Walter F. White

The executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Naacp) from 1930 until his death in 1955, Walter White was arguably the preeminent African American civil rights spokesperson of his day. Yet, some sixty years later, he is largely absent from the public imagination. This neglect, Robert L. Zangrando and Ronald L. Lewis suggest, is caused by a variety of factors. Blond, blue-eyed, and light skinned, White was just “not black enough” to become a civil rights icon (p. 9). From the mid-1950s the style of leadership associated with White fell out of fashion. He “had no faith in mass movements” (p. 3). Coming of age during the Progressive Era, he internalized the values of that time. He believed that lobbying the powerful, combined with a courtroom-based strategy, was the best way to counter racial injustice. Academic researchers, overly reliant on the testimony of White's critics, have underplayed his achievements and overstated his shortcomings. This includes Kenneth Robert Janken's seminal 2003 biography, White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. Naacp, which depicts White “as a complex figure but essentially embraces the view of his enemies” (p. 11), notwithstanding the fact that Janken had access to Zangrando's notes from interviews with close associates of White. Instead, the authors seek to present a more balanced account. Drawing on approximately seventy interviews with White's family and colleagues, they argue that he should be viewed as one of “the great civil rights leaders of the twentieth century” (p. 12)

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