Profiles in Character #24: Walter White Campaigns to End Lynching
In the White House Rose Garden on March 29, 2022, over 120 years since one was first proposed, President Biden signed into law a bill making it possible for the federal government to prosecute lynching (conspiracy to commit a hate crime that results in death or serious bodily injury). Walter White, unknown to most Americans today, was certainly there in spirit, having passed away in 1955. As a staff member of the NAACP and later its Executive Secretary, White spent years putting his life in jeopardy to end the practice that murdered some 6,500 African Americans.
On February 13, 1918, age 24 and recently arrived in New York City to work for the NAACP, Walter saw a newspaper story about Jim McIlherron, a black man living in Estill Springs, Tennessee. A mob of more than 1,500 had gathered to watch him burn at the stake. White, who daily saw a map in the NAACP office with a pin in every location where a lynching had taken place, resolved to visit the town to investigate. He had one key advantage – and faced one existential threat.
White was black, but he had blond hair, blue eyes and a complexion that could easily pass for white. His was the great-grandson of William Henry Harrison who before becoming president fathered several children with one of his slaves. One of those children was White’s grandmother. Born in Atlanta in 1893, White identified as black, went to a black school and church and with his father faced an angry white mob outside their home in 1906. He understood the South, its dangers and customs.
Walter created as his cover for the investigation the role of a white, traveling salesman for the Exelento Medicine Company, enabling him to talk with townspeople about the lynching. If discovered, he knew he’d face torture and death. As the train carrying him south drew closer to Estill Springs, White recollected that “My self-confidence steadily declined and my fear rose on the train ride. It was my first attempt to pass.”
White talked to people in the town, gathered evidence and wrote a report, which was published in the NAACP’s journal The Crisis. Nothing happened –silence from the state’s governor, no investigation, no arrests. Undaunted, Walter would continue. By 1923, as he told a friend, “I have personally investigated 35 lynchings and eight race riots.” The result was always the same – outrage among some and little more.
One of his most dangerous investigations followed the 1921 Tulsa race massacre that killed, Walter estimated, between 150-200 black citizens. Disguised as a reporter, he was able to get deputized by the Tulsa police to patrol the city with other white officers, one of whom told him after he was sworn in that “Now you get to go out and shoot any nigger you see and the law’ll be behind you.” His report led to “more than a hundred anonymous letters threatening my life.” Finally revealed as black, he could no longer go undercover. His efforts to halt lynching increasingly relied on political and legal strategies.
In 1918, Representative Leonidas C. Dyer of Missouri had introduced a federal anti-lynching bill to allow prosecution of perpetrators if a state refused to do so. A later version would pass the House in 1922 but die in a filibuster by southern Senators. In 1934, Democratic Senators Edward Costigan and Robert Wagner authored another anti-lynching bill. Despite Walter’s efforts, having become Executive Secretary of the NAACP in 1931, President Roosevelt refused to meet with him or support the bill, for fear of losing southern Democratic votes. A Senate filibuster also doomed that bill to defeat. By 1968, some 200 anti-lynching bills had been introduced in Congress and not one made it into law until the Emmett Till Antilynching Act cleared the House and Senate in early 2022.
Walter’s campaign included writing as well. A 1924 novel, Fire in the Flint, chronicled the life of Kenneth Harper, a young black physician who comes to the South, helps local sharecroppers and is targeted and ultimately lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. In 1929, he published a non-fiction account of lynching, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch.
While his tireless efforts did not produce legislation, his exposure of lynching and the outrage it generated likely contributed to the demise of the practice around the time of his death. Those who might dismiss his quest as quixotic, however, would grossly underestimate the power of his character and achievements. He brought Roy Wilkins and Thurgood Marshall into the NAACP, the latter whose efforts resulted in the end of school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. He helped launch the Harlem Renaissance, persuade President Roosevelt to end discrimination in federal wartime hiring and President Truman to end discrimination in all federal hiring and integrate the military. Walter’s life and accomplishments are chronicled in White Lies:The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret, by A.J. Baime (which heavily informed this post).
Photo Credit: aaregistry.org
