Kenneth Robert Janken. White: the Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP.

New York: New P, 2003. 477 pp. $29.95.

Kenneth Janken's Walter White was more than just the dominant force behind the growth of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he was also a Harlem Renaissance cultural entrepreneur, an "exotic" Negro, a "voluntary Negro," and a "masquerading" Negro. In Janken's biography, Walter White is a black man whose blue eyes and blond hair simultaneously vex and ease his course through life. In a nation that only understood black and white, Walter White could never quite fit. Despite his matrilineal slave ancestors, he was never black enough to have his actions or his motives go unquestioned, and he certainly, no matter how blue his eyes, pale his skin, or blond his hair, could ever be white enough either. How someone whose racial identity and allegiance were always up for debate and whose intellectual gifts were average, at best, became the most powerful, influential non-black, black man in America is the core of Janken's story.

This, therefore, is not so much a biography in the traditional sense, as it is a political biography. As a result, Walter White's family life both as a child and as an adult are only important insofar as they illuminate the political strengths, weaknesses, and developments of the man. We, therefore, hear from his parents and siblings, whom Janken relies upon to verify--or, more often, contradict--Walter White's version of the past. It is a past, we are told, which White created in numerous articles and in his autobiography, A Man Called White, to "inflate the value of his credentials as a race champion and ease suspicion of him by the much darker majority of African Americans." We also get a glimpse of Waiter's first wife, Gladys Powell White, who had just enough melanin, class, and talent to bolster his black credentials and ensconce him deeper into the black intelligentsia. And then there is White's liaison dangereuse and eventual marriage to white, South African-born Poppy Cannon. This second marriage, coming a mere week after the end of his twenty-seven-year marriage to Gladys, rocked the black community, threatened his career at the NAACP, and compelled White's son, Walter C. D. White, to drop all vestiges of his father's name and keep only the middle names, Carl--after Nigger Heaven Van Vechten--and Darrow. Racial confusion reigns in this biography.

With family set as framing comments, Walter White almost comes to life as a selfish, giving, miserly, extravagant, loving, cold man. We see him raised in the climate of Atlanta's black bourgeoisie. We watch him find gainful employment in the black economic world of insurance sales. Then we see how he caught the attention of James Weldon Johnson and moved into the ultimate black arena, the NAACP, which, ironically enough, was going through its own identity crisis and racial power struggles. This kind of organization was obviously tailor-made for Walter White. It was during his early years at the Association that he developed his reputation for fearlessness, ruthlessness, and political savvy. White's multiple treks into the Deep South "passing" as white to investigate a string of lynchings, his chilling exposes detailing for a national audience one atrocity after the next, and his decision to put the NAACP on the map during the confirmation hearings of Judge John J. Parker spoke volumes about a man who was a force to be reckoned with. White, however, was more than just a political animal. His numerous literary efforts (some more successful than others) to tell the multilayered, tangled story of African Americans, his hobnobbing with Claude McKay, Countee Culleen, Roland Hayes, and Langston Hughes, and his eagerness to "chaperone ... interested and well-placed whites on their voyeuristic tours of Harlem nightspots" strongly suggested a Harlem Renaissance man in the making. But Janken does not stop there. He gives us a closer look to reveal a man who is more practical than theoretical, more parrot than innovator, and more confused than clear.

All of these traits, Janken asserts, became the operating code of the NAACP, an organization whose life and purpose were as messy and as contradictory as White's. Infighting and jockeying for power were commonplace, as was Walter White's eventual triumph--no matter who the challenger may have been: W. E. B. Du Bois, Roy Wilkins, or even Thurgood Marshall. Indeed, White guarded and protected his own internal turf, just as much as he fought for and protected the NAACP's against all possible external threats--the Communist Party, the National Negro Congress, or even the March on Washington Movement. Because dominance uber alles was White's and, hence, the NAACP's mantra, long-term gains, innovative strategies, and effective alliances were often sacrificed. The end result, Janken tells us, is that the NAACP remained just as perplexed about its racial identity as did Walter White. The Association, like White, could never systematically think through what integration would really mean for the well-being of African Americans and the viability of the black community. The Association also focused so much on having access to power brokers that it mistakenly equated access to power with real power. This confusion, Janken asserts, should come as no surprise given White's well-documented penchant for name-dropping and "schmoozing" as ways to inflate and define his own influence. The end result, Janken concludes, is that the NAACP, under White's top-down, elitist leadership, did not have the capacity to realize that the Association already had the power in its hands, through its branches, to enhance the quality of life for millions of African Americans. Too intent on rubbing elbows with presidents and congressmen and too afraid of the black masses to embrace grassroots mobilization, the NAACP and Walter White took themselves down the path of legalistic obsolescence. This explains why, after White's death in 1955, someone who had been so influential could have so easily been "erased" from societal memory and replaced in the historiography and in the hearts and minds of civil rights activists by the theoretical brilliance of W. E. B. Du Bois, the moral eloquence of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the militant fire of Malcolm X. Walter White, his strategies, and especially his literary output had become as outdated and passe as the NAACP.

This is obviously no fawning ode to Walter White. Yet, through interviews and archival records, Janken has managed to provide a balanced assessment of a very complicated and important man. Indeed, this political biography hangs together quite well, especially if the reader buys into the racial identity crisis that is supposedly White's catalyst and nemesis. If, however, one questions how voluntary White's "voluntary Negro" status could really be, given that his racial identity was forged in the blood of Atlanta's Race Riot of 1906; or, if one questions the plausibility of a black man actually "masquerading" as a black man, then it just might be that White was not so conflicted as Janken suggests but merely determining which one of Paul Laurence Dunbar's "masks" he would wear for the appropriate occasion. If that is the case, then Janken's biography becomes an invaluable composite sketch but certainly not the definitive portrait of a "Man called White."

Carol Anderson

University of Missouri-Columbia