On this date in 1893, Walter Francis White was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a prominent civil rights activist, writer, and leader of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). As a mixed-race man with very light skin, he was able to pass as white, which he used to investigate lynchings and racial violence in the South, often at great personal risk.
During his tenure as Executive Secretary of the NAACP (1931–1955), he played a key role in the fight against segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial violence. He also worked on landmark civil rights legal cases, including those that led to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, which ruled school segregation unconstitutional.
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