While many consider the birth of the civil rights movement tobe 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on anAlabama bus, the stage had been set decades before byactivists of the National Association for the Advancement ofColored People. Some of the NAACP leaders are familiar,including W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall, but WalterWhite, head of the NAACP from 1929 to 1955, has been all butforgotten. With his blond hair and blue eyes, Walter Whitelooked white; he described himself as "an enigma, a Black manoccupying a white body." Like virtually all light-skinnedAfrican Americans of his day, White was descended fromenslaved Black women and powerful white men. But he was Black— by law, identity, and conviction and spent his entirelife fighting for Black civil rights. Forgotten Hero: WalterWhite and the NAACP traces the life of this neglected civilrights hero and seeks to explain his disappearance from ourhistory.
