DAVIES: It's fascinating that when he wrote about this, much later in his life, some members of his family said, wait a minute, I don't remember you with a (laughter) shotgun. What do you make of that? Writer Zora Neale Hurston accused Walter White of stealing her designed costumes from her play The Great Day. White never returned the costumes to Hurston, who repeatedly asked for them by mail. [40] White criticized singer/activist Paul Robeson, who admitted to pro-Soviet leanings. Together with Roy Wilkins, the editor of The Crisis, he arranged for distribution of "Paul Robeson: Lost Shepherd", a leaflet against Robeson, which was written under a pseudonym. [39] Literary career [ edit ] Phillips, Amber (2021-11-25). "Warren Harding and 5 other presidents who have faced 'love child' questions". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286 . Retrieved 2023-07-23. DAVIES: Roosevelt was not willing to desegregate the military. But Walter White and the NAACP had another idea, which was to end discrimination in civilian employment among defense industries, which were really gearing up because of the war effort. And they set upon a tactic which was quite effective. Tell us about this.

DAVIES: A.J. Baime's new book is "White Lies: The Double Life Of Walter F. White And America's Darkest Secret." A national antilynching bill, one of the unmet goals of the NAACP under White's leadership, was finally enacted by Congress earlier this month and was signed yesterday by President Biden. BAIME: He knew going into this it wasn't going to go well, so he took a leave of absence from the NAACP. He at this time, had been chief executive for almost two decades. And he goes on this around-the-world radio news program tour without telling anyone that he obtained a divorce and that he had married this woman in a private ceremony. Best Known For: As a member of the NAACP, Walter White investigated lynchings and worked to end segregation. He was the organization's executive secretary from 1931 to 1955. BAIME: It was extraordinarily effective in basically integrating the assembly lines during World War II. It didn't always go well, but the results were extremely important, and a huge victory for Walter, who was at this time building his national political platform. In his autobiography, A Man Called White, he dedicates an entire chapter to a time when he almost joined the Ku Klux Klan undercover. White became a master of incognito investigating. He started with a letter from a friend who recruited new members of the KKK. [19] After correspondence between him and Edward Young Clark, leader of the KKK, Clark tried to interest White in joining. [19] Invited to Atlanta to meet with other Klan leaders, White declined, fearing that he would be at risk of his life if his true identity were discovered. [19] White used the access to Klan leaders to further his investigation into the "sinister and illegal conspiracy against human and civil rights which the Klan was concocting." [19] After deeper inquiries into White's life, Clark stopped sending signed letters. White was threatened by anonymous letters that stated his life would be in danger if he ever divulged any of the confidential information he had received. [20] By then, White had already turned the information over to the U.S. Department of Justice and New York Police Department. [20] He believed that undermining the hold of mob violence would be crucial to his cause.During White’s tenure as NAACP secretary, the association launched a series of legal suits designed to achieve equality between the races in education. This effort culminated in the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared unconstitutional the doctrine of “separate but equal.” There's this moment where during World War II, he goes overseas to find out how democracy is functioning on the front line. And he's in a military plane, and it crashes. And he nearly dies. And he has this what you might call a come-to-Jesus moment where he knows he's getting older, and he wants to be in love. And he decides that he's going to do something about it. And he knows that when the world finds out about this, he's going to be - his reputation will be shattered. Granted press credentials from the Chicago Daily News, White gained an interview with Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough, who would not have met with him as the NAACP representative. Brough gave White a letter of recommendation to help him meet people and his autographed photograph. BAIME: Well, this is a fascinating meeting. Firstly, there were a few of them. But there's one in particular that we're talking about. When the war began and it became clear that the United States was going to get involved in World War II, two things happened. Obviously, we had a massive ramp up of the military. But we also had a massive ramp up of industry. We're coming out of the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt creates this thing called the arsenal of democracy. His idea is to join the military, politics and private industry into this one massive military force. And that's the only way we're going to defeat Hitler, right? And so tremendous amounts of money are going into the military and into industry with government contracts. And Walter White decides, this is a really important opportunity. Nothing can do more to erase the color line in America than desegregation of the military. So he's trying to convince Roosevelt to do that. The other thing is he's trying to convince Roosevelt to have a fair practice, like, basically, fair employment. So if the government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on factories to turn out tanks and planes, those factories should be hiring not just white people. And so he begins this pressure campaign on the White House. Each member of Walter White's family, including Skyler and Hank, eventually find out about his meth empire in Breaking Bad, but when do they? The story of Breaking Bad sees Walt, a boring and unadventurous chemistry teacher and car wash assistant, diagnosed with terminal cancer. To ensure his family's future, Walt cooks methamphetamine with former student Jesse Pinkman, and over the course of five seasons, evolves into a true drug lord with an iron grip on the local drug scene and an international sphere of influence.

A Fly. A house fly. It will ruin our batch and we need to destroy every trace of it, so we can cook. My head is not the problem Jesse, the fly is! An angry Walter White in a hazmat suit hunts down a fly with a metal pole in his hands, raised above his head. He wears a loose orange hazmat suit and bears an aggressive, angry expression on his face. Over top of his bald head is a protective visor with detailed sculpting of the respirators, which are painted pink, yellow and white.The double-walled window box is illustrated to show the meth lab where Walt and Jesse labor for hours. This collectible ships in a matte, embossed, protective outer sleeve. About Breaking Bad So what happened was a group of sharecroppers wanted to unionize, and the landowners really didn't like this. And so one night, a group of sharecroppers were meeting in a church in a very rural place. And three white law officers showed up outside, but they did not identify themselves as law officers. And some gunfire broke out. And no one can agree who shot first, but it didn't really matter. At the invitation of activist and writer James Weldon Johnson, 25-year-old White moved to New York City. In 1918, he started working at the national headquarters of the NAACP. White began as secretary assistant of the NAACP; Du Bois and other leaders got over their concerns about his youth. White became an undercover agent in investigating lynchings in the South, which were at a peak. With his keen investigative skills and light complexion, White proved to be the NAACP's secret weapon against white mob violence. [12] Cortner, Richard C., A Mob Intent on Death: The NAACP and the Arkansas Riot Cases. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. DAVIES: Right. He later asks Truman to speak at the NAACP convention in 1947. And we should say this is time when Truman is about to run for reelection and needs the support of Southern whites. Despite that, well, what does he say when Walter White says will you speak at our convention?Gladys and their children broke off with White and his second wife. White's sister said that he had wanted all along simply to pass as a white person. [16] His son changed his name to Carl Darrow, signifying his disgust and desire to separate himself from his father. [16] Marie Harrison [ edit ]

Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893–March 21, 1955) was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for a quarter of a century, from 1929 until 1955. He directed a broad program of legal challenges to racial segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist.

BAIME: Well, of course, it was Walters. But let me set the scene for you. So Walter's - it's his 12th day in New York. So he's brand new. He wants to impress his bosses. And he has this new routine where he and James Weldon Johnson take a bus from Harlem down to the NAACP office, which was on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street. And they're on the bus and reading the newspaper. And they read about this - the torture and killing of a man named James McIlherron in a small town in Tennessee, and the article is all of, you know, one paragraph long. Walter White was also very effective with Harry Truman, who became president after Roosevelt died in 1945. Tell us a little bit about Truman and why it's a little surprising that he had such an open mind towards Walter's appeals. White soon faced a struggle in the NAACP as a result of his personal life. In 1922 he had married Leah Gladys Powell, a clerical worker in the association’s headquarters; they had two children, Jane and Walter. That marriage ended in divorce in 1949, and the same year he married Poppy Cannon, a white woman born in South Africa. Within the NAACP this interracial marriage provoked protests and calls for White’s resignation. But White, ever the defender of integration, shrugged off the criticism, maintaining that one’s choice of a mate was a private matter. Eleanor Roosevelt, who had joined the association’s board of directors after her husband’s death, saved White’s position by threatening to resign should White be dismissed. Although declining health soon forced him to turn over many of his administrative duties to Roy Wilkins, he remained the NAACP’s executive secretary and most important public spokesperson until his death in 1955. White received the Harmon Award ( William E. Harmon Foundation Award for Distinguished Achievement among Negroes) for his book Rope and Faggot: An Interview with Judge Lynch, a study of lynching. Both characters come complete with two heads each, one with their faces on and the other wearing masks. I love this attention to detail and the fact they needed two heads to pull it off without encroaching on the face print.

a b Gloster b. Current (March 1969). "Walter White and the Fight for Freedom". The Crisis: 115. ISSN 0011-1422 . Retrieved November 20, 2010. ; see also "RACES: The Colored Man's White", Time Magazine, April 4, 1955. White published his findings about the riot and trial in the Daily News, the Chicago Defender, and The Nation, [23] as well as the NAACP's own magazine, The Crisis. Governor Brough asked the United States Postal Service to prohibit mailings of the Chicago Defender and The Crisis to Arkansas, and others tried to get an injunction against distribution of the Defender at the local level. Walter White always saw himself as a chemist, an upper-class professional, and not a true criminal, which helps to explain why he created the science-inspired Heisenberg alternate identity in Breaking Bad. While operating under a pseudonym had the practical benefit of hiding Walter's Breaking Bad secret from the law and his family, it also allowed him to create a psychological separation between his life as a criminal and his one as a family man. However, the mythology of Heisenberg became more and more alluring and larger-than-life to Walt, eventually bleeding into his family life and entirely taking over his personality. a b Pratt, Charles A., "Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People". MA thesis. Western Michigan University. 1971, p. 6. OCLC 8174738Walter White is the great-grandson of William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States. Today I have the two main characters, Walter White& Jesse Pinkman, from the hit TV show Breaking Bad, granted it’s quite an old show, but still amazing none the less. But essentially, Walter's leadership was destroyed. His reputation was destroyed. His children refused to speak to him. And they never spoke to him again. His son even dropped the name White from the end of his name because he didn't want to be associated with his father because he was so hurt by what his father did. And that's one of the main reasons why people don't know who Walter White is today. There was another case where he looked at a county in Arkansas of violence against sharecroppers. In that case, his report didn't just go in the NAACP's publication. It was also published in The New York World, the newspaper owned by Joseph Pulitzer. What did that do for the NAACP's profile?