White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP

Walter White was a blond-haired, blue-eyed charmer and "voluntary Negro" who could have slipped across the color line and passed as a white man. Instead, he burned his incandescent energies in the 20th century's many struggles for black freedom. Kenneth Janken, a solid and capable historian, captures White wonderfully in this subtle, fair-minded and fascinating biography. At great personal peril, Walter White used his light complextion to investigate 41 lynchings and eight "race riots" in which white mobs killed dozens of African Americans. His courage and eloquence--and sometimes his self-promotion and deceit--lifted White to leadership in the NAACP. There he put the brakes on mass-based political organizing wherever it bubbled up. In fact, much of what we think of as "the civil rights movement" happened in spite of, not because of, the national office of the NAACP.His investigations of mob violence earned White a reputation as a fearless race man. But as executive secretary of the NAACP, White proved himself to be the classic organization man. A skilled lobbyist and fund-raiser, White favored a careful, bureaucratic NAACP than was profoundly undemocratic and sometimes unresponsive to its rank and file members. At the end of his life, White sank into such despair that he advocated that African Americans literally bleach themselves into white society. His article in LOOK magazine, "Has Science Conquered the Color Line?" argued that chemical treatments to lighten skin color "will provide a way to get fair treatment [Negroes] have always wanted" and "let them live like other Americans and be judged on their own merits." It was as if someone suggested that the ccure for anti-Semitism was wholesale conversion to Christianity! The staggering pessimism beneath these arguments spoke volumes about White's own agonies. And yet White had given his whole life to push the struggle forward, and Janken certainly does not sell him short. In fact, it is the central strength of this book that Janken understands the diverse basis of African American politics, which differed by class and region and in which personal ambitions and ideological clashes also play their part.It was perhaps fitting that this "voluntary Negro" leader of such mixed elements died in 1955, only months before African American women in Montgomery organized the bus boycott that lifted up a far more bold and imaginative leader, and a revolt of the black masses that would capture the moral imagination of the world. Walter White would not have approved, but he sought the same "sense of somebodiness" that Dr. King wanted for his people. If a race man like Walter White, fearless enough to brave the mob, could not quite escape from his own internalized white supremacy, we should not be shocked to find it lingering in our own minds.Kenneth Janken has captured a rich, subtle, and important American life with impeccable research and an engaging prose style, and I went away from this book