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WALTER WHITE IS a "missing link" in the chain of great African-American civil rights leaders. Informed Americans are aware of the general outline of leadership passing from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr. But between Du Bois' direction of the civil rights movement, which ended in the mid-1930s, and the emergence of King 20 years later, there was a gap -- the truly "forgotten years" of the movement. During this hiatus Walter White and his organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), were at the fore. In this thoughtful, thoroughly researched, and fascinating biography, Kenneth Robert Janken has restored Walter White to his proper place in history.
To all the world White looked like a Caucasian. His skin was white, his eyes blue, his hair blond. Yet he chose to be black because his identity was formed as a child growing up in Atlanta in a family of very light skinned Negroes. One of his early memories was of a day in 1906 when the infamous Atlanta riot began. White was 13 years old at the time, and the experience affected his character indelibly. On that day White happened to go on rounds with his father, a postal worker. As they went down Atlanta's main business street, they witnessed a mob of whites beating a black man to death. The Whites' skin color was so light that the mob mistook them for Caucasians. But as night fell the mob marched into the neighborhood where the Whites lived. "We turned out the lights early," White recalled in his autobiography, and "Father and I...took our places [with rifles] at the front windows of the parlor.... A voice which we recognized as that of the son of the grocer with whom we had traded for many years yelled, `That's where that nigger mail cartier lives!' In the eerie light Father turned his drawn face toward me. In a voice as quiet as though he were asking me to pass him the sugar at the breakfast table, he said, `Son, don't shoot until the first man puts his foot on the lawn and then -- don't you miss.'"
The Whites' property was spared when some friends distracted...