#Black man posed as white to expose racism, was shunned for interracial affair

Walter F. White, as one newspaper article would later put it, was a “Negro by choice.”

The Harlem resident was the product of generations of white owners fathering children with their slaves, and as a result had light skin, blonde hair and blue eyes.

But White used his appearance almost like a superpower, going undercover in the Jim Crow South to investigate lynchings and other horrific crimes against African-Americans.

“It stuns me how few people have heard his story,” says A.J. Baime, author of the new biography “White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret” (Mariner Books), out Feb. 8.  

White was born in 1893 and grew up in Atlanta. In 1906, race riots tore the city apart. In a possibly apocryphal story, White described a white mob showing up in front of his house. His father, a postal worker and religious man, handed his son a shotgun and told him to start shooting once the mob crossed the lawn’s edge.

Shots rang out elsewhere and the mob luckily dispersed. But White was left with a clear sense of identity. “After that night I knew I never wanted to be a white man,” he would later write. “I knew which side I was on.”

He began working with the NAACP as an adult, and in 1918, he moved to New York for an executive job in the group’s Fifth Avenue headquarters.

Just 13 days into his tenure, he read a newspaper article about a Tennessee black man who’d been burned at the stake by a mob of 1,500. White volunteered to investigate first-hand.

Posing as a white traveling salesman, White chatted up the locals and easily identified the perpetrators. His report, published in 1918 in “The Crisis,” created a “modest sensation,” as he described it — though Tennessee’s governor publicly refused to condemn the killers.

White also went undercover to look into the infamous 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in which an affluent black neighborhood was burned to the ground after an African-American teenager was accused of a raping a white woman in an elevator (he only accidentally stepped on her toe).

To “guard the town” through the violence, the sheriff began deputizing random whites.

White volunteered. At his hasty swearing in, the man next to him remarked, “Now you can go out and shoot any n—er you see and the law’ll be behind you.”

White spent a night patrolling the city and later published a widely read report in The Nation, writing that, “Perhaps America is waiting for a nationwide Tulsa to wake her.”

Ultimately, White undertook more than 40 undercover investigations — at great risk to himself.

“The more famous he became for these investigations, the more likely it was that his identity would be exposed,” the author says. “These were ritualistic tortures — burnings at the stake, castrations. Had he been uncovered, his own fate would have been that or worse.”

His work raised awareness of racist killings, but unfortunately yielded few concrete results.

“Walter would construct these reports and barge into the governor’s office, and say, ‘Here are the names of the killers,’ and still no one would be arrested,” Baime says. “He realized that the the only way to enforce the laws was through a federal anti-lynching law.” (Such a law still has not been passed and in 2019 was blocked by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.)

White’s work — including several popular books and his columns in the New York Evening Post — made him so famous that his photo hung in many African-American homes. He also became an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance, championing artists and writers and hosting legendary parties at his uptown apartment. George Gershwin even debuted “Rhapsody in Blue” on White’s piano.

But then, in 1949, came the scandal that would eclipse his legacy — the main reason, Baime argues, many have not heard of White or his work.

White divorced his longtime African-American wife, Gladys Powell, and married a white magazine editor, Poppy Cannon. The split was tabloid fodder, and many in the black community felt stung by what they considered a betrayal. 

White’s two children never spoke to him again. His sister wrote to him, “Now you are telling . . . all the world that all this race pride and work for the Negroe [sic] race was only to advance your interest — and you had no real interest in them. You want a white woman to share the rest of your days.” 

In 1955, when White died of a heart attack at age 61, some 1,800 mourners gathered at Harlem’s Saint Martin’s Episcopal Church. But to many others, White was already dead to them.