Review by Booklist Review
Walter Francis White, a leading civil rights advocate of the twentieth century, was, in his own words, an "enigma of a Black man occupying a white body." White passed in order to fight crime and to be an agent of change. His astonishing story starts with an Atlanta race riot he witnessed as a teen. This led him to the NAACP and to his mentor, James Weldon Johnson, as well as to W. E. B. DuBois, in addition to his sometimes difficult interactions with Marcus Garvey. The author chronicles how White used his appearance to infiltrate Klan groups in the South and expose perpetrators of lynchings, visiting crime scenes at great risk to his safety. His investigations often found that there were more murder victims than newspapers reported. Eventually, some Klan members caught on and put the word out against him, which exposed him to even greater risk of harm, but, in spite of the high personal costs, White continued fighting against white supremacy and racial injustices. In White Lies, Baime engagingly points the spotlight on one of the most significant figures in American history, whose story deserves to be far more widely known.
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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Historian Baime (Dewey Defeats Truman) delivers a captivating portrait of civil rights activist and novelist Walter White (1893--1955) and the fight to end anti-Black violence and racial discrimination in the U.S. Born into a family of "light-skinned Negroes" in Atlanta, White had blue eyes, pale skin, and blond hair. ("The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me," he wrote in his autobiography.) He took an executive position at the NAACP in 1917 and went undercover as a white man to report on the Red Summer of 1919, the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, and other outbreaks of racial violence in the South. Baime seamlessly interweaves White's harrowing investigations with his life in Harlem, where he was at the epicenter of a flowering of a Black arts and activism scene that included Claude McKay, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and delves into the NAACP's unsuccessful campaign to get an anti-lynching bill through Congress, tensions between the civil rights group and the U.S. Communist Party, and the fallout from White's decision to divorce his wife for a white woman in 1949. Filled with vibrant period details and lucid explanations of legal and political matters, this is a riveting portrait of a complex and courageous crusader for racial equality. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Baime (The Arsenal of Democracy) writes a biography of Walter Francis White (1893--1955), a Black American civil rights activist who directed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1929 to 1955. White (who was blue-eyed and blond but identified as Black) cut his teeth as an undercover investigator of lynchings. He sometimes passed for white to gain the confidences of racist murderers and witnesses and expose crimes in the newspapers, Baime writes. Later, succeeding his mentor James Weldon Johnson as leader of the NAACP, White quintupled its membership to 500,000, refocused the association on fighting for civil rights through the courts and via political lobbying, and helped persuade President Harry S. Truman to mandate racial equality in the U.S. military. White wrote six books and figured prominently in the Harlem Renaissance, but despite these achievements, White has been sidelined by scholars and the public, Baime argues, perhaps in part due to the scandal of his marriage to a white woman in 1949. Baime tells White's story with verve, clarity, and perspicacity. The result holds its own with more scholarly biographies of White from Kenneth Janken (2003) and Robert Zangrando and Ronald Lewis (2019). VERDICT A riveting profile of a little-studied Black civil rights leader.--Michael Rodriguez
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Sturdy biography of a Black journalist, writer, and reformer who moved easily, if sometimes stealthily, between two worlds. Walter Francis White (1893-1955) was born in Atlanta to light-skinned Black parents whose multiracial heritage spoke to the complex genealogies of the Old South. "My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond," White would later write. "The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me." The absence of those traits allowed White and his family to survive the waves of lynchings that plagued the South. In his early 20s, he moved to New York, where he worked as an investigator and sometime journalist, often returning to the South posing as a White man to examine racially motivated murder cases. Baime ably depicts White's lifelong Zelig-like abilities: He was at some of the signal events of his time, taking his place at the lead of the Harlem Renaissance, doing gumshoe work in the immediate aftermath of the Tulsa Massacre, weathering the Red Scare, and accumulating scores of friends. The author brings us directly into White's fascinating world, in which Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson were frequent guests at salons White held in Harlem, while "George Gershwin debuted Rhapsody in Blue on Walter's piano." Active in civil rights as a leader in the NAACP, White pressed Franklin Roosevelt to support activist legislation to advance Black causes, which Roosevelt did not do willingly, fearful that "he would offend a power base of his own party, the Democrats' Solid South." Fortunately, Eleanor Roosevelt reached out to express her support, trying to persuade her husband to do the right thing--and adding another friend to White's long list. He died too young, and he was almost immediately pushed into the back ranks of the civil rights movement, although he was the primary architect of an anti-lynching bill that has yet to clear the Senate, thanks to the opposition of Rand Paul. A well-constructed life of a man who, largely forgotten, deserves pride of place in civil rights history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.