depicting black life. White took up the challenge,
and in a writing frenzy of 12 days, he produced The
Fire in the Flint (Knopf, 1924), which portrays the
harsh opposition of a small southern town to any
form of black progress. When Kenneth Harper, an
African-American doctor, returns from the North,
he finds himself relentlessly drawn into the racial
strife he had hoped to avoid. Economic, social, and
psychological factors within the white community
ultimately boil over in violent acts that reassert
white supremacy. The novel sold well and was
warmly received. White described the work as “a
modest best-seller, far beyond its literary merits”
(White, 68).
Despite this comment, White was clearly
pleased enough with the novel and its reception
to write his second novel, Flight (1926). In this
novel, White presents a light-skinned female pro-
tagonist, Mimi Daquin, who “passes” into white
society after she gives birth to an illegitimate child.
Driven by shame, she moves from Atlanta to Har-
lem. Disenchanted with the black community, she
enters the white community, where she lives a suc-
cessful but unsatisfying life. Realizing, after several
encounters with African-American music, that
the emptiness in her life results from her distance
from the black community, Mimi reclaims her Af-
rican-American identity. Flight offers a compelling
portrait of troubled racial identification—a theme
that intrigued numerous authors of the Harlem
Renaissance—but this second novel sold poorly.
Although critics labeled his fiction melodramatic,
unpolished, and didactic, White offered, through
his novels, a strong indictment of the racial injus-
tice he saw in America; they earned him a Guggen-
heim Fellowship in 1926.
White used the fellowship to move to France,
where he planned to write his third novel, which
he never completed. Instead, he began a work of
nonfiction: Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge
Lynch (1929). For this invaluable work, White
drew on his experience investigating lynching
throughout the South to expose the economic,
religious, sexual, and social causes of lynching in
a systematic and compelling fashion. White never
returned to fiction, devoting his literary energies
to essays, articles, and books that complemented
his work with the NAACP. A Man Called White:
The Autobiography of Walter White is his other
major nonfiction contribution to African-Ameri-
can letters. This work is less White’s autobiogra-
phy (although there are some gripping personal
details) than a history of the early NAACP. White
offers extensive firsthand accounts of the investi-
gative, legal, and political roles the NAACP played
in battling segregation and racial violence. His
other works include The American Negro and
His Problem (1927), The Negro’s Contribution to
American Culture (1928), What Caused the De-
troit Riots? (1943), A Rising Wind: A Report on
the Negro Soldier in the European Theater of War
(1945), How Far the Promised Land? (1955), and
numerous articles and essays. In these works, as
in his other writing and his politics, Walter White
stressed a basic but unrealized truth: Shared hu-
manity necessitates shared rights, opportunities,
and respect.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brooks, Neil. “We Are Not Free! Free! Free!: Flight
and the Unmapping of American Literary Stud-
ies.” College Language Association Journal 41, no.
4 (1998): 371–386.
Scruggs, Charles W. “Alain Locke and Walter White:
Their Struggle for Control of the Harlem Renais-
sance.” Black American Literature Forum 14, no. 3
(1980): 91–99.
Waldron, Edward E. Walter White and the Harlem Re-
naissance. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press,
1978.
White, Walter. A Man Called White: The Autobiogra-
phy of Walter White. 1948. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1970.
Andrew LeiterWhitehead, Colson (1970– )
Novelist and essayist Colson Whitehead was born
in New York City in 1970. During his adolescent
years, he moved with his family to various loca-
tions within the city. In 1991 he earned a bache-548 Whitehead, Colson