Walter Francis White, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Walter Francis White

American civil rights activist

Date of Birth: 01-Jul-1893

Place of Birth: Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Date of Death: 21-Mar-1955

Profession: human rights activist, journalist, novelist, essayist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Cancer


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About Walter Francis White

  • Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 – March 21, 1955) was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for almost a quarter of a century, 1929–1955, after joining the organization as an investigator in 1918.
  • He directed a broad program of legal challenges to racial segregation and disfranchisement.
  • He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist.
  • He graduated in 1916 from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a historically black college. In 1918, White joined the small national staff of the NAACP in New York at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson.
  • He acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary and traveled to the South to investigate lynchings and riots.
  • Of multiracial, majority-white ancestry, at times he passed as white to facilitate his investigations and protect himself in tense situations.
  • White succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP, leading the organization from 1929 to 1955.
  • He joined the Advisory Council for the Government of the Virgin Islands in 1934 and resigned in 1935 to protest President Roosevelt's silence at Southern Democrats' blocking of anti-lynching legislation to avoid retaliatory obstruction of his New Deal policies. White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation.
  • He worked with President Truman on desegregating the armed forces after the Second World War and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this.
  • Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up its Legal Defense Fund, which conducted numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes.
  • Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v.
  • Board of Education (1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal.
  • White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.

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