Resource: Walter White: Reporting the Crime
Media Type:
QuickTime Video
Length: 3m 19s
Size: 9.0 MB
This video from the The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow presents experiences from the life of Walter White. This unsung hero was an African American man who put his life in danger passing for a white man while working as the chief investigator of the crime of lynching for the NAACP. White was successful on countless occasions in documenting the crime and even collecting and publishing the names of perpetrators.
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Transcript (Rich Text Format Document)
Loading reviews...Teachers' Domain, Walter White: Reporting the Crime, published August 19, 2009, retrieved on ,
http://www.teachersdomain.org/resource/bf09.socst.us.prog.refrom.investigat/
- Background Essay
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Print Background EssayDuring the race riot of 1906 in Atlanta, Ga., Walter White, an African American, escaped the mob only because his fair complexion allowed him to pass through safely. The experience led him to become one of the outstanding civil-rights leaders in America between 1920 and 1955.
White joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1918 and almost immediately became its chief investigator of lynching. His fair appearance enabled him to travel to communities where lynchings had occurred and gather details about the crimes, including the names of the participants. He would then publish this information in the NAACP magazine The Crisis and various newspapers.
In 1929, White became executive director of the NAACP, succeeding James Weldon Johnson. White's main goal was to have the federal government pass an anti-lynching law. Although Southern senators prevented the law from being enacted, White's exposure of the "Southern horror" helped change the climate of public opinion and put pressure on the South. The number of lynchings declined in the latter part of the 1930s.
In 1934, a long simmering feud between White and W.E.B. Du Bois came to a head after Du Bois wrote an article advocating voluntary segregation as a temporary expedient in the face of massive white resistance to blacks. This was contrary to the NAACP's policy, and Du Bois resigned rather than retract his position.
White invited Charles Hamilton Houston, Dean of Law at Howard University, to join the NAACP and lead its legal attack on Jim Crow. In 1941, White assisted his colleague, labor leader A. Philip Randolph, in pressuring President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to issue the executive order creating the Fair Employment Practices Act, which banned discrimination in government and war industries. White's autobiography, A Man Called White, was published in 1948.
We assign reference terms to each statement within a standards document and to each media resource, and correlations are based upon matches of these terms for a given grade band. If a particular standards document of interest to you is not displayed yet, it most likely has not yet been processed by ASN or by Teachers' Domain. We will be adding social studies and arts correlations over the coming year, and also will be increasing the specificity of alignment.Related Resources:
Charles Hamilton Houston: Laying the Groundwork for Integration
(QuickTime Video)
The Crisis: A Weapon Against Jim Crow
(QuickTime Video)
See Also:
K-12 Subject:
The Progressive Era
Source: The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow: "Don't Shout Too Soon"
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