White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. Naacp - Hardcover

Janken, Kenneth Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565847733 ISBN 13: 9781565847736

Publisher: The New Press, 2003

Synopsis

From his earliest years, Walter White was determined to transcend the rigid boundaries of segregation-era America. An African American of exceptionally light complexion, White went undercover as a young man to expose the depredations of Southern lynch mobs. As executive secretary of the NAACP from 1931 until his death in 1955, White was among the nation’s preeminent champions of civil rights, leading influential national campaigns against lynching, segregation in the military, and racism in Hollywood movies.

White is portrayed here for the first time in his full complexity, a man whose physical appearance enabled him to negotiate two very different worlds in segregated America, yet who saw himself above all as an organization man, “Mr. NAACP.” Deeply researched and richly documented, White’s biography provides a revealing vantage point from which to view the leading political and cultural figures of his time—including W.E.B. Du Bois, Eleanor Roosevelt, and James Weldon Johnson—and an unrivaled glimpse into the contentious world of civil rights politics and activism in the pre–civil rights era.

About this title

About the Author:

Kenneth Janken is associate professor of Afro-American studies and adjunct professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African American Intellectual and White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP (The New Press).

From Publishers Weekly:

When Walter White died suddenly of a heart attack in March of 1965, the New York Times obituary, taking account of his light skin, straight blond hair, and blue eyes, noted that "White, the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington, was a Negro by choice." Indeed, Janken (associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) finds that when White left Atlanta to work on race violence in the NAACP's New York office in 1918 at the age of 24, he often used his ability to "pass" to his advantage, sometimes even infiltrating white lynch mobs to expose them. This elegantly written and comprehensive biography, the first major work on its subject, is a model of nuanced scholarship and popular history. Janken covers the full sweep of White's career: his complex interactions with the artistic culture of the Harlem Renaissance (he authored several popular novels), his involvement with the NAACP's relationship to the Communist Party, his close working relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt in the attempt to pass congressional anti-lynching laws, his complicated plan to recast in global terms the NAACP's mission during the Cold War. Yet Janken never allows this wealth of detail to become burdensome, moving animatedly through White's life and career, and never hiding the more difficult moments, such as White's fights with W.E.B. DuBois over separatism versus integration, or his "abrasive" (but productive) relationship with a pre-Supreme Court Thurgood Marshall. In sum, this is a multilayered portrait of an important American political figure, who has, until now, been overlooked by historians.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1565847733
• ISBN 13: 9781565847736
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368