Today In Black History: Walter White
Executive NAACP Secretary and Great-grandson of President William Henry Harrison
Issue #604 Today In Black History, Thursday, May 16, 2024
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Today’s Black History WOW!
Walter White in 1918
Walter White was born on July 1, 1893, in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in a racially segregated society. He was able to pass as white due to his light skin color and his racial makeup of less than 16% African, which allowed him to witness firsthand the disparities and injustices faced by African Americans. White and his family nevertheless always identified as Negroes, and he attended the Atlanta public schools where he was exposed to instruction that included the research of W. E. B. Du Bois.
All members of his immediate family had fair skin, and his mother, Madeline, was also blue-eyed and blonde. 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. Harrison had six children with Dilsia and, much later, was elected president of the United States in 1840. Madeline's mother, Marie Harrison, was one of Dilsia's daughters with Harrison, who was thus the great-grandfather of Walter White.
In 1918, White joined the NAACP as an assistant secretary at the invitation of the then Executive Secretary, James Weldon Johnson. He quickly rose through the ranks to become the organization's executive secretary in 1931. As a leader of the NAACP, White focused on increasing membership, expanding the organization's reach, and advocating for anti-lynching legislation. He also used his platform to draw attention to challenge the prevailing narrative of white supremacy.
White became an undercover agent in investigating lynchings in the South, which were at a peak. With his keen investigative skills and light complexion, White proved to be the NAACP's secret weapon against white mob violence.
White's first major struggle as leader of the NAACP centered on the Scottsboro Trial in 1931, as the American Communist Party was trying to gain a foothold in the Black community.
White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. 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. Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up its Legal Defense Fund, which conducted numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement and achieved many successes, including the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.
At the age of 61, Walter White died of a heart attack in New York City on March 21, 1955.
Today In Black History
In 1792, Denmark abolished its slave trade.
In 1868, the U.S. Senate failed to oust impeached President Andrew Johnson by one vote.
In 1947, singer Billie Holliday was arrested in her New York City apartment for possession of narcotics.
In 1966, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Touré) was named chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
In 1972, segregationist former Alabama Governor George Wallace won the Michigan Democratic Presidential Primary.
In 1997, the U.S. government issued a formal apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. President Bill Clinton promised that something similar would never happen again.
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