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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 |
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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. * * *
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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)
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update 2 July
2008 |
