A. J. Baime - White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and Americas Darkest Secret

Walter F. White, 1929

No state shall... deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1868)

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1870)

As my father lay dying in a jimcrow hospital in Atlanta he put into words for my brother and me the faith which had sustained him throughout his life. Human kindness, decency, love, whatever you wish to call it, he said, is the only real thing in the world.... Its up to you two, and others like you, to use your education and talents to make love as positive an emotion in the world as are prejudice and hate. Thats the only way the world can save itself.

Walter White, A Man Called White

AT THE RISK OF GETTING AHEAD OF MYSELF , I want to say: Many readers will find in this book occurrences that will feel impossible to believe, events that you may think could never have happened in the United States of America. For others, this story will hit closer to home. The difference between these two readers is exactly what White Lies is about.

White, Black, and the shades in between.

The central figure is Walter Francis White, born in Atlanta in 1893 and raised there as well. Both of Walters parents came from enslaved families in Georgia, and while they were African American, they had skin so pale, they and their children could have passed for white. I am a Negro, Walter himself explained. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.

The familys complexion represented a shameful truth: that generations of enslaved families were born out of illicit encounters between Black women who had no rights to their bodies and white male slave owners, who had full legal impunity. Walters great-grandmother on his mothers side, in fact, birthed six children in the 1830s, fathered by her owner, William Henry Harrison, who later became president of the United States.

Walter was raised as a Black child. He went to a Black school, attended a Black church, and graduated from all-Black Atlanta University in 1916. A chance occurrence led him to race activism, and through that, he was plucked from obscurity at twenty-four years of age and brought to New York City to work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a small organization made up of a handful of white and Black intellectuals that was, at the time, new and struggling to gain a foothold.

Walters move northward coincided with a wave of racial violence, and within days he began to live a double life: as an undercover investigator, posing as a white man in the South while cracking racially charged murder cases, but also as a budding Black intellectual in New York. He was uniquely gifted in moving from one world to the other and switching racial identities when it suited his investigative work. As a New Yorker writer later described him in 1948, he was the perfect economy-size double duty package. He was young, spry, fearless, perceptive, glib, and, above all, reversible.

Working as an undercover investigator in the South from 1918 to 1930, Walter infiltrated secret societies, discovering an underbelly of fear and sadism, and he wrote about his findings in reports that made sensational national headlines, exposing some of the most shocking crimes in American history. So many of the darkest chapters of Americas past the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa massacre of 1921, the Lowman lynchings in South Carolina in 1926, as a few examples Walter investigated firsthand, and many of his notes from those investigations exist in his papers today, documenting it all in profound detail.

After these investigations, Walter headed north by train over the Mason-Dixon Line (which he sarcastically called the Smith & Wesson Line), shed his white persona, and lived openly as a Black man again, rising in the ranks of the NAACP. He moved to Manhattan at the perfect time to help found the Harlem Renaissance and emerge as one of its central figures. He became an internationally famed novelist and a fixture in Harlems nightclub scene during the Roaring Twenties. At parties in Walters Harlem apartment, Black and white audiences first heard the singing of Paul Robeson and the verse of Langston Hughes. Broadway hit maker George Gershwin debuted Rhapsody in Blue on Walters piano.

Walter White was a New York celebrity, David Levering Lewis wrote in his Harlem Renaissance history, When Harlem Was in Vogue. His apartment at 90 Edgecombe Avenue [was] a stock exchange for cultural commodities, where interracial contacts and contracts were sealed over bootleg spirits and the verse or song of some Afro-American who was then the rage of New York.... At 32, short, incomparably gregarious, White was already a legend in Harlem.

In an era before TV, he could live as a famous Black man in New York and as a white undercover crime fighter in the South. When his fame transcended, however, and he became chief executive of the NAACP in 1931 which by then was the most powerful and militant race organization that had ever existed Walter left his undercover work to focus the fight for civil rights where he believed it would be most effective in the future: politics. He became a regular guest in the Oval Office of FDR and Harry Truman. Arguably, he was the nations most powerful driving force in the historic realignment of Black political power, from the Party of Lincoln, the Republicans, to the Democrats, where it remains for the most part today.

Never was it lost on the poor or the powerful the bizarre twist of Walters skin color. In his own words, he was the enigma of a black man occupying a white body. When he died in 1955, the New York Times stated in his obituary, White, the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington, was a Negro by choice.

All of which begs the question: Why is his story so obscure today?

Walter spent his life exposing secrets. But he also had a secret of his own. When, late in life, he could no longer keep this secret, he let go of it, and the explosive scandal shattered his reputation. But that was not all. Soon after he died a new generation of African American leaders emerged, and for these leaders his pale complexion was an inconvenience. Walter was not Black enough, especially in the new era of television. His story faded into oblivion.

This book is a character study of Walters odyssey and an exploration of the essence of identity. His story is the story of race in America. It is also a story aimed at the conscience of America. As the Nobel Peace Prizewinning political scientist Ralph Bunche said of Walter, he was a man whose life, in fuller measure than that of any I have known, was devoted to making American democracy a complete and equal reality for the black as well as the white citizen.... He lived that struggle for three decades. In a symbolic sense, he was that struggle of our times.

Now is an apt time to unearth Walter Whites story. America is once again experiencing a surge of white supremacy, Black protest, and racial bloodshed. And once again, the country is being divided in two. Perhaps the lessons that need to be learned are not to be found in the present or future but in the past.