When Walter White died suddenly of a heart attack in March of 1965, the New York Times
obituary, taking account of his light skin, straight blond hair, and blue eyes, noted that "White, the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington, was a Negro by choice." Indeed, Janken (associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) finds that when White left Atlanta to work on race violence in the NAACP's New York office in 1918 at the age of 24, he often used his ability to "pass" to his advantage, sometimes even infiltrating white lynch mobs to expose them. This elegantly written and comprehensive biography, the first major work on its subject, is a model of nuanced scholarship and popular history. Janken covers the full sweep of White's career: his complex interactions with the artistic culture of the Harlem Renaissance (he authored several popular novels), his involvement with the NAACP's relationship to the Communist Party, his close working relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt in the attempt to pass congressional anti-lynching laws, his complicated plan to recast in global terms the NAACP's mission during the Cold War. Yet Janken never allows this wealth of detail to become burdensome, moving animatedly through White's life and career, and never hiding the more difficult moments, such as White's fights with W.E.B. DuBois over separatism versus integration, or his "abrasive" (but productive) relationship with a pre-Supreme Court Thurgood Marshall. In sum, this is a multilayered portrait of an important American political figure, who has, until now, been overlooked by historians. (Apr.)
