Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 – March 21, 1955) was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for a quarter of a century, from 1929 until 1955.

[1][2] He joined the Advisory Council for the Government of the Virgin Islands in 1934, but he resigned in 1935 to protest President Franklin D. Roosevelt's silence at Southern Democrats' blocking of anti-lynching legislation to avoid retaliatory obstruction of his New Deal policies.

He worked with President Harry S. Truman on desegregating the armed forces after World War II and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this.

By the time he was born, his father had attended Atlanta University, which is still known today as one of the South's historically black colleges, and had become a postal worker, an admired position in the federal government.

Undoubtedly White's life work reflected on the "Old Atlanta University's pioneer and still unequaled contributions in Southern colored institutions of higher learning.

"[8] The White family belonged to the influential First Congregational Church, founded after the Civil War by freedmen and the American Missionary Association, based in the North.

[10] The oral history of his mother's family asserts that her maternal grandparents were Dilsia, an enslaved woman concubine, and her owner, William Henry Harrison.

George and Madeline White took a kind but firm approach in rearing their children, encouraging hard work and regular schedules.

[13] In his autobiography, White relates that his parents ran a strict schedule on Sundays; they locked him in his room for silent prayer, a time so boring that he almost begged to do homework.

[15] Du Bois and Walter White later disagreed about how best to gain civil rights for black people, but they shared a vision for the country.

(Black people had been effectively disfranchised at the turn of the century by Georgia's passage of a new constitution making voter registration more difficult, as did all the other former Confederate states.

[22] According to White's oral history, when Harrison decided to run for president, he concluded that it would not be politically advantageous for him to have "bastard slave children" in his home.

[citation needed] White used his appearance to increase his effectiveness in conducting investigations of lynchings and race riots in the American South.

Such work was dangerous: "Through 1927 White would investigate 41 lynchings, 8 race riots, and two cases of widespread peonage, risking his life repeatedly in the backwaters of Florida, the piney woods of Georgia, and in the cotton fields of Arkansas.

"[23] In his autobiography, A Man Called White, he dedicates an entire chapter to a time when he almost joined the Ku Klux Klan undercover.

[26] Granted press credentials from the Chicago Daily News, White gained an interview with Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough, who would not have met with him as the NAACP representative.

The NAACP provided legal defense of the black men convicted by the state for the riot and carried the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Locked in a cell awaiting trial, the "Scottsboro boys looked to be prime lynching material: dirt poor, illiterate, and of highly questionable moral character even for teenagers.

White said: "The shortsightedness of the Communist leaders in the United States (led to their eventual failure); Had they been more intelligent, honest, and truthful there is no way of estimating how deeply they might have penetrated into Negro life and consciousness.

He advised white America to reconsider its position of unfair treatment because they might find the black population choosing radical alternative methods of protest.

[36] In his autobiography, White gave a critical summary of the injustice in Scottsboro: In the intervening years it had become increasingly clear that the tragedy of a Scottsboro lies, not in the bitterly cruel injustice which it works upon its immediate victims, but also, and perhaps even more, in the cynical use of human misery by Communists in propagandizing Communism, and in the complacency with which a democratic government views the basic evils from which such a case arises.

[37]White was a strong proponent and supporter of federal anti-lynching bills, which were unable to surmount the opposition by the Southern Democrats in the Senate.

In the late 1910s, newspapers reported a decreasing number of southern lynchings but postwar violence in Northern and Midwestern cities increased under the competition for work and housing by returning veterans, immigrants and black migrants.

At the turn of the 20th century, the state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws and constitutions that effectively created barriers to voter registration and closed black people out of the political process.

If Walter White should consent to have this bill laid aside its advocates would desert it as quickly as football players unscramble when the whistle of the referee is heard.

The program's guidelines were to prepare future NAACP leaders and activists, educate youth on black history, support campaigns for civil rights or against lynching, and foster interracial cooperation.

White feared a backlash that might cost the NAACP its tax-exempt status and end up with people equating civil rights with communism.

Writer Zora Neale Hurston accused Walter White of stealing her designed costumes from her play The Great Day.

[46] After Hattie McDaniel was the first African-American to win an Oscar, the 1939 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Gone with the Wind and beating Olivia de Havilland, White accused her of being an Uncle Tom.

Additional books were A Rising Wind (1945, which inspired Nevil Shute to write the popular novel The Chequer Board two years later),[48] his autobiography A Man Called White (1948), and How Far the Promised Land (1955).