White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP.

White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP. By Kenneth Robert Janken. (New York: New Press, c. 2003. Pp. xviii, 477. $29.95, ISBN 1-56584-773-3.)

Kenneth Robert Janken's detailed and provocative account of Walter White provides an intimate glimpse of both the activist and the organization he helped to mold. Motivated by acts of racial injustice in Progressive-era Atlanta, White cultivated a zeal for black civil rights, an interest that began in college and peaked in 1917 when he and others founded the Atlanta chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The following year he joined the national office as assistant to the executive secretary. During his tenure, White headed a national crusade to taper racism, nurtured promising black talent, promoted integration, and enhanced the reputation of the NAACP. While incognito as a white journalist or businessman, he traveled the country, investigating dozens of lynchings and race riots. White published his findings and lobbied unsuccessfully to facilitate the passage of antilynching legislation.

Moreover, White, who became executive secretary of the NAACP in 1931, headed the national effort to block the appointment of John J. Parker to the Supreme Court. As the NAACP's legal team increasingly relied on the expertise of black attorneys, it began to map out concrete strategies to eradicate job discrimination, disfranchisement, public school inequities, and segregation. White's vigor increased in the 1940s as people of color worldwide pressed for human rights.

White's leadership sparked controversy. Both a sexist and an elitist, White alienated vocal female activists, staffers, and other blacks he deemed inferior. Furthermore, a new cadre of 1930s race leaders, who embraced working-class solidarity and black nationalism over traditional, middle-class concerns and organizational leadership, antagonized White. He also found himself at odds with W. E. B. Du Bois, who increasingly advocated political radicalism and black economic separatism. Moreover, a highly publicized disagreement between the NAACP and the Communist Party over the selection of defense counsel for the accused "Scottsboro Boys" aroused sharp anti-NAACP criticism. Equally controversial, White supported the increasingly conservative Truman administration and abandoned longtime political allies with leftist leanings in an effort to avert anticommunist suspicion of the NAACP. White, whose actions, strategies, and contacts catapulted the NAACP to international prominence, would never waver: he favored pragmatic interracial cooperation over mass demonstrations and black separatist politics and had no intention of alienating white allies.

White isolated his family as well. Routinely away on business trips, Walter relied heavily on his wife as the primary family caretaker. He fell out of love with her early on in the marriage, however, and divorced her in 1948. A year later he married his longtime white lover, Poppy Cannon. So controversial was his marital entanglement that many within the NAACP and the black community asked for his immediate dismissal or resignation. White died of a second massive heart attack in March 1955 at age sixty-two.

Walter White's endearing and contentious life speaks to issues of race, class, and gender in the United States. Regardless of his political leanings and conflicting spirit, his commitment to human rights, integration, and social justice created the impetus for the modern civil rights movement. Students of civil rights history and black studies will find this biography beneficial as they attempt to better understand the black human rights struggle.

BERNADETTE PRUITT

University of Illinois at Chicago