Walter Francis White, died March 21, 1955

“I was glad I was not one of those who hated; I was glad I was not one of those made sick and murderous.... I was glad my mind and spirit were part of the races that had not fully awakened, and who therefore had still before them the opportunity to write a record of virtue as a memorandum to Armageddon.”

~ Walter White 

Walter White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People{NAACP), died on March 21, 1955 of a heart attack at his apartment in New York City, New York. He was 61 years old.

Obituary Notice in Jet Magazine for Walter White

 In October 1954, he twice entered the New York Hospital for treatment for a heart ailment that had caused him to take a leave of absence from his duties.  Shortly before his death, he had returned from a month's visit to Haiti and Puerto Rico.   The day before his death, he spent two hours at his office.

Poppy Cannon White and her children
 at Walter White's Funeral

The funeral was held March 24, 1955, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Harlem, New York City.  Thousands of people attended his funeral, and President Eisenhower praised him in Time as “a vigorous champion of justice and equality.”  

The magazine's obituary for White noted, 

The year White was born... 152 U.S. citizens, mostly Negroes, were murdered by mobs. In his lifetime, 3,017 men and women were lynched in the U.S., but when Walter White died... there had been no lynchings for four years.... As Walter White died, his old enemy Jim Crow was dying too.

St, Martin's Episcopal Church, 
Harlem, New York City

White, the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington, was a Negro by choice.  Only five-thirty-seconds of his ancestry was Negro. Five of his great-great-great-grandparents were black and the other 27 were white. His skin was fair, his hair blond, his eyes blue and his features Caucasian.  His mother,Madeline, was also blue-eyed and blonde.  Her maternal grandparents were Dilsia, a concubine and slave, and Dilsia's master, William Henry Harrison, who much later became president of the United States.  

Harrison is believed to have had six children with Dilsia. When he ran for president he did not want "bastard slave children" around, so he gave four of his children to his brother, who sold them to a Georgia planter. 

Madeline's mother, Marie Harrison, was one of Dilsia's mixed-race daughters by Harrison, and her father Augustus Ware was a white man.

Walter White  could easily have joined the 12,000 Negroes who pass the color-line and disappear into the white majority every year in this country.  But he deliberately sacrificed his comfort to publicize himself as a Negro and to devote his entire adult life to completing the emancipation of his people.

Walter White was born in Atlanta, Georgia, July 1, 1893, 28 years after the end of the Civil War.  A twelve-year-old witness to the murderous white riot that killed two dozen black people in Atlanta and injured hundreds more in 1906, Walter White strove for the next half-century to move America's conscience forward. He became active in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People a few years after its organization in 1909. From 1918 until 1929, White personally investigated forty-one lynchings and eight race riots.

Walter White

Investigating the notorious race riots in Elaine, Ark., in 1919, in which three whites and 200 Negroes were killed, he posed as a reporter for The Chicago Daily News. He interviewed some of the seventy-nine Negro men imprisoned, some lynchers, and even the Governor of the state, before escaping on a train one jump ahead of a mob that had discovered his identity.

Walter White was the first African American to be featured on the cover of Time Magazine, in January 1938.

Walter White with first wife, Leah, and children, Jane and Walter

 In 1922, Mr. White married Leah Powell,  an N.A.A.C.P. secretary. They had two children, Jane, and Walter C. D. White. That marriage ended in divorce in 1949. 

Poppy Canon White

White married Poppy Cannon in 1949.  Although there was some criticism because Cannon was a white woman, family and friends were upset because White broke up his 27-year marriage for a thrice-married and divorced woman with whom he had a relationship for more than twenty years.

Walter tried to resign from the NAACP citing health concerns, not his divorce and remarriage plans.  They refused to accept his resignation and instead offered him a one year leave.  His leave began June 1, 1949. His divorce from Gladys became final on June 30 and he married Poppy Cannon one week later.  The newlyweds immediately left for Europe on a radio program tour.

When word of his divorce and subsequent remarriage became public there was a split reaction among the NAACP board, the African American press and the black public.  Carl Murphy, an African American newspaper editor and NAACP board member. wrote in a letter about the marriage to Poppy Cannon, " [White] has so weakened his usefulness that the Association will assume a grave risk in attempting to keep him in office....The public believes Mr. Walter White as an outstanding leader of the country and as an executive of our Association, has done the wrong thing in marrying across racial lines. That bitterness is more pronounced among women than men." 

In his newspaper The Afro-American published in Baltimore he was more ambivalent: Although White had done only what was intended by the creator and what makes a good marriage by marrying the woman he loved, he wrote that White had "tossed away" his thirty-five years in the struggle for equality because he "unwittingly placed in the hands of our most vocal opponents the very rebuttal they have attempted to use against our battle for freedom." 

The African American Louisiana Weekly defended White and wrote, "We don't get leaders like Walter White every day and it would make us as a group appear very ungrateful to throw him overboard for something that is his own personal and private business....Let us not forget that the NAACP is an interracial organization, so now its executive secretary and his wife are an interracial couple."

Eleanor Roosevelt, who had joined the association's board of directors after her husband's death, saved White's position by threatening to resign should White be dismissed. Although declining health soon forced him to turn over many of his administrative duties to Roy Wilkins, he remained the NAACP's executive secretary and most important public spokesperson until his death in 1955.

In her memoir A Gentle Knight, Poppy recalled the speech White gave at a party in 1954, the day the Brown vs. Board of Education decision was handed down: “I can’t help thinking of the number of times in the last thirty-five years,” he said,“when some of my very closest friends told me that I was a damn fool—for believing that within a reasonable period of time we could really smash segregation in America.... Yet we together...have created a miracle.... But this is not the end.... There are some of us who will not be around much longer.... But there will be new people coming into the struggle and they will have to complete the fight in which today we won possibly the greatest victory that has been won since the infamous Dred Scott decision.”

Walter White did not live to see the flowering of the civil rights movement in the second half of the 1950s and 1960s.