Born: July 1, 1893, Atlanta, GA

Education: Atlanta University, B. A., 1916

Died: March 21, 1955, New York, NY

Light-skinned and blue-eyed, White fought for black equality. Armed beside his father during the Atlanta race riot (1906), he helped protect the family's home from a white mob. An Atlanta University alumnus, he joined the local NAACP staff and later moved to the National Office (1918). Able to “pass,” once nearly caught passing in Arkansas (1919), he became the most fearless lynching investigator of the Jim Crow era. Using eyewitness and newspaper accounts, he wrote Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929).

White defined the NAACP's agenda. He recruited Howard Law School dean Charles Houston as chief counsel. Houston shaped a legal strategy of “direct attack” on segregation that led to Brown. White forced Crisis editor W. E. B. Du Bois to resign (1934) for espousing black self-help within Jim Crow, instead of racial integration, as blacks’ goal. He also backed A. Philip Randolph's threatened March on Washington, which gained an executive order for the Committee on Fair Employment Practice (1941) and more black employment in defense industries. White observed the United Nation's opening assembly (1945) in the US delegation, including Du Bois. The UN's human rights declaration and ongoing black protest foreshadowed the President's order to integrate the armed forces (1948).