Walter Francis White - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

White was the fourth of seven children born in Atlanta to George W. White and Madeline Harrison. They belonged to the influential First Congregational Church, founded after the Civil War by freedmen and the American Missionary Association, based in the North. Among the new middle class of blacks, both of the Whites ensured that Walter and each of their children got an education. When White was born, George had graduated from Atlanta University and was a postal worker. Madeline had graduated from Clark University and became a teacher. Of mixed race with African and European ancestry, White's appearance showed his high proportion of European ancestry. He emphasized in his autobiography, A Man Called White (p. 3): "I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me." Five of his great-great-great-grandparents were black and the other 27 were white. All of his family were light-skinned, and his mother Madeline was also blue-eyed and blonde. Her maternal grandparents were Dilsia, a slave, and Dilsia's master William Henry Harrison, who much later became president of the United States. Madeline's mother Marie Harrison was one of Dilsia's mixed-race daughters by Harrison, and her father Augustus Ware was a white man. Despite his family's ancestry being mostly white and himself being blond-haired, blue-eyed, and very fair, White and his family identified as black and lived among the Atlanta black community. In the earlier stages of his career White took advantage of his features to make investigations in the South, passing for white to gather informations more freely and protected on violations of civil and human rights such as lynchings and hate crimes in socially hostile environments. He involved himself in KKK groups in the South in order to expose those involved in lynchings and other murders, and was forced to escape on a train after learning threats of a black man passing for a white was being hunted down to be lynched.