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##### March 22, 1955 OBITUARY ## Walter White, 61, Dies in Home Here ##### By THE NEW YORK TIMES Walter White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, died last night of a heart attack at his home at his home, 242 East Sixty-eighth Street. He was 61 years old. Last October he twice entered the New York Hospital for treatment for a heart ailment that had caused him to take a leave of absence from his duties. Recently he had returned from a month's leisurely visit in Haiti and Puerto Rico. Yesterday he spent two hours at his office. Mr. White, the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington, was a Negro by choice. Only five-thirty-seconds of his ancestry was Negro. His skin was fair, his hair blond, his eyes blue and his features Caucasian. He could easily have joined the 12,000 Negroes who pass the color-line and disappear into the white majority every year in this country. But he deliberately sacrificed his comfort to publicize himself as a Negro and to devote his entire adult life to completing the emancipation of his people. Joined N.A.A.C.P. Early Walter Francis White was born July 1, 1893, one of seven light-skinned children. Being bright and of a comparatively well-to-do family--his father was a postman--he was able to attend Atlanta Preparatory School and Atlanta University. After graduation in 1916 he became an insurance salesman. He became active in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People a few years after its organization. James Weldon Johnson, then executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., impressed by the young man, hired him in 1918 as assistant secretary and brought him to New York. When Mr. Johnson retired in 1929, Mr. White succeeded him. From 1918 until 1929 the assistant secretary personally investigated forty-one lynchings and eight race riots. Investigating the notorious race riots in Elaine, Ark., in 1919, in which three whites and 200 Negroes were killed, he posed as a reporter for The Chicago Daily News. He interviewed some of the seventy-nine Negro men imprisoned, some lynchers, and even the Governor of the state, before escaping on a train one jump ahead of a mob that had discovered his identity. As head of an organization of 580,000 Negroes and white sympathizers, and unofficial champion of 14,000,000 Negroes, Mr. White was a powerful lobbyist for Federal anti-lynching, anti-poll-tax and anti-segregation laws. Influenced Presidents In 1938 he pushed a Federal anti-lynching bill nearer to passage than ever before in twenty years of effort. The bill was defeated only after seven weeks of filibuster by Southern Senators. In 1930 he helped block the confirmation of President Hoover's appointment of John J. Parker of North Carolina to the Supreme Court, because of the judge's approval of racial segregation. He was the author of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's executive order on Fair Employment Practices in war industry during World War II. And he was responsible for President Harry Truman's stand on civil rights that caused the Dixiecrat bolt from the Democrats in the 1948 campaign. Mr. White traveled 1,000,000 miles, including two trips around the world, lecturing and investigating racial discrimination. He made perhaps 10,000 public speeches, wrote five books (including two novels), a hundred articles for national magazines, and for years wrote two weekly columns, one syndicated in Negro newspapers and the other in white papers. During the Harlem race riots of Aug. 1, 1943, he and Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia toured the streets all night in a limousine calming the agitated throngs. In 1939 he staged an open-air concert by Marian Anderson in Washington that attracted 75,000 persons after the Daughters of the American Revolution had refused their hall to the Negro singer. From 1943 to 1945 he toured every war theatre as a special correspondent for The New York Post. He was on the Advisory Council for Government of the Virgin Islands in 1934 and 1935, consultant to the United States delegation at the organization meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 and consultant to the delegation at the General Assembly meeting in Paris in 1948. In 1922 Mr. White married Leah Powell, an N.A.A.C.P. secretary. They had two children, Jane, now an actress, and Walter C. D. White. That marriage ended in divorce. In 1949, Mr. White married Poppy Cannon. Besides his second wife, who is food editor of the magazine, House Beautiful, and his children, he leaves three sisters, Mrs. Eugene Martin and Miss Madeline White of Atlanta, and Mrs. Alice Glynn of Cleveland.
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