White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret

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.)