White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP

Rating:
Summary: Informative, But the Author Has Too Many Biases
Review: Kenneth Janken hads written a very informative book about Walter White. What's good about it is that it rectifies the dearth of good books that really delve into the gravity regarding the history of America's racial sickness. Walter White had a front row seat to this reality. He was able to investigate some of the most gruesome lynchings in American history because most people thought he was Caucasian. The extent of the racial pogroms detailed in this book is amazing. It dramatizes how throughout U.S. history African Americans have had to beg, borrow and steal our way to a modicum of respect. It is especially revealing with regard to the condecension displayed by Jews who called themselves helpful in advancing African American civil rights. And it shows how all people labled as oppressed minorities strive to join the majority group where ever they live. Yet African Americans are the sole group in U.S. society for whom a concerted effort has been made (and continues to be made) to keep on the outside. There are flaws to the book, however. For example, like so many Caucasians, Janken refuses African Americans any right to complexity. By that I mean that he denies us the right to class distinctions by chastising White for looking down his nose at African Americans at the bottom who didn't do their best to improve themselves. This is a common attitude amongst so-called liberal and leftists Caucasians, who seem to feel that all African Americans at the bottom are noble. Yet these same Caucasians do their best to identify themselves as "white," as in separate from African Americans, the implication being that racial distinctions that really aren't legitimate, indeed, are legitimate. Such people simply can't seem to accept the fact that ever since the end of slavery there has been a significant cadre' of African Americans at the bottom who have no interest at all in improving themselves. It is this "noble savage" element which continues to fascinate most Caucasian Americans, who just can't seem to accept any African Americans who seek assimilation and self-improvement as "true blacks." In addition, there is at least one error in the book. Janken discusses the struggle to build the VA hospital in Tuskegee Alabama at the end of World War I. In his discussion he erroneously states that efforts to ensure that the staff of the hospital was all Caucasian were temporarily successful. This was not true at all. From the very beginning, the president of Tuskegee, Robert Moton, and school physician John A. Kenney Sr., successfully resisted all efforts to staff the hospital with Caucasians. The other criticism I have of the book is that in many passages it is overwritten (example: "[White] was no Pollyanna, and he was the angry black soldiers' amanuensis." What the h... does "amanuensis" mean?). Too often Janken strives for words that make a reader run to his dictionary unnecessarily. In this he is like fellow historian, David Levering Lewis. Overall, I recommend this book for informativeness only.

Rating:
Summary: "voluntary Negro" and striking activist captured beautifully
Review: Walter White was a blond-haired, blue-eyed charmer and "voluntary Negro" who could have slipped across the color line and passed as a white man. Instead, he burned his incandescent energies in the 20th century's many struggles for black freedom. Kenneth Janken, a solid and capable historian, captures White wonderfully in this subtle, fair-minded and fascinating biography.

At great personal peril, Walter White used his light complextion to investigate 41 lynchings and eight "race riots" in which white mobs killed dozens of African Americans. His courage and eloquence--and sometimes his self-promotion and deceit--lifted White to leadership in the NAACP. There he put the brakes on mass-based political organizing wherever it bubbled up. In fact, much of what we think of as "the civil rights movement" happened in spite of, not because of, the national office of the NAACP.

His investigations of mob violence earned White a reputation as a fearless race man. But as executive secretary of the NAACP, White proved himself to be the classic organization man. A skilled lobbyist and fund-raiser, White favored a careful, bureaucratic NAACP than was profoundly undemocratic and sometimes unresponsive to its rank and file members.

At the end of his life, White sank into such despair that he advocated that African Americans literally bleach themselves into white society. His article in LOOK magazine, "Has Science Conquered the Color Line?" argued that chemical treatments to lighten skin color "will provide a way to get fair treatment [Negroes] have always wanted" and "let them live like other Americans and be judged on their own merits." It was as if someone suggested that the ccure for anti-Semitism was wholesale conversion to Christianity! The staggering pessimism beneath these arguments spoke volumes about White's own agonies. And yet White had given his whole life to push the struggle forward, and Janken certainly does not sell him short. In fact, it is the central strength of this book that Janken understands the diverse basis of African American politics, which differed by class and region and in which personal ambitions and ideological clashes also play their part.

It was perhaps fitting that this "voluntary Negro" leader of such mixed elements died in 1955, only months before African American women in Montgomery organized the bus boycott that lifted up a far more bold and imaginative leader, and a revolt of the black masses that would capture the moral imagination of the world. Walter White would not have approved, but he sought the same "sense of somebodiness" that Dr. King wanted for his people. If a race man like Walter White, fearless enough to brave the mob, could not quite escape from his own internalized white supremacy, we should not be shocked to find it lingering in our own minds.

Kenneth Janken has captured a rich, subtle, and important American life with impeccable research and an engaging prose style, and I went away from this book with a deeper understanding of 20th century US racial politics. And unlike, for example, certain biographies--Hugh Pearson's slapdash book on Huey Newton, for example--you can trust Janken's careful research and his historical assessments.