Walter F. White: The NAACP's Ambassador for Racial Justice by Robert L. Zangrando and Ronald L. Lewis (review)

This book is a monographic study of the life of prominent civil rights leader Walter F. White, who fought for racial justice throughout his lifetime. It consists of three parts. The first part describes White's early career, focusing on how he demonstrated his coordination, organization, and leadership abilities as an assistant to Executive Secretary James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP. White worked against the Ku Klux Klan and made investigations on lynching, which successfully evoked the conscience of American society and got the support of the House of Representatives for antilynching legislation. These successes not only enhanced the NAACP's influence in the country but also earned White a good reputation. He was promoted to be the executive secretary of the NAACP in 1929, thus initiating his quarter-century-long leadership of the civil rights movement.

The second part of the book explains how White became a civil rights leader who had powerful lobbying capacity. He tapped into the rising political power of African Americans to expand their influence in the Democratic Party and the federal government. White also had direct access to President Franklin D. Roosevelt via Eleanor Roosevelt, which made it possible for him to gain support from the federal government for civil rights. In addition, the Four Freedoms proposed by President Roosevelt became weapons for White to compel the federal government to forbid racial discrimination in employment and ameliorate the conditions of African American soldiers, which laid a solid foundation for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The third part of the book describes White's civil rights activities during the early period of the Cold War. Based on realistic considerations, White chose to cooperate with the federal government to remove any suspected communist members in the NAACP on one hand, and he was actively engaged in cultural diplomacy and devoted his energy to transnational political activities on the other hand. He lobbied the U.S. government to give economic development aid to nations like India and Haiti in order to win more support from the Third World for America. His strategy was different from that of other civil rights leaders and helped African Americans make progress, even during the Cold War.

Unlike the mainstream narrative on White, Walter F. White: The NAACP's Ambassador for Racial Justice merges White's struggle for racial justice into the long civil rights movement, which enables readers to have a full picture of the history of the movement. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s never did run smoothly, and its achievements were inseparable from the efforts of African American leaders, as represented by White, in the first half of the twentieth century. The book also makes contributions by examining White's struggle for civil rights from a transnational perspective. White linked African Americans' fate tightly with that of people of color worldwide through participating in the Pan-African movement, anticolonial movement, and overseas civil rights activities. These transnational political activities compelled the American government to respond to African Americans' demands and created a more favorable environment for eliminating racial discrimination at home.

Two aspects are neglected in the book, and they are worthy of attention. First, Robert L. Zangrando and Ronald L. Lewis do not explain clearly why the NAACP's struggles shifted from antilynching legislation to school integration in the 1940s. Neither do they explain how White, as executive secretary of the NAACP, exerted influence on these changes. Second, White devoted his efforts to lobbying the upper class and paid little attention to African Americans' daily life and economic problems, a fact on which the authors do not make any critical comments.