Celebrate the 116th Anniversary of the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP.
One of the key figures in NAACP history was Walter White, born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1893. A college graduate like both his parents, White had blue eyes and blond hair like his parents, grandparents, and great-great grandparents.
The White family was listed in the 1900 Georgia census as white, but that designation changed in the 1920 census to Mulato. When Walter was 12 years old, he witnessed a murderous riot where local white men killed two dozen black Atlantans and injured hundreds. The experience profoundly influenced the rest of his life.
A year after graduating from Atlanta University he was invited to join the NAACP as a Secretary’s Assistant. Soon he was operating undercover investigating acts of racial violence and discrimination. For his first assignment he interviewed participants in the lynching of a black man. The perpetrators spoke freely in front of this blue-eyed blond, starting White’s nine-year stint as an undercover agent.
He traveled thousands of miles and reported first-hand on forty-one lynchings, eight race riots, and two cases of peonage or debt servitude. His reporting helped to change public opinion that led to federal anti-lynching, anti-poll tax and anti-segregation legislation.
White became the national Secretary of the NAACP in 1931. During WWII he visited the European, Pacific and North African theaters of war to report on discrimination suffered by black service men and wrote to President Truman requesting an end to the practice.
In 1941 helped White persuade President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 which prohibited racial discrimination in defense industries and established the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), the first Federal agency to monitor compliance with anti-discrimination measures
During his NAACP career, White gave thousands of speeches, wrote hundreds of articles, and two long-time weekly columns for both black and white newspapers, and five books including two novels. Yet his name is not as well-known as others in the movement.