Walter Francis White (1893-1955), general secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for 24 years, was an outspoken critic of lynching and racial injustice in America.

Walter White was born in 1893 in Atlanta, Georgia. His father, George, was a postman, and his mother, Madeline, a former school-teacher. The younger of two sons in a family of seven children, all light enough to pass for white, he was raised in an eight room, two story house on the edge of the ghetto. Their light complexion caused them a variety of problems. Aboard Atlanta's Jim Crow cars, the family found that if they sat in the "white" section, African Americans accused them of passing; if they sat in the African American section, they faced embarrassing stares and rude remarks. To avoid humiliation, the children walked everywhere or rode in the surrey their father had purchased.

When he...