as Jim Crow closed in around him.<\/p>\n

A.J. Baime<\/a> centers the first two thirds of his vigorous biography, \u201cWhite Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America\u2019s Darkest Secret<\/a>,\u201d on the first 12 years of White\u2019s confrontation with that brutal regime. His breakthrough came two weeks into his time as an NAACP staffer, when his boss, the incomparable James Weldon Johnson<\/a>, sent him to investigate a lynching in tiny Estill Springs, Tenn<\/a>. White arrived in town claiming to be a traveling salesman. In short order, he was sitting in the general store, chatting up the locals who assumed that he was as White as they were. By nightfall, he had gathered all the horrifying details that made his resulting expos\u00e9, published in the NAACP magazine, the Crisis<\/em><\/a>, a sensation…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Walter White joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People\u2019s New York staff in 1918, he had a thin record of civil rights activism. But he quickly made himself into the association\u2019s indispensable man, particularly skilled at communicating the terror of racial violence to White audiences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,5,8],"tags":[32839,33398,899,2708,2875,28260,6786,1929,2581],"class_list":["post-63635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","tag-a-j-baime","tag-kevin-boyle","tag-naacp","tag-national-association-for-the-advancement-of-colored-people","tag-the-washington-post","tag-walter-f-white","tag-walter-francis-white","tag-walter-white","tag-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63635"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63636,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63635\/revisions\/63636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}