Walter Francis White (1893–1955) was an American civil rights leader, journalist, and novelist. He served as executive secretary of the NAACP from 1931 to 1955, leading anti-lynching campaigns and helping to desegregate the United States military and federal employment. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, to a mixed-race family, he had a light complexion and blue eyes that allowed him to pass as white during investigative work, including infiltrating lynch mobs to report on racial violence for the NAACP. His key works include the novels The Fire in the Flint (1924), depicting racial violence in the Jim Crow South, and Flight (1926), which follows a mixed-race protagonist grappling with racial passing; the nonfiction study Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929), documenting the sociology and history of lynching in America; and his autobiography, A Man Called White (1948), detailing his NAACP leadership and his personal experience of navigating racial identity. His fiction and nonfiction alike are grounded in firsthand investigative work, giving his prose a documentary, unflinching quality distinct from that of his more purely literary contemporaries of the Harlem Renaissance.
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