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Biography of Walter Francis WhiteName: Walter Francis WhiteBirth Date: July 1, 1893 Death Date: March 21, 1955 Place of Birth: Atlanta, Georgia, United States Nationality: American Gender: Male Occupations: civil rights leader, author Walter Francis White Walter Francis White (1893-1955), general secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for 24 years, was an outspoken critic of lynching and racial injustice in America.Walter White was born in 1893 in Atlanta, Georgia. His father, George, was a postman, and his mother, Madeline, a former school-teacher. The younger of two sons in a family of seven children, all light enough to pass for white, he was raised in an eight room, two story house on the edge of the ghetto. Their light complexion caused them a variety of problems. Aboard Atlanta's Jim Crow cars, the family found that if they sat in the "white" section, African Americans accused them of passing; if they sat in the African American section, they faced embarrassing stares and rude remarks. To avoid humiliation, the children walked everywhere or rode in the surrey their father had purchased.When he was 13, Walter learned "…showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…to see the legal basis of that exclusion overturned. He was a consistent and articulate spokesman in the cause of human rights. Associated Organizations Further Reading A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (1948) is the best introduction to the NAACP leader's career. Brief biographical sketches also appear in the Dictionary of American Negro Biography (1983) edited by Rayford Logan and Michael Winston and in A Biographical History of Blacks in America Since 1528 by Edgar A. Toppin (1969). White himself was the author of Fire in the Flint (1924); Flight (1926); Rope and Faggot: The Biography of Judge Lynch (1929); A Rising Wind: A Report of Negro Soldiers in the European Theatre of War (1945); and How Far Is the Promised Land (1955).Waldron, Edward E., Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance, Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978. White, Walter Francis, A man called White: the autobiography of Walter White, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995. |