FORGOTTEN HERO: WALTER WHITE AND THE NAACP
KENNETH MACK, PROFESSOR OF LAW: In the early 20th century life for African Americans in the South has been changing for the worse for decades. The vote is being suppressed. Lynchings are increasing. Segregation is increasing. We're really at the nadir of African American experience since slavery.
KARLOS HILL, HISTORIAN: Lynching is the primary form of enforcing and reinforcing white supremacy. There is nothing that provides sanctuary for you or your family.
NARRATOR: The freedom struggle had never seemed more forlorn. But in 1909, during this darkest hour, a group of activists gathered to form a new organization, dedicated to the radical ideal of equality. They called it the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It would be at the heart of Black America’s freedom struggle for the next fifty years.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: This was not a natural American development. This came from people who understood what America could be, and were willing to put it on the line to make it happen.
JOSE ANDERSON, PROFESSOR OF LAW: You have WEB Du Bois: absolutely brilliant, phenomenal communicator. Charlie Houston, spectacular legal mind. Thurgood Marshall: card playing, bourbon drinking, great storyteller; the ultimate legal rock star. They were really an odd set of people.
NARRATOR: The man who ended up leading this fractious group of geniuses was brave, gifted, egotistical, gregarious, deeply flawed…and utterly, fiercely devoted to the cause.
KENNETH MACK, PROFESSOR OF LAW: Walter White makes the NAACP into a national player.
KIDADA WILLIAMS, HISTORIAN: The NAACP and Walter White laid the foundation for the movement that we see in the 1960s.
NARRATOR: For decades Walter White was arguably the most influential Black man in America, the face of the civil rights movement. Yet he was an enigma even to himself, as he put it, “a Black man occupying a white body.”
ELLIS MONK, HISTORIAN: He is very light skinned, indistinguishable from white Americans.
ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH, HISTORIAN: He used his appearance to go into places where lynchings had happened.
KARLOS HILL, HISTORIAN: He was a revered person because of the risks that he was willing to take.
RANDOLPH STAKEMAN, HISTORIAN: The question is…why is he forgotten?
ROSE PALMER, NIECE OF WALTER WHITE: Somehow my uncle was just written completely out of Black history.
KIDADA WILLIAMS, HISTORIAN: There's so many assumptions about the civil rights movement, because people are looking for simple stories. And this isn't a simple story.
ATLANTA
SEPTEMBER 22, 1906
NARRATOR: Something was wrong. Thirteen-year-old Walter White could feel it as he rode through the city with his father. Race-baiting politicians had been stirring up trouble all summer long. The newspapers were full of rumors about Black men and white women. “The Negro grows more bumptious in the street,” the Atlanta Journal warned, “more impudent in his dealings with white men. And when he cannot achieve social equality as he wishes, he assaults the fair young girlhood of the South.”
WALTER WHITE (VO): All over downtown Atlanta, little bands of sullen, evil-looking men talked excitedly on street corners. Father told me that rumors of a race riot that night were sweeping the town.
DAVID LEVERING LEWIS, HISTORIAN: Someone shouted to the milling crowd, "What are you waiting for, men? Women are being raped every day as I speak!" Suddenly this mass of ten thousand souls began to attack every person of color.
CLARISSA MYRICK-HARRIS WHITE, HISTORIAN: Ten thousand white people attacking African-Americans, willy-nilly on the street, wherever they saw - "There's one. Let's go get them. There's one. Let's go get her." You know, didn't matter if it was a woman. Didn't matter if it was a child. They were they would get them, beat them.
NARRATOR: “In some streets,” the Atlanta Constitution reported, “the sidewalks ran red with the blood of dead and dying Negroes.” But the mobs took no notice of Walter and his father, with their pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: They're not identified by the mob as African-Americans. So they're able to move through this horror, and witness what's happening.
NARRATOR: Walter and his father ran the gauntlet of violence, and finally made it back home to safety. But as darkness descended, they braced themselves.
ROSE PALMER, NIECE OF WALTER WHITE: There was a rumor that they were going to burn down the entire Black community. And so my grandfather and Uncle Walter stood at the front window, watching for the advance of the mob.
NARRATOR: For hours they waited, listening for the sounds of rioting in the distance. Around midnight, the roar grew louder. Walter watched in horror as a mob made its way up the street.
WALTER WHITE (VO): Some of them were bearing torches. Suddenly there was a volley of shots. Friends of my father's had barricaded themselves in a two-story brick building just down the street. It was they who had fired.
CLARISSA MYRICK-HARRIS WHITE, HISTORIAN: African-American men were patrolling the area, protecting their neighbors. And when the white mobs came, they shot back.
WALTER WHITE (VO): The mob hesitated, stopped. Our friends fired another volley. The mob broke and retreated up Houston Street.
NARRATOR: Walter and his family had been saved by their Black compatriots. But all the same, the thirteen-year-old was deeply scarred.
KARLOS HILL, HISTORIAN: The violence that Walter White witnessed, he finds it repugnant. And so distasteful that he says, “I am so glad that I am not a member of, of the white race.” He develops his sense of not only identity but of who he wanted to be in the world.
WALTER WHITE (VO): In that instant there opened up within me a great awareness; I was gripped by the knowledge of my identity. I was a Negro. In the depths of my soul I was glad of it.
ELLIS MONK, HISTORIAN: Walter White was the direct descendant of an enslaved woman, Dilsia. Dilsia had multiple children with a slave master or the children of the slave master. So Walter White is phenotypically, you know, indistinguishable from white Americans.
CLARISSA MYRICK-HARRIS WHITE, HISTORIAN: The White family could have easily passed for white, but they made a choice. Walter White, as a child, moved through the world as an African-American. He lived in the African-American community.
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: His father was a mail carrier, and his mother was a former teacher. The family owned its own house. It was one of the things that marked them, as part of the middle class in Atlanta.
NARRATOR: Atlanta’s Black middle class was small enough that George and Madeline White were acquainted with even its most illustrious members. WEB Du Bois - the writer, activist, and sociologist at Atlanta University - visited their home from time to time. For Du Bois, the Whites and their children were perfect representatives of what he called “The Talented Tenth.”
ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH, HISTORIAN: Du Bois is the person who gives us the phrase “Talented Tenth.” He's not the only person who believes that there is within - and he would say the race - within the race, there’s a subset of elite and educated Negroes, whose responsibility it was to lead the masses more broadly.
NARRATOR: For the most part, the Talented Tenth came from one subset of African American society.
ELLIS MONK, HISTORIAN: At the turn of the 20th century// Most of the political vanguard among African Americans// they're all mixed race, mulatto, light-skinned. Du Bois wasn’t very dark-skinned himself. Lightness in this era usually is something that is signifying that you have direct kinship ties to whites. They are more likely to be educated, to learn a trade. They may have inherited wealth. They are, by definition, the people who have the political capital, the economic capital, and the education to actually do this sort of civil rights work.
NARRATOR: For Walter and his family, Du Bois was a conduit to a wider world of activism and resistance. A new chapter in that long struggle began on the 14th of August 1908, in response to yet another terrifying urban massacre. For Du Bois, for the Whites, and other survivors of the Atlanta massacre, the news reports were horribly familiar. But there was a crucial difference: this time the mobs rose up in the North, in Springfield Illinois, the hometown of Abraham Lincoln.
ELLIS MONK, HISTORIAN: The Springfield riot really led to this call to bring people together across racial lines, to fight for the equality for African-Americans. But this was something very much led mainly by whites - socialists and people in that lineage of, of abolition who were very interested in racial equality.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: For white progressives, this was the sense that the race war is moving north. So In May of 1909 a meeting is called in New York City. Oswald Garrison Villard, the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison; Mary White Ovington, whose father had been active in the abolitionist movement, they invited Du Bois. And it's remarkable. It's historic. Three hundred people attend - Black and white.
NARRATOR: Du Bois joined with those northern activists to form a national organization with sweeping ambitions. At his suggestion they called it The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Its goals were almost unimaginably radical for most Americans: full political, legal, and social equality. But before any of those goals could be achieved, the NAACP would have to somehow contain the epidemic of racial violence.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: Du Bois understood that you had to work together. There was a sense that white Americans could be responsive to this if they saw what was happening.
KIDADA WILLIAMS, HISTORIAN: In a really just world, African-Americans wouldn't be experiencing this violence in the first place because white people wouldn't allow lynching to happen. But they do. And so African-Americans are in this position where they have to appeal to the white majority for empathy, for recognition of their right to live and be free and equal and feel secure in their own nation.
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1910, WEB Du Bois left Atlanta University for a poorly paid, tenuous position at the NAACP’s headquarters in New York. That fall he introduced the organization’s new monthly magazine. In Du Bois’ hands, The Crisis would rally Black Americans to the NAACP’s vision of the struggle. By 1912 The Crisis was selling more than twenty thousand copies a month. Back in Atlanta Du Bois had been a voice in the wilderness, with little influence beyond the most rarefied circles of Black society. Now he became the guide and prophet of a tiny but growing national movement. His writing channeled the aspirations, and the anger, of millions. “We have crawled and pleaded for justice,” he reminded his readers, “and we have been cheerfully spit upon, murdered and burned. We will not endure it forever. If we must die, in God’s name, let us perish like men, and not like bales of hay.”
NARRATOR: Eighteen months after Du Bois left Atlanta University, Walter White arrived on campus as a freshman. With his blond hair and blue eyes, Walter stood out - but he wasn’t alone.
DAVID LEVERING LEWIS, HISTORIAN: There was a component of, of people of color, who were phenotypically all but white. My mother and Walter were classmates //and she thought he was just a terrific personality. My mother agreed with Walter: there was no ambiguity about identity.
NARRATOR: Whatever his convictions, for Walter there was no escaping the paradox of his appearance.
ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH, HISTORIAN: We talk about the color line as if it's obvious and discernible. But for White, if he sat in the Black section //on the streetcar, then people would look at him like he was crazy and wonder what he was doing there. If he sat in the white section, people that knew he was Black, would accuse him of trying to take something that was not his to take.
ROSE PALMER, NIECE OF WALTER WHITE: People always accused him of not being Black, or just choosing to be Black. But he had always grown up in a Black community.
NARRATOR: Walter could never be sure how others perceived him; in their eyes he had no secure place on either side of the color line. But his own sense of racial identity grew ever deeper as he began to see more of the world.
WALTER WHITE (VO):The summer before my senior year I took a job selling policies for a life insurance company. Atlanta had been thoroughly covered by more experienced salesmen, so I set out for the rural areas outside the city. I learned a lot from talking with whites of these rural areas, especially when they believed me to be of their own race.
CLARISSA MYRICK-HARRIS WHITE, HISTORIAN: They would say all kinds of things to him that gave him a sense of what white people were thinking about the Black community.
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: He found out from African Americans, how hard their life was, about the plight of sharecroppers. And he returned to school in his senior year, having made up his mind that he wanted to do something about it.
NARRATOR: In the fall of 1916, Atlanta’s Board of Education decided to eliminate the seventh grade for Black children in order to spend more money on white schools. Walter and his Talented Tenth colleagues sprang into action.
RANDOLPH STAKEMAN, HISTORIAN: Walter, on behalf of the group, wrote to the NAACP, asking them to form a chapter in Atlanta. That letter ended up with James Weldon Johnson, who had just become the field secretary.
ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH, HISTORIAN: The NAACP had grown into a national organization. Local branches are proliferating as people see that there might be an opening to push the freedom struggle. And in those local branches, they might be kind of the more respectable or better placed people in a community, like insurance salesman and preachers and women who do club work.
RANDOLPH STAKEMAN, HISTORIAN: The NAACP branches were mostly in the cities in the north. And Johnson was very much interested in getting branches in the South, because, of course, that's the place with the most African Americans. So he replied to Walter White, indeed I will come and help you set things up.
NARRATOR: Under Johnson’s guidance, Walter played a crucial role in convincing the school board to back down, saving the seventh grade for Black students. Soon afterwards Walter launched the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP. Johnson was impressed and sent Walter an invitation to come work as his assistant at the NAACP headquarters in New York.
WALTER WHITE (VO): Mother was very vocal against my leaving home to live in “that Sodom and Gomorrah” of New York. Others told me that I would be a fool to devote myself to an almost hopeless cause. But my father urged me to accept the offer. “You’ll be misunderstood and criticized,” he told me quietly, “but don’t falter or turn back. It is your duty to pass on what you have been given.”
NARRATOR: On a frigid January morning in 1918, Walter White stepped off a train at New York’s Penn Station. James Weldon Johnson was there to meet him. The two men made their way through the crowds and headed up to Harlem. Walter had never seen a city this big, had never been this cold, never lived away from his family, never known a place that wasn’t segregated. He loved it.
DAVID LEVERING LEWIS, HISTORIAN: New York and Harlem were bedazzling I think, for Walter White. And he brought a kind of brio that people noted right away.
NARRATOR: On weekday mornings Johnson and White read the papers on the bus downtown to the NAACP office. It was on one of their morning commutes that they read of the gruesome lynching of Jim McIlherron in Estill Springs, Tennessee.
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: The usual thing that the NAACP did was to issue a press release and get in touch with elected officials.
NARRATOR: From its earliest days, the leaders of the NAACP had lobbied Congress for a federal anti-lynching bill, to rein in the mobs and the local authorities who condoned and encouraged them.
KIDADA WILLIAMS, HISTORIAN: If the states won't enforce their own laws on murder, then what they really want, is to pressure the federal government to step in. What kind of message, what information do members of Congress need to know about this violence in order to come out against it?
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: So Walter White is barely in the office a few weeks. And says, "I'll go.”
NARRATOR: White laid out a wildly risky plan: posing as a white salesman, he would travel to Estill Springs, gain the trust of the locals, and get the full story of the lynching from the perpetrators themselves. Johnson was adamantly opposed. “I understand this is dangerous,” White wrote him. “I take full responsibility if anything happens to me. And I hold you not liable in the event of my injury or death.” White was following in the footsteps of one of the most remarkable activists of the era.
KARLOS HILL, HISTORIAN: Ida B Wells during the 1890s, single-handedly initiates the anti-lynching movement, initially to get justice for her friends who were lynched in Memphis. The narrative that most Americans received about lynching portray black men oftentimes as guilty. And so it was very important if you wanted to try to create sympathy for those individuals, you had to paint a different picture of them, around who this person was in life, not just what they were accused of in death.
NARRATOR: Wells had attended the first gathering of the NAACP in 1909, but walked out after being excluded from the organizing committee. She was especially hurt by Du Bois’s role in the incident, and never joined the NAACP. Even so, Wells had a profound influence on the entire movement.
KIDADA WILLIAMS, HISTORIAN: Ida B. Wells has already laid the foundation for communicating what's going on with lynching. So Walter White is able to build upon the work that's already been done.
NARRATOR: White’s physical appearance offered an opportunity that was never open to Wells.
RANDOLPH STAKEMAN, HISTORIAN: It was very hard to get information about lynching. But people were quite willing to talk about it to somebody they considered one of their own.
WALTER WHITE (VO): My self-confidence steadily declined and my fear rose on the long train ride. In Georgia I had learned enough of the cruelty of which southern mobs were capable. I believed that I would be subjected to even greater fury for the sin of “passing” as a white man.
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: Walter White got off the train, and began his investigation. He hung out at the general store, posing as a traveling salesman of the Excellento Medicine company.
WALTER WHITE (VO): Arrived to find this place still in very great excitement and everybody very secretive and inclined not to discuss the affair. But I soon learned the inhabitants couldn’t refrain from talking in my presence if only I were patient.
NARRATOR: White stayed in Estill Springs just long enough to get the story, and then jumped on the next train out of town. As soon as he was out of danger White began writing his account of McIherron’s death.
WALTER WHITE (VO): About one mile from the railway station of Estill Springs, there lived a Negro by the name of Jim McIlherron. He resided with his mother, several brothers, and father.
KIDADA WILLIAMS, HISTORIAN: Mcllherron is a prosperous landowner. He's also confident, and he doesn't take a lot of nonsense off of white people.
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: One day he was walking in the downtown area and a handful of whites started throwing stones at him. He retaliated and shot at them.
WALTER WHITE (VO): Large possees of men scoured the surrounding county for four days, until he was located in a barn just beyond McMinnville. News of the capture spread like wildfire. Men, women and children started pouring into the town from a radius of fifty miles.
RANDOLPH STAKEMAN, HISTORIAN: Lynching was public because it had to do two things. One, it had to frighten black people and keep them in their place. But secondly, it was about building white solidarity.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: It was a horrific lynching, very violent. And Walter White gets the inside story.
WALTER WHITE (VO): McIlherron was chained to a hickory tree. Bars of iron were placed in the fire and heated to a red-hot pitch. Men, women, and children surged forward in an attempt to gloat over the suffering of the man. A member of the mob took one of the iron bars, and while those of the mob close enough to see shouted in glee, McIlherron was unsexed. Finally, one man poured coal oil on the Negro’s trousers and shoes and lighted the fire around McIlherron’s feet. The flames rose rapidly, soon enveloping him, and in a few minutes, McIlherron was dead.
NARRATOR: Nobody can say exactly when the exodus began. Sometime in the 19-teens Black people began leaving the South, a few families here and there. Despite the risks and hardships of life in the North, the migration gathered steam so quickly that by the early 1920s, entire cities were being remade. Harlem, in particular, was packed with migrants from across the South. The blending of different Black cultures was producing a spectacular outpouring of music, art, and literature. “Harlem,” James Weldon Johnson wrote, “is Mecca for the adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious, and the talented of the Negro world. It strikes the observer as a phenomenon, a miracle straight out of the skies.”
ELLIS MONK, HISTORIAN: Part of this movement is all about bringing Black people together regardless of these ancestral and these skin tone differences. They were trying to fight for black peoplehood, and to show that they had a culture, that they were civilized.
NARRATOR: “Nothing,” James Weldon Johnson argued, “will do more to change the mental attitude, and raise his status, than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro, through his production of literature and art.” Walter White took his mentor’s manifesto to heart, and made himself, more than perhaps any other individual, the catalyst for what became known as the Harlem Renaissance.
DAVID LEVERING LEWIS, HISTORIAN: White was a simultaneous phenomenon in the Harlem Renaissance. He was everywhere. The energy component was just extraordinary.
ELLIS MONK, HISTORIAN: He was directly involved with the literary scene, the art scene. He is shepherding young poets and young novelists and artists.
NARRATOR: Countee Cullen, Rudolf Fisher, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Dorothy West, and Hale Woodruff all owed their careers in part to Walter White.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: He’s really looking at culture as another front in, in the fight. And, and they really help to promote and realize the real strength of that approach.
NARRATOR: When Walter wasn’t promoting Black artists, he found time to court Gladys Powell, an aspiring actress who worked as a stenographer at the NAACP. Gladys was acutely aware of the difference in their complexions, and worried she would be accused of taking on a white lover. They took to speaking French to each other in public. They imagined what onlookers made of them - nobility from a French colony perhaps, or Parisian artists on tour. On the 15th of February 1922, after a whirlwind courtship; Walter and Gladys were married.
Gladys had one last turn on the stage - a musical called Deep River - but then her theater dreams were put on hold as she raised their daughter Jane, and then a son, Walter Jr. Her husband was away for months at a time, but when he was in New York, Walter and Gladys’s apartment - a.k.a. “The White House” - became one of the most popular hangouts for Harlem’s bright and beautiful. “Many who were to do much in wiping out the color line,” White recalled, “learned to know each other as human beings and artists without consciousness of race.”
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: There was a piano and so somebody would start playing, and then Robeson or Hayes or Bledsoe would join in. George Gershwin previewed Rhapsody in Blue on Walter White's piano. He was a literary, literary and artistic conduit, but he really wanted to be known as a writer.
DAVID LEVERING LEWIS, HISTORIAN: He's loaned a cabin in Great Barrington to write a novel. Finishes it in three weeks, or four weeks. And so he's off and running with “The Fire in the Flint,” which sells like a hot cake, is translated into Japanese and French, every language.
NARRATOR: Night after night, Harlem’s nightclubs were packed with white New Yorkers. “The Negro,” Langston Hughes wrote, “was in vogue.” In some settings, racial integration lived up to the hopes of its advocates. But elsewhere Harlem’s night life catered to the worst instincts of white patrons. To some, Walter White embodied the less attractive aspects of the interracial moment, too eager to satisfy the cultural voyeurism of wealthy whites. WEB Du Bois, for one, was skeptical of the whole enterprise, and of White’s involvement in particular.
DAVID LEVERING LEWIS, HISTORIAN: Du Bois famously asked, “What have we, who have just emerged from slavery, and have so many problems, to do with poetry and novels?” Not everybody is going to write himself and herself out of the ghetto.
NARRATOR: But Walter was too busy to bother with his critics: Harlem’s glittering arts scene was a welcome relief from the more harrowing aspects of his work. When he wasn’t writing novels or wheeling and dealing in the arts world, he might be risking his life among lynchers in a remote Southern town, or lobbying for an anti-lynching bill in Congress. And all the while, Walter White was playing a crucial role in a long-running legal drama that dated back to 1919, and one of the worst massacres in the country’s history.
NARRATOR: 1919 began with a flush of relief and jubilation. The Great War was over; the soldiers were coming home. Those veterans included 380,000 Black men, who trusted that their military service had earned them a full share in American life. Their hopes were reflected in the NAACP’s membership rolls, which grew from nine thousand to more than ninety thousand within a few months of the war’s end. But as White traveled through the South that spring, he sensed a far more menacing trend.
WALTER WHITE (VO): There is an air of expectancy, of something which is about to happen. Every hardware store and pawn shop is crowded with white people buying revolvers, guns of every description, and ammunition. Little or none is being sold to colored people.
NARRATOR: Black Americans hoped that society might change; but millions of their white countrymen were dead set on restoring the old racial order. Through the summer and fall of 1919, twenty-five cities, towns and counties exploded in racial violence. White mobs murdered hundreds, injured thousands, and burned entire communities to the ground. But the last and most terrible chapter of what James Weldon Johnson called Red Summer began on the evening of September 30th, outside Elaine, Arkansas.
KARLOS HILL, HISTORIAN: The Mississippi Arkansas Delta was the most southern place on Earth. It was a place of racial oppression, particularly economic exploitation.
KENNETH MACK, PROFESSOR OF LAW: A group of black tenant farmers tried to organize; they're effectively trying to organize a union. This is just a colossal insurrection in the eyes of whites in the local area. Things come to a head during a meeting in a church. A white deputy sheriff shows up, and there are people there who are armed to try to protect the Black organizers because they understand the, you know, what's what's coming. And one of the deputies gets killed.
NARRATOR: Word spread like wildfire that an armed Black insurrection was underway. “The situation was reported to be critical at Elaine,” the Arkansas Gazette reported, “the Negroes greatly outnumbering the whites.” Hundreds of white men rushed in from as far as Mississippi and Tennessee, to help suppress the alleged uprising. By sunrise the next day, groups of white men were tracking through the canebreaks and cotton fields of Phillips County, killing every Black person they could find.
WALTER WHITE (VO): Every colored man, woman, and child who could do so fled, many of them by foot through the swamps and woods, under cover of darkness, during several days and nights of slaughter.
NARRATOR: In response to an urgent plea from the Arkansas governor, the Secretary of War dispatched five hundred troops from nearby Army bases; many of them simply joined in the killing. Walter White rushed to the scene, passing as a white reporter for the Chicago Daily News. In the course of his reporting, he estimated that more than two hundred Black people had been killed, but the real number would never be known. What White didn’t know was that while he was collecting victims’ testimony, word was spreading that a northern agitator was in town.
ROSE PALMER, NIECE OF WALTER WHITE: There was a rumor going around in the city that there was a n----- passing for white and they were going to get him. As he was walking down the street though, somebody walked up beside him and suggested they go to a side street.
WALTER WHITE (VO): A Negro led me into a clump of woods far enough away to be out of sight. "I don't know what you're down here for,” he said,“but I just heard them talking about you – I mean the white folks – and they say they're going to get you.”
ROSE PALMER, NIECE OF WALTER WHITE: He didn't even go back to the hotel and pick up his suitcase. He walked directly to the train, and he jumped on a train without a ticket.
DAVID LEVERING LEWIS, HISTORIAN: As he sits, a white guy says, "Oh, you're leaving just as the fun is about to begin. There's a white Negro here, and they're going to teach him a lesson." And so Walter says, "Oh, who could that be?" And he says, "Well, I can always tell people like that by the half moons on their fingernails." And Walter extends and says, "Oh, they don't have the moons?" He says, "No, no, you can always tell them."
WALTER WHITE (VO): I shall never take as long a train ride as that one seemed to be. When I finally reached Memphis, I heard rumors that I had been lynched in Arkansas that afternoon.
NARRATOR: White made light of his close calls, but the dangers, and the reporting itself, were exhausting.
KARLOS HILL, HISTORIAN: Walter White is hearing things being said about Black people - the most disparaging, brutal, humiliating things that are being said. He's got to listen to that without revealing himself. And so you can imagine, as someone who is Black, who is a race man, how torturing that would be.
KIDADA WILLIAMS, HISTORIAN: The risks grow, as he becomes more popular, as he starts to appear at press conferences, more and more people start to know who he is. So it's very risky, and it gets riskier and riskier as he starts to do more of this work.
NARRATOR: No white man was ever charged in connection with the Elaine massacre, but sixty-seven Black men were imprisoned for up to twenty-five years, and twelve were sentenced to die for their roles in the supposed insurrection. The NAACP teamed up with local lawyers to appeal those convictions, arguing that they had been determined by the huge mobs that laid siege to the courthouse. Walter White had no legal training, but he led fundraising, coordinated protests, assisted the lawyers, and lobbied officials. It took four years of appeals before they finally reached the Supreme Court of the United States.
WALTER WHITE (VO): Three times gallows were built for execution of the twelve Negroes; three times we were able to stay the execution. On February 19th, 1923 the Supreme Court handed down the decision: against unbelievable odds, we had won!
NARRATOR: Not only had White and the NAACP helped save the lives of the condemned men; they had launched a revolution in criminal justice. For the first time the Supreme Court declared that state authorities couldn’t trample on their citizens’ constitutional rights.
RANDOLPH STAKEMAN, HISTORIAN: The strategy of using the federal government in order to override the state governments, that was indeed the same strategy of the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s.
KIDADA WILLIAMS, HISTORIAN: This is part of a really long game, to try to use the law in order to bring down Jim Crow.
ELLIS MONK, HISTORIAN: Those legal protections are essential to shaping the 20th century and the 21st century for African-Americans. And that kind of strategy is something that's very much tied to Walter White and the early NAACP.
NARRATOR: At the end of September 1929 James Weldon Johnson stepped down from the leadership of the NAACP. Thirty-six-year-old Walter White was the clear choice to take over from his ailing mentor. “I blithely accepted the responsibility,” he wrote. But neither White, nor anyone else, could foresee the catastrophe that lay just ahead. Within weeks the stock market collapsed, and the economy went into free fall.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: The NAACP was really hit hard. African-Americans, more than other Americans, were impacted by the Depression. So their lifeline - membership dues and all that - really takes a big hit.
RANDOLPH STAKEMAN, HISTORIAN: It's not that that Black folks stopped believing in the NAACP. They stop supporting it because they didn't have the money to support it.
NARRATOR: Even as the NAACP’s funding dried up, the cries for help were multiplying. In 1931 the organization received three and a half thousand requests from victims’ families and communities.
KIDADA WILLIAMS, HISTORIAN: When they write the NAACP, the NAACP writes back. Walter White is constantly trying to point them in the direction of local resources, sending out their own investigators to try to collect additional information. They saw the NAACP as caring, as willing to listen, as willing to do what they could.
NARRATOR: White was working eighteen-hour days, much of that time spent deciding which of those cases to pursue, and above all, how to fund them. Among the thousands of appeals that crossed White’s desk in 1931 was one from Scottsboro Alabama: nine Black teenagers pulled off a train after getting into a fight with a group of white vagrants. There wasn’t much to it, until authorities realized that two of the white vagrants were in fact women. Rather than risk being arrested for prostitution, they both claimed that they had been raped by all nine Black men.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: In two days, eight of the men are sentenced to death, and the youngest is life in prison. Done. You know, two days. And execution set for the earliest possible time.
NARRATOR: Within days of their convictions, the Scottsboro Boys’ case had been taken up by a rising civil rights organization. But it wasn’t the NAACP.
JOSE ANDERSON, PROFESSOR OF LAW: The American Communist Party put protest marches together around it. They expanded interest in the case; they go to international media.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: This is just a legal lynching. So it resonated with Black people across the country. And they started saying, “Where is the NAACP?”
NARRATOR: In the eyes of the white establishment the Scottsboro Boys were disreputable, a menace. The white lawyers affiliated with the Communist Party had no qualms about defending them. But the NAACP was wary of the case.
KIDADA WILLIAMS, HISTORIAN: The NAACP is in a tricky position. If they take on cases that are deemed less than respectable, if there's anything in their background that's questionable, that can be used against the NAACP So that means they have to be selective about cases. And that's problematic, but I think that also reflects their clear understanding of the environment they're operating in.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: People are really disappointed in White because the NAACP is being shut out of this case, and we have to save them. And White just doesn't handle that well, because once he realizes he dropped the ball, he starts to pretend that he didn't, and compete with the Communist Party for the case.
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: Walter White went to Kilby Prison //and met with the Scottsboro Boys, and tried to convince them to, to sign over the handling of their defense to the NAACP. He came away from that meeting really distinctly unimpressed. He thought that they were slow. He thought that they were unintelligent.
NARRATOR: After the meeting White complained to reporters about what he called “the ignorance and stupidity of the boys’ parents.” The contempt was mutual.
DAVID LEVERING LEWIS, HISTORIAN: One of the mothers said, “We’re not so uneducated and slow-witted that we don’t know a faker when we see one. We'll stick with the Communists."
NARRATOR: Finally, at the beginning of 1932, White gave up on his effort to take over the Scottsboro case. True to its word, the Communist Party stuck it out through years of appeals. The Scottsboro Boys were all freed eventually, but their lives had long since been destroyed.
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: Scottsboro, for the NAACP, was a disaster. There was a growing sense that the NAACP was an elitist organization.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: It was a rough start for White. But he learned from it. He said that won't happen again.
NARRATOR: Walter was still dealing with the fallout from Scottsboro when news arrived that his father had been rushed to a hospital after being hit by a car in Atlanta.
VOICE OF WALTER WHITE
WALTER WHITE (VO): First they took him to the white ward because they thought he was white. And then my brother-in-law, who is brown skinned, came in and asked for my father, and they said, “What? We got a nigger here in the white ward of the hospital?” And they picked up my father's broken body and took it across the street in a driving rainstorm to the filthy, dingy, cockroach-ridden Jim Crow ward.
NARRATOR: For seventeen days Walter watched his father slip away. When it was finally over, on the train back to New York, he spiraled into a deep personal crisis.
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: White is really shattered by the death of his father. And on the train ride back, he's robbed. Somebody broke into his Pullman berth and stole his wallet and his money.
NARRATOR: At some point on that long ride home, Walter came to a fateful decision.
RANDOLPH STAKEMAN, HISTORIAN: After his father's funeral, he didn't go home. He went to Poppy Cannon's.
NARRATOR: Walter had met Poppy Cannon in the last, heady days before the Wall Street Crash: he, a thirty-five -year-old civil rights leader, she, a twenty-something aspiring writer. Born Lillian Gruskin and raised in a devoutly Jewish home in Connecticut, Poppy had taken on a new name, buried her Jewish identity, and built a new life. Although Walter and Poppy were both married, and each had children, they began finding reasons to get together. “I realize how desperately we reached for excuses,” Poppy remembered, “how carefully, and how long, even to ourselves, we maintained the fiction of mere mutual interests.” The fiction ended that morning. “That day,” Poppy wrote, “Walter wept in my arms.”
NARRATOR: The Great Depression ground on with no end in sight. The pace of lynchings was accelerating again. Walter White had investigated forty-one separate lynchings, each one as harrowing as the last. He had become too famous to work undercover, but those experiences inspired him to write a groundbreaking sociological study of lynching. White’s work helped dispel the myth that lynching was primarily linked with the rape of white women. In fact, it was the cornerstone of white supremacy.
KIDADA WILLIAMS, HISTORIAN: A Black man fails to yield the sidewalk to a white woman, a Black man looks at a white woman, a Black woman protests her husband's lynching. Every time they try to resist someone denying them their wages, violating the terms of a contract, trying to sexually assault them, trying to take their children. Any acts where you have Black people resisting their subjugation can result in a lynching.
KARLOS HILL, HISTORIAN: Walter White's investigations made lynching a national issue, creating a real conversation about holding people accountable at the national level.
NARRATOR: By the 1930s attitudes were beginning to change. But all too often, state and local authorities still condoned lynching, especially in the South. The only answer was a federal anti-lynching bill. Back in 1922 the NAACP had passed a bill through the House, only to have Southern senators kill it. Now Walter White was trying again, but the new bill seemed destined to suffer the same fate.
KIDADA WILLIAMS, HISTORIAN: Walter White can help get the bill passed in the House, but the Senate is controlled by white southern conservatives, and they're going to make sure that that bill doesn't pass.
NARRATOR: White believed that the new president, Franklin Roosevelt, might be willing to bring those Democratic Southern senators to heel. But a one-on-one meeting with the President of the United States was no simple matter. Back in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt had caused a national scandal by inviting Booker T Washington - the most prominent Black leader of his generation - to the White House for dinner. No president since had risked repeating that PR disaster.
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: By 1934, Walter White had developed really deep contacts in, in the administration. But he had also become friends with Eleanor Roosevelt.
NARRATOR: White had learned to be skeptical of politicians - even his allies. But the First Lady seemed different. “I turned in desperation to Mrs. Roosevelt,” he wrote. “She promised to give the facts I had told her to the president.” It was the beginning of a deep and lasting alliance. On a warm spring day in 1934, Walter White was ushered onto the South Portico of the White House for afternoon tea, becoming just the second Black man to break bread with a president.
DAVID LEVERING LEWIS, HISTORIAN: Walter said "Hello Franklin!" or something like that, which probably was not appreciated by FDR. And then they had this serious discussion, and Roosevelt said, "Walter, all that you say is true. And I wish I could help you. But my hands are tied."
NARRATOR: “If I come out for the antilynching bill,” the president told White, “the Southerners in the Senate will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can't take that risk.” Without the support of the president, the anti-lynching bill was filibustered to death by a small group of Southern senators. For White the lesson was painfully clear: without political power, African Americans would forever be reduced to pleading for favors.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: He does a study of the Black vote and what he finds, migration of African-Americans in northern cities is really transforming the political landscape. The Black vote is poised to really be the balance of power in several major northern states.
NARRATOR: Not only were Black voters becoming a potentially deciding force in the North, their old attachment to the Party of Lincoln was fading.
WALTER WHITE VO: White politicians, Republican and Democratic, did not like the new situation, but were forced to recognize that the Negro voter was an increasingly potent force.
NARRATOR: A political tipping point was coming, and the NAACP was going to do everything it could to bring it along. In the meantime, Walter White played a weak political hand with consummate skill.
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: Walter White built the NAACP as a powerful lobbying organization, as an organization that got the results it did by hobnobbing and button-holing politicians and other influential people.
RANDOLPH STAKEMAN, HISTORIAN: Walter White was the best lobbyist for the race, ever. Because that was how you effected change, when you had no power.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: Walter White and DuBois. Very different personalities. Different generations. Walter White had a really healthy ego. And of course, Du Bois did as well. DuBois had been there at the beginning. He probably felt that he could not report to Walter White. I mean, that was beyond his imagination.
NARRATOR: Back when Walter White had joined the organization, WEB Du Bois had praised him as a team player, with a “ready smile” and “sense of humor.” But times had changed. Their mutual dislike aggravated a deepening schism within the NAACP. Walter White was committed to racial integration, but Du Bois now argued that the time had come to reconsider the organization’s goals and strategies.
ELLIS MONK, HISTORIAN: Du Bois starts writing all of these articles in The Crisis, which are very much about how African Americans should have some kind of form of voluntary economic and political segregation.
NARRATOR: “There seems no hope,” Du Bois told his readers, “that America in our day will yield in its color or race hatred any substantial ground.” Twenty-five years of NAACP work and sacrifice had yielded very little progress. But Du Bois argued that there had been a precious unintended consequence. “More and more,” he wrote, “colored America has discovered itself.”
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: Basically what he says is, “Our power is in our communities and our institutions. And, or if the if the Negro has advanced it's because of Black colleges, it's because of Black homes. Let's embrace that.”
NARRATOR: “Use segregation,” Du Bois told his readers, “use every bit that comes your way and transmute it into power.” Du Bois’s editorials triggered a powerful backlash: for many African Americans any talk of self-segregation was playing into the hands of white racists.
DAVID LEVERING LEWIS, HISTORIAN: The business of segregation would have been repellent to, Walter White, as to the board, as to really the great majority. It was heresy that could not be abided.
NARRATOR: White insisted that the NAACP issue a statement explicitly advocating racial integration. The debate over segregation had become a struggle over the direction of the NAACP - and it was getting ugly. In the next issue of the Crisis Du Bois said the quiet part out loud. “Walter White is white. He has made more white companions and friends than colored. He goes where he will in New York City, and naturally meets no color line, for the simple and sufficient reason that he isn’t ‘colored.’ This naturally makes Mr. White an extreme opponent of any segregation.”
ELLIS MONK, HISTORIAN: Du Bois is saying that Walter White's position on integration and segregation is self-serving, that Walter White lives his life basically as a white man, almost, that he's just voluntarily Black whenever it suits him, so he shouldn't have anything to say about Du Bois's kind of new political move for African Americans. But of course it's also deeply pejorative because it's a move here that kind of taps into this long held belief that lighter skinned, mulatto, mixed race Black people are not fully dedicated to Black liberation because they don't really suffer in the same way, so they don't take the struggle as seriously.
NARRATOR: Du Bois had fatally overplayed his hand. Mary White Ovington, one of the founders of the NAACP and still its matriarch, had no doubt about the outcome.
RANDOLPH STAKEMAN, HISTORIAN: Mary White Ovington, who in her youth had been an acolyte of Du Bois, said that Du Bois is losing it; he's acting like a petulant child, and that White was ten times more valuable to the organization than Du Bois was.
NARRATOR: In July 1934 WEB Du Bois quit the association he had helped found twenty-five years before. Walter White emerged from the struggle as the NAACP’s unchallenged leader. It was a dubious prize: the organization was broke and divided. White would have to somehow give the NAACP new purpose, and lead it out of the wilderness.
NARRATOR: In the fall of 1933, thirty-five-year-old Charles Hamilton Houston packed a car with food, books, blankets, and a film camera, and set off for the backwoods of South Carolina.
KENNETH MACK, PROFESSOR OF LAW: The idea was to go through the South and find the evidence, look at the schools, film them. What is the condition of the black schools? How do they compare to the White schools? So the project was to document this thing as a prelude to attacking it through the courts.
NARRATOR: Walter White hired Houston away from Howard Law School, where he had trained a generation of civil rights lawyers. One of Houston’s most outstanding graduates would ride shotgun on the South Carolina trip. For Thurgood Marshall, it was a mixed blessing: Black men had been lynched for far less. But still, he cherished the opportunity to work with his hard-driving mentor.
VOICE OF THURGOOD MARSHALL
THURGOOD MARSHALL VO: Charlie himself was a perfectionist, and if we did a slipshod job, boy, he would lay it on you. We nicknamed him Iron Pants, and Cement Shoes. We named him everything. But he insisted on perfection.
NARRATOR: The school documentary was the first, tentative, step in the NAACP’s new courtroom strategy.
KENNETH MACK, PROFESSOR OF LAW: The NAACP hasn't done litigation systematically before. It's been defensive - something happens, and we've got to mobilize. So there's this idea that we're going to be more systematic. Walter White is beginning to think about these kinds of things, and one of the people who really helps him is Charles Houston.
NARRATOR: Houston opened the legal assault on Jim Crow with what he called “the equalization strategy.”
JOSE ANDERSON, PROFESSOR OF LAW: The equalization strategy was to go after the “equal” part of “separate but equal.” For example, in schools in South Carolina, teachers who were African American were paid less than white teachers were paid. Houston said, “This is a one exhibit case. You show the pay card to the court and you say it's separate, but it's not equal.”
NARRATOR: Over the next several years, equalization cases cropped up throughout much of the South. That was just the beginning: soon Houston and Marshall were chipping away at segregation in graduate and professional schools, and even fighting to restore voting rights in the South. As Houston wrote at the outset, the goal of litigation extended far beyond the courtroom; it should, he said, “arouse and strengthen the will of local communities to demand and fight for their rights.” Their campaign reverberated through Southern society.
KENNETH MACK, PROFESSOR OF LAW: You see things that had never been seen before, which is a Black lawyer coming to court. You get to ask questions of white people. You know, you get to cross-examine that person. You get to imply that the person's being a liar. And of course, if a Black person had done something like that anywhere outside the courtroom, that person's life would be in danger. So, you know, something happened in this courtroom that you just never saw before.
JOSE ANDERSON, PROFESSOR OF LAW: More people started to write directly to the organization about the myriad of issues that they were experiencing. Remember: in the South there was no representation in Congress, no representation in the judiciary, no representation in most state legislatures. So imagine a people that have no other first responder for their civil rights.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: The talent that came into that organization - the creativity, the imagination, the faith. They were like insurgents. There’s no clear path, they created the path.
WALTER WHITE VO: My dear Mr. Selznick: Wherever I have gone, I have found among both white and colored Americans, a very definite apprehension as to the effect “Gone With the Wind” will have. Frankly, I share this apprehension.
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1938, Walter White turned his attention to Hollywood, and a film that had alarm bells ringing in the Black press. Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” was an ode to the Old South of moonlight, magnolias - and slavery. It sold millions of copies, and David O Selznick’s upcoming production promised to be a blockbuster. In an effort to placate White and other critics, the studio did change some of the most troubling aspects of the screenplay: the n-word was deleted, along with the KKK, and this time the heroine was assaulted by a white man, and rescued by a Black one. But when White finally saw Gone With the Wind, he hated it.
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Mammy is dressing Scarlett.
MAMMY (As written in the script): Keep yo’ shawl on yo’ shoulders. Ah ain’ aimin’ fo’ you to git all freckled…
NARRATOR: But no amount of picketing could prevent Gone With the Wind from becoming one of the biggest hits of all time. For White, the episode illustrated Hollywood’s uniquely powerful role in the dissemination of racist stereotypes.
WALTER WHITE (VO): We are tired of seeing the Negro as a barbaric dolt, a superstition-ridden ninny…cowardly, benighted, different. We ask that the Negro be given full citizenship in the world of the movie.”
NARRATOR: White made his way to Los Angeles, where he set up workshops for scriptwriters and organized an ad hoc committee of politicians, studio heads and movie stars. Hollywood’s A-list gave him the star treatment and made promises to do better. But even as he cultivated the white power brokers who ran Hollywood, Walter White scorned the Black actors who took the only roles that were available to them. He singled out Hattie McDaniel, who had played Mammy in Gone With the Wind. Although frequently cast in subservient roles, she considered herself an activist and fought back by making her characters more confrontational than the norm. Her nuanced performance made her the first African American ever to win an Academy Award.
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HATTIE MACDANIEL: Fellow members of the motion picture industry and honored guests, this is one of the happiest moments of my life. I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry. My heart is too full to tell you just how I feel and may I say thank you.
NARRATOR: “I am disgusted at the sheer selfishness of actors like Hattie,” White said, “who just want to save their jobs without regard for the future of Negroes as a whole.” “When you ask me not to play the parts,” MacDaniel fired back, “what have you got to offer in return?” ”I can be a maid for $7 a week, or I can play a maid for $700.” In any case, MacDaniel wrote, “Walter White is prejudiced to those Negroes of my complexion. He is only one eighth Black, and is not qualified to speak for the race.”
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: White thought that the most important thing was working with the influential people at the top. But he basically boycotted the Black actors and actresses in Hollywood, and angered them a good deal.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: That was a flaw in his character, unnecessarily sort of alienating people who should be your natural allies.
NARRATOR: But no matter what White did, he couldn’t force change on a profit-hungry and risk-averse industry. In the wake of his campaign studios did begin to shy away from demeaning Black roles, but their promises of better parts went largely unfulfilled. Instead, African Americans began disappearing from Hollywood movies altogether.
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FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT, JANUARY 6 1941: At no previous time has American security been as seriously threatened from without as it is today. Those who man our defenses, and those behind them who build our defenses, must have the stamina and the courage which come from unshakable belief in the manner of life which they are defending.
NARRATOR: When the United States went to war at the end of 1941, few African Americans held an unshakeable belief in the manner of life they were supposed to defend. It was hard to ignore the irony of fighting racist enemies with a military that was segregated down to the Red Cross blood banks. Nevertheless, a million Black men and women would serve in that military. Given the opportunity, they distinguished themselves in combat. But the overwhelming majority were relegated to service battalions, given the most demeaning and unpleasant tasks, denied promotions, and all too often abused by their white officers.
At home, the colossal military buildup did create new opportunities: Walter White helped strongarm FDR into opening up war industries to Black workers. Wages rose and unions began to diversify. NAACP membership skyrocketed, hundreds of new branches were formed, and the whole enterprise was energized with renewed determination.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: The NAACP is providing the infrastructure for people to mount protests and feel strong. The branches are shaping where the NAACP is going, and people are having a voice and feeling connected to each other and to a national movement.
NARRATOR: But inevitably, it seemed, African American hopes were met with a violent backlash.
WALTER WHITE (VO): The press was filled with countless stories of lynchings and mistreatment of Negro soldiers. War industries were begging for workers, but those with black skins were not wanted. A steady stream of letters told of gratuitous insults and beatings and humiliation suffered by Negro men who had fought in the Pacific.
NARRATOR: White himself was growing tired of preaching patience, of playing the long game. At the beginning of 1944 he set off to chronicle the lives of Black soldiers in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific. There were some who complained that the head of the NAACP had enough work to do at home. But there was a revolution brewing in that segregated army, and White wanted the world to know about it.
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: He was given credentials and, and given access to troops and given access to officers. He was in some ways in his element again, and he had some adventures that were somewhat dangerous and he liked that. What he came away with deeply troubled him.
ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH, HISTORIAN: For soldiers abroad, they have the experience of fighting a devastating and ghastly war, and along with that, all of the nastiest parts of American racism.
NARRATOR: Enemy propaganda preyed on the doubts of African-American soldiers.
VOICE OF WALTER WHITE
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WALTER WHITE (VO): The Germans bombed us time and time again with shells loaded with leaflets, and the leaflets contained excellent photographs of a recent American race riot and others showed the bodies of Negroes swinging from southern trees. Underneath were the words, “This is what you are fighting for.” I remember one Negro GI sitting beside a blown out house, silently taking a few last puffs from a damp cigarette before moving off with his reconnaissance patrol. He threw away the leaflet after grinding it beneath his boot, and silently he filed down the road with his men toward the German lines.
NARRATOR: White returned from the Pacific theater in the spring of 1945 exhausted, disheartened, and angry. At the same time he had been deeply moved by African American soldiers’ dedication to the cause of civil rights, and by the warmth they showed him in these far-flung outposts. “Here was a man who was second to none,” one soldier wrote. “In our estimation, we met the greatest of the greatest, the voice of thirteen million, Mr Walter White.” By war’s end, those thirteen million were determined that America should finally live up to its ideals. More than anywhere else, they looked to the NAACP to make that happen.
ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH, HISTORIAN: World War Two sparked a political consciousness. It also fueled a postwar militancy that would change the shape of the latter part of the 20th century.
NARRATOR: In every war since the Revolution, African American soldiers had rallied to the flag, only to have their hopes betrayed in the aftermath. In the summer of 1945, they began returning from overseas, only to find once again that white Americans were determined to reimpose the old racial order, to put them back in their place.
The NAACP was flooded with stories of veterans being abused, assaulted, and lynched. Local and state authorities looked the other way; the crisis spread unchecked. On the 19 of September 1946, White led a group of civil rights leaders to the White House, where they tried to convey these horrors to the new president. “I frankly doubted,” White wrote, “that our efforts would be any more rewarding than those we had made with any of Truman’s predecessors.” But this time, the president’s response caught White by surprise. “I had no idea it was as terrible as that,” Truman said. “We’ve got to do something.”
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RADIO ANNOUNCER: Good afternoon from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. You are about to hear an address by the president of the United States as he speaks…
NARRATOR: In 1947, fifteen years after White made news by having tea with FDR, he invited Harry Truman to address the NAACP’s national convention on the Mall in Washington. The occasion was in part a measure of the organization’s growing political clout: during the war the NAACP’s membership had exploded from fifty thousand to half a million. But White was beginning to suspect that the new president actually believed in the cause.
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HARRY TRUMAN: Our immediate task is to remove the last remnants of the barriers, which stand between millions of our citizens and their birthright. There is no justifiable reason for discrimination because of ancestry, or religion, or race, or color.
ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH, HISTORIAN: Speaking to the NAACP comes with some risks - no one's ever done it.// so we can talk about it in terms of political calculation, but we also need to credit the risk he was willing to take.
NARRATOR: The 1948 election was just around the corner. Thanks in large part to the NAACP’s courtroom victories, African Americans were reclaiming voting rights in parts of the South. Millions more had migrated to the North, where they could vote freely - so many, in fact, that Black voters had the potential to play a deciding role in several swing states. That potential became very real that summer, at the Democratic Party’s convention.
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STROM THURMOND: These uncalled-for, and these damnable proposals he has recommended under the guise of so-called civil rights. And I tell you that the American people from one side or the other had better wake up and oppose such a program. And if they don’t, the next thing will be a totalitarian state in these United States.
NARRATOR: On the 14th of July 1948, the Dixiecrats, as they became known, walked out to protest the party’s civil rights platform. With the white South lined up against him, Truman’s only chance was to nail down every Black vote. White had been informing the president about African American priorities: lynching, disfranchisement, the poll tax, unemployment and education. Many of these required legislation that could be hijacked in Congress. But in a few vital areas, the president could make momentous changes with the stroke of a pen. On the 26th of July, less than two weeks after the Dixiecrat revolt, President Truman did just that.
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HARRY TRUMAN: It is hereby the declared policy of the president that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, creed, or color, or national origin. Well with this I took my political life in my hands, and now it was up to the people to decide what they wanted to do about it.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: Truman announces that he will desegregate the armed forces. It's a major turning point, a terrific moment for Truman and for the movement.
NARRATOR: On the 2nd of November 1948 Black voters held up their end of the bargain…
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TRUMAN: …and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and
defend the Constitution of the United States.
NARRATOR: …providing the margin of victory in the three states that decided the election. It was one of the greatest upsets in American political history. At last - for the first time since Reconstruction - African Americans held real political power.
KARLOS HILL, HISTORIAN: He's not only leading an organization, he's really delivering victories, winning legislative victories, winning court cases. These things aren't generally happening for Black people. They're happening because of the NAACP, and an NAACP led by Walter White.
NARRATOR: Walter’s sister Madeline was a social worker in the poorest sections of rural Georgia. “You have no idea how many of these homes have your picture,” she wrote her brother, “often cut out of a newspaper and tacked to a beam, or pressed on a little cracked mirror. They depend on you. For many of them, you are all they have, you and the NAACP.”
NARRATOR: By the end of 1948 Walter White was arguably the most influential Black man in American history. White’s affiliation with Truman was indeed paying dividends, but it was becoming apparent that there were steep downsides. Above all, the NAACP was expected to support Truman’s Cold War policies, and to stop criticizing American racism on the world stage.
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: Walter White spoke candidly one too many times at a meeting of the United Nations. And the State Department said, “If you don't tone this down, we will cut you off. You'll be on your own.” The agreement was that he would pursue a focused agenda on legal civil rights. And he became increasingly critical against the Communists and against the progressive left in the United States.
NARRATOR: The NAACP had to tread carefully. The Red Scare was at high tide; dissent of any kind was suspect, civil rights activism was tantamount to subversion. “The Communist Party,” Life Magazine warned, “is sinking tentacles into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.”
ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH, HISTORIAN: The NAACP was vulnerable because if segregation's defenders could label them as Communists they could get the NAACP shut down, made illegal.
NARRATOR: As White saw it the alliance with Truman was the key to the NAACP’s survival, but some wondered whether he had bargained away the organization’s soul. White’s old nemesis WEB Du Bois was characteristically scathing, telling the New York Times that under White the NAACP had become a “bourgeois set up,” that he had shackled to the “reactionary, warmongering, colonial imperialism of the [Truman] administration.” At the same time, Walter White was facing a new challenge, a younger rival competing for the spotlight.
JOSE ANDERSON, PROFESSOR OF LAW: Thurgood Marshall was quite a character: personable, card playing, bourbon drinking, great storyteller. Loved being extremely social.
NARRATOR: Marshall had spent the last fifteen years building on the legal strategy that Charles Hamilton Houston had envisioned in the early 1930s. Marshall’s courtroom campaign was becoming the most important aspect of the NAACP’s work - and the most visible.
JOSE ANDERSON, PROFESSOR OF LAW: Thurgood and Walter both had egos, and they both like controlling their own sphere: White was the boss, Thurgood was in charge of the legal campaign. That worked very well for a long time. But when the legal campaign became the focal point of what the NAACP was doing, the relationship really started to deteriorate.
NARRATOR: By 1949 Walter White had been at the NAACP for more than thirty years, had led it for twenty. The power struggles, the tensions, controversies, the accumulated trauma of decades of racial violence, and the endless, crushing responsibility: it was all slowly killing him. He put on weight, he smoked incessantly and drank more than the doctors wanted.
RANDOLPH STAKEMAN, HISTORIAN: White has a heart attack. And he is hospitalized for six days. He started to realize that he was mortal and that nobody knows how much time they have left. His marriage to Gladys, I wouldn't say it was a loveless one, but it was one in which they were just going through the motions.
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: It was very hard for Gladys, and very hard for the family. I think they were probably growing apart.
NARRATOR: In June of 1949, after twenty-seven years of marriage, Walter and Gladys White were divorced. But very few people knew of it, let alone the rest of the story.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: He's had a romance, a long running romance with Poppy Cannol who is a White woman. She'd been three times divorced.
RANDOLPH STAKEMAN, HISTORIAN: He ends up telling his favorite sister, Madeline// that he wanted to marry Poppy Cannon. Madeline says to him, "Look, people might not know who the president is, they might not know who Abraham Lincoln is, but they know who Walter White is. Don't do this.”
NARRATOR: On the 6th of July 1949, at a dingy municipal office in New Jersey, Walter White married Poppy Cannon. News of his divorce and remarriage leaked out soon after the new couple had left town for an extended global tour. “The selfishness is unbelievable,” Alice wrote her brother. “I am glad Momma and Papa are not here to suffer this disgrace.” Walter’s children were appalled; Walter Jr went so far as to change his name to erase any connection to his father.
RANDOLPH STAKEMAN, HISTORIAN: White saw it as a civil rights issue of him claiming the right of every person in the society to marry whoever he wanted. And some people agreed with White. But a whole lot of people did not.
NARRATOR: “One should not blame Walter White for wanting to marry a white woman,” the Afro-American concluded; “the race itself is to blame for permitting a man who wanted to be white so bad to be their spokesman for so long.”
ROSE PALMER, NIECE OF WALTER WHITE: The moral convention of the time was not to divorce and marry...remarry. Especially not to marry white when you're a symbol of your race. But I think she made the last five years of his life happy.
NARRATOR: Despite, or because of, the controversy Walter and Poppy became something of a celebrity couple.
EDWARD R. MURROW
PERSON TO PERSON, 1954
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EDWARD R MURROW: Walter White and his wife Poppy Cannon live in this four-story house on the east side of midtown New York City. They have lived here for five years.
EDWARD R MURROW: Evening Poppy! How are you?
POPPY: Come right into the kitchen.
EDWARD R MURROW: Thank you. Walter, I know that Poppy writes about food as well as prepares it. Could we look around your domain a little, Poppy?
POPPY: Oh yes, come and see what we have.
NARRATOR: Walter devoted himself to his new family, to the exclusion of his own children.
CLAUDIA PHILLIPE, STEPDAUGHTER OF WALTER WHITE: My mother and Walter were very, very much in love. I don't think that I've met anyone who was as kind and giving as he was. He was my loving stepfather.
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EDWARD R MURROW: Now Walter I wonder if we have time to meet
your two daughters. Good evening Cynthia!
CYNTHIA: Hello Mr Murrow how are you?
EDWARD R MURROW: Good.
POPPY CANNON: And this is Claudia, Mr Murrow.
CLAUDIA: Good evening Mr Murrow.
EDWARD R MURROW: How are you?
CLAUDIA: Fine, thank you!
CLAUDIA PHILLIPE, STEPDAUGHTER OF WALTER WHITE: People made me aware of the scandal. I didn't know what the hell was going on. But I knew there was danger. I think they had some police keeping an eye on the neighborhood. They had a great deal of trouble getting a mortgage for the house. And that was a matter of race. And I don't think I put together until later that they were phasing him out at the NAACP.
NARRATOR: By the spring of 1950 Charles Hamilton Houston, the architect of the NAACP’s courtroom strategy, knew he was dying of a degenerative heart condition. He sent his wife and young son away, to spare them the final indignities. Houston’s funeral drew hundreds of activists from across the civil rights movement. But Walter White was conspicuously absent, on the other side of the world with his new bride.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: When White took his leave, he thought he'd do something else. He really had a sense that he would have great opportunities, given who he knew and what he had done, and, but he didn't. So he came back to the NAACP. And there was some friction about that, about the coming back.
NARRATOR: In fact, many members wanted to be rid of White, but in June of 1950 he convinced the board to retain him, although in a diminished capacity.
VOICE OF THURGOOD MARSHALL
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THURGOOD MARSHALL: Walter White was the front man. And I had the legal side. But at times the real problem would come because Walter White always thought he was a lawyer, and he would interfere with my legal business and he'd get his head chopped off.
JOSE ANDERSON, PROFESSOR OF LAW: As Marshall peaked in power, White was diminishing in power. And so he kind of was ushered out of the leadership of the organization.
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: I think Marshall felt that Walter White was self-promoting, which by that time he was.
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INTERVIEWER: Exactly, what have you accomplished?
WALTER WHITE: I think a good deal. For example take the armed services, I was a war correspondent during the last war and I saw friction between white and Negro troops because they were segregated. And that has been eliminated and we have a more efficient and more economical army...
KENNETH JANKEN, HISTORIAN: Walter White did not want to leave public life.
NARRATOR: Three weeks after Houston’s funeral, Marshall summoned forty-three civil rights lawyers to plot out the final assault on legal segregation.
JOSE ANDERSON, PROFESSOR OF LAW: This was part of a plan that Houston had mapped out in the early 1930s. Marshall had just decided that the time had come to move on this set of cases and push to the finish line. And he wanted to make it clear to his soldiers that that's what was going to happen. It was time to abandon the equalization strategy and to try to desegregate all schools across the country.
NARRATOR: For the next four years, Marshall and his team of lawyers shepherded a set of carefully chosen school segregation cases all the way to the Supreme Court.
CLAUDIA PHILLIPE, STEPDAUGHTER OF WALTER WHITE: The decision for// Brown versus the Board of Education. We were very aware in the house that that was impending and we were just all awaiting it with anticipation.
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THURGOOD MARSHALL: We do believe that this decision in itself will encourage the people to take further steps without litigation in many areas.
NARRATOR: Walter White was three years old when the Supreme Court gave its blessing to racial segregation. He’d spent his entire adult life fighting to end it. Figurehead or not, he was still the leader of the NAACP when the Supreme Court decision finally came down on the 17th of May 1954.
WALTER WHITE (VO): The court did it not because it wanted to do it. They did it because of the accumulation of cases that has taken place over the years… because people in this room and other people had the courage to stand up and to be the protagonists in this struggle, even though that might have meant death for them. It took fifty-eight years of fighting, but we together have created a miracle. There are some of us who will not be around much longer… But there will be new people coming into the struggle, and they have to complete the fight.
NARRATOR: On the 21st of March 1955, Walter White died at home of a heart attack.
RANDOLPH STAKEMAN, HISTORIAN: His death was in all the major papers, not just the African-American press, It was a big deal.
NARRATOR: Nine months later, in Montgomery Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus. That moment would be remembered as the genesis of a new civil rights movement. In fact it had been decades in the making, and the NAACP had been there all along.
ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH, HISTORIAN: Rosa Parks wasn’t just a civilian who happened into a bus boycott. Rosa Parks entered the movement in the 1930s through the Montgomery NAACP branches, raising money on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys. She was doing that as part of her NAACP work.
NARRATOR: Although the Montgomery bus boycott had roots in the NAACP, it soon ushered a new generation of activists onto the scene, young people who were skeptical of their elders, of meeting white authorities on their own turf, and playing by their rules, and who were inspired by a phenomenally charismatic young preacher.
ELLIS MONK, HISTORIAN: You have more radical younger people who are unhappy with what is seen as a too-legalistic position of the NAACP. //You're seeing a much more radical protest movement.
NARRATOR: One way and another, the NAACP was soon eclipsed by this vibrant new movement. Walter White in particular - Mr. NAACP - all but vanished from public memory overnight.
ROSE PALMER, NIECE OF WALTER WHITE: The big motto at the time was, “Black is beautiful.” And I think that they didn't want to believe he was Black. All the attention went to Martin Luther King and to the new movement.
KIDADA WILLIAMS, HISTORIAN: Walter White gets forgotten. But I think there are lessons to learn from him and his work about courage, about an ethic of care for victims of violence, about an unyielding fight for justice, a willingness to play the long game. Walter White is one of the unsung heroes of the 20th century.
KARLOS HILL, HISTORIAN: When we think about the civil rights movement today, we don't think so much about all those who laid the foundation.
ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH, HISTORIAN: The NAACP is so many things and so many places and for so long. It’s the story of a nation that is perpetually trying to become a better thing, you know, and the people who are trying to define what that better thing might be.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN, HISTORIAN: That kind of sustained effort across several generations, it's unprecedented in our history. The NAACP was the group that said, “We shed our blood for this country. This is ours.”
