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Books by Walter White
The Fire in the Flint (novel,1924)
/
Flight
(novel,1926) /
Rope
and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929)
How far the Promised Land?
955) /
A
Man Called White (autobiography,1948).
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* * * *
Books on
Lynching & Racial Violence
The Chronological
History of the Negro in America (1969) /
Strain of
Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (1975)
But There Was
No Peace: The
Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction
(1984) /
Lynch Law
( 1905) /
An American Dilemma
(1944)
The Crucible of Race:
Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation
(1984) /
Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
(1989)
Rope and Faggot
( 1929) /
The Tragedy of
Lynching (1933) /
Race Riot in East St,
Louis (1964) /
Urban Racial Violence
(1976)
/
Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders
(1968) /
Violence
in America (1969) *
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White:
The Biography
of Walter White, Mr. NAACP
By Kenneth Janken
A
publishing landmark, the first biography of the man who brought
the NAACP to national prominence.
Walter
White was one of the most important civil rights leaders of the
fist half of the twentieth century. He was executive secretary
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP). He pushed for a national effort to achieve
political, economic and social rights for African Americans.
Walter White
[1893-1945] was a blond haired, blue-eyed boy who belied his
African American ancestry. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia.
following graduation from Atlanta University in 1916, he worked
for an insurance company. His civil rights career began when he
organized a protest against the Atlanta Board of Education's
plan to drop 7th grade for black students in order to finance
the building of a new white high school. After founding the the
Atlanta branch of the NAACP, he moved on to become assistant
secretary for the organization's national staff in 1918. By
1931, he was executive secretary -- the highest position in the
organization.
White married his first wife, Gladys Powell, in 1922. The
Whites' apartment which they moved into in 1929, was known as
"The House of Harlem" because of the prominent and
important figures who were guests there. Ms. White and her
daughter lived there until 1961. Gladys and Walter were divorced
shortly before they moved out of "The House of
Harlem."
During this same period, White also wrote several books
including two novels,
The Fire in the Flint (1924) and
Flight
(1926), as well as a study of the factors behind lynching,
Rope
and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929). He also wrote
How far the Promised Land?; (1955) and an autobiography,
A
Man Called White (1948).
As leader of the NAACP, White led the flight for anti lynching
legislation - a cause he was familiar with, having investigated
more than forty such deaths. During his tenure, the NAACP also
launched major legal campaigns to end white primaries, poll
taxes and segregated housing and education. In 1937 White
received the Spingarn Medal for his investigations of lynchings
and lobbying for the anti-lynching bill (defeated by a narrow
margin in 1938).
With A. Phillip Randolph, he persuaded Franklin D. Roosevelt to
issue an executive order in 1941 prohibiting racial
discrimination in defense industries and establishing the Fair
Employment Practices Commission. His work as a foreign
correspondent during World War 2, resulted in another book, A
Rising Wind, (1945) which exposed the discrimination black
soldiers faced and influenced the president Harry Truman's 1948
order to desegregate the armed forces. That same year he also
persuaded Truman to appoint a presidential committee on civil
rights. The committee's report became the basis of the
Democratic party's platform plank on civil rights in 1948.
Although White primarily focused on improving conditions for
African Americans he recognized the international implications
of the race issue and devoted time and effort to them. He was a
delegate to the Second Pan-African Congress in 1921 and a member
of the Advisory Council for the government of the Virgin Islands
in 1934 through 1935. He was also an advisor to the United
States delegation to the founding conference of the United
Nations in 1945 and to the 1948 General Assembly session in
Paris.
White remained executive secretary of the NAACP until his death
despite periodic internal threats to his leadership. He survived
these, but with his power somewhat curtailed by the time of his
death in 1955, much of the financial management and supervision
of the office had passed to his assistant secretary, Roy
Wilkins.
Walter White married his second wife, Poppy Cannon, in 1949,
with whom he was living with at the time of his death.
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. DuBois, 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. * * *
* *
Walter Francis White
(July 1, 1893, Atlanta, Georgia – March 21, 1955, New York, New York)
was an African American who became a spokesman for his community in the
United States for almost a quarter of a century, and served as executive
secretary (1931–1955) of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He
graduated from Atlanta University in 1916 (now
Clark Atlanta University). In 1918 he joined the small national
staff of the NAACP in New York at the invitation of
James Weldon Johnson. White acted as Johnson's assistant national
secretary. In 1931 he succeeded him at the helm of the NAACP.
White oversaw the plans and
organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. Under
his leadership, the NAACP set up the
Legal Defense Fund, which raised numerous legal challenges to
segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among
these was the Supreme Court ruling in
Brown v. Board of Education, which determined that segregated
education was inherently unequal. He was the virtual author of President
Truman's presidential order desegregating the armed forces after the
Second World War. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly
500,000.In addition to his NAACP work, White was a journalist, novelist,
and essayist, and influential in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
Wikipedia.
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Kenneth R. Janken
Education:
B.A., M.A. (History) Hunter College of the City University
of New York
Ph. D. (American History) Rutgers University
Dr. Kenneth Janken is an African and Afro-American studies
professor and an adjunct professor of history at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Email: krjanken@email.unc.edu |
 |
TEACHING INTERESTS: In addition to
our department's survey course on the black experience, I teach
the civil rights movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and black
thought. In the next several semesters, I would like to
introduce courses on black politics and African American
biography and autobiography. I am on the faculty advisory
board of the Office of Undergraduate Research, and I am a firm
believer that all undergraduates should have such an experience
at least once in their time at Carolina.
RESEARCH INTERESTS: So far my research has
concentrated on 20th century African American history, with a
special emphasis on the varieties of black intellectual and
political thought and action and the connections between African
Americans and the world. I am the author of
Rayford W.
Logan and the Dilemma of the African American Intellectual
(1993), which is a biography of a prominent and important
scholar and Pan-African activist; . I am also completing a
biography of Walter White, who was a Harlem Renaissance author
and who was the head of the NAACP from 1930 to his death in
1955. I have written several articles on these two
historical figures, as well as an article on African American
intellectuals and their relations with their French-speaking
black counterparts during the 1920s and 1930s.
OTHER INTERESTS: I love baseball, both watching
it and playing it. I also have a busy family life, what
with a spouse and two young children. * * *
* *
Bill
Moyers Interviews Douglass A. Blackmon
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06202008/watch2.html
Douglas A. Blackmon,
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the
Civil War to World War II (2008)
update 2 July
2008 |
