B6 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 27 , 2022
March 1931, White took his place, a promo-
tion that required him to set aside the
dramatic interventions of the 1920s for the
organizational work that would define the
rest of his professional life. Baime uses the
last third of his book to lay out his accom-
plishments. Under White’s direction, the
association promoted interracial unioniza-
tion, pried open Blacks’ access to wartime
defense work, and pushed the Pentagon to
desegregate the military. The NAACP started
the legal campaign that would dismantle Jim
Crow’s claim to constitutionality. And it
became a political powerhouse, with White as
its symbolic center, sweeping into the Oval
Office for the consultations that were due a
man people took to calling “Mr. NAACP.”
But there were problems, too. He hesitated
to defend the Scottsboro Boys — nine poor
Black teenagers accused of raping two young
White women in 1931 Alabama — in large
part, because they didn’t fit the respectable
middle-class image he expected the associa-
tion to project. He drove his most esteemed
colleague, W.E.B. Du Bois, out of the NAACP
in a fight steeped in the poisonous politics of
skin color. Some of his most talented staffers
bristled at his tendency to favor presidential
photo ops over the hard work of organizing
ordinary people. And, in 1949, he eviscerated
his standing in the association and the Black
communities that supported it by divorcing
his wife of 27 years so that he could marry the
White woman he loved.
Baime details those difficulties, but he
never really grapples with the racial dynamics
behind them. It’s a crucial omission, as it’s
through those dynamics that White’s story
speaks most powerfully to the American
dilemma. Here was a man who had been born
bearing the signs of racial exploitation, who
had taken enormous risks to reveal the
horrors of racial domination, who despite all
he had seen still believed that justice might be
secured through his passions and commit-
ments. Yet he had let some of the central
assumptions, preferences and prejudices of
the nation’s racial order shape his sense of the
movement he directed and the life he sought
to lead. Such was the power of that order that
even a man as extraordinary as Walter White
couldn’t quite overcome it.about the dangers of racial passing. Those
triumphs he followed with a landmark study
of lynching published just a year before his
last investigation, of the gruesome assault
that left two young men hanging from a tree
in Marion, Ind., in the fetid summer of 1930.
By then, Johnson was winding down his
tenure as the NAACP’s executive secretary. Inart. Through the early 1920s, he assiduously
courted those White writers, editors and
publishers powerful enough to help him
launch the Black literary movement he be-
lieved would uplift his race. His own contri-
butions became two of the Harlem Renais-
sance’s most publicized novels, one about a
Black doctor’s political awakening, the otherabolition will convey to a wider audience
important — “shocking” — realities that have
long been recognized in more academic
writings about antislavery. Chapman was far
from alone in her racist views, and she was
far from the only fellow abolitionist —
Garrisonian or otherwise — to treat Douglass
with condescension. It was telling that when
Douglass traveled to the British Isles for a
lecture tour in 1845, he repeatedly wrote of
finding himself regarded as a human being
for the first time in his life.
But Hirshman’s expository device of the
“threesome” distorts the underlying forces in
antislavery as well as overstating the signifi-
cance and distinctiveness of the connection
among her three main characters. Chapman,
at best, stood on the margins of the deep,
complex, and much-studied relationship be-
tween Garrison and Douglass. More impor-
tant, Hirshman’s interpretation of Douglass’s
move from Garrisonianism to Republicanism
focuses largely on his personal conflict with
Chapman. He is pushed not pulled; she, not
he, becomes the “prime mover,” the funda-
mental agent in this story. But other factorsprogress.” Their effect, Hirshman argues, was
to drive Douglass out of the Garrisonian wing
of abolition, with its dedication to the
exclusive power of moral suasion, into the
arms of the New York antislavery activists led
by Gerrit Smith, who saw political action as
the path to freedom. Ironically, Chapman’s
behavior results in Douglass’s embracing
alliances and views that prove far more
effective in the antislavery cause. Chapman’s
offensive words and deeds work ultimately
for Douglass’s — and abolition’s — own good.
Hirshman’s book is a lively depiction of the
antislavery movement, in which the three
charismatic characters at the heart of her
story provide an engaging avenue into the
competing philosophies and strategies that
continually challenged abolitionism’s unity
and effectiveness. Her writing is breezy,
designed to engage readers who are not
historians and whose interests may lie more
in the present than the past: Douglass is a
“superstar” and so, indeed, is John Quincy
Adams; ideas take off in an “1844 version of
viral.” The book’s depiction of the racial
divisions and White prejudices at the heart ofBook WorldTHE COLOR
OF ABOLITION
How a Printer,
a Prophet,
and a Contessa
Moved a Nation
By Linda
Hirshman
Mariner Books.
330 pp. $28W
hen Walter White joined the National
Association for the Advancement of
Colored People’s New York staff in
1918, he had a thin record of civil rights
activism. But he quickly made himself into
the association’s indispensable man, particu-
larly skilled at communicating the terror of
racial violence to White audiences. It was a
talent built partly on his limitless courage,
partly on his incessant charm, and partly on
an inheritance that set him apart from most
of Black America. “I am a Negro,” he wrote late
in life. “My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my
hair is blond. The traits of my race are
nowhere visible upon me.”
But the marks of slavery were. The sexual
exploitation that ran through the antebellum
South coiled tightly round White’s maternal
line: Both his great-grandfather and grandfa-
ther were prominent White men; his great-
grandmother and grandmother, enslaved
women powerless to resist them. His mother
was born into bondage, too, just as the Civil
War was about to bring the slave system
down. Over the decades of freedom that
followed, she and the light-skinned man she
married pulled their family into the Black
middle class, where their color carried a great
deal of cachet. There White was born and
raised, wrapped in the Victorian virtues of
turn-of-the-century Atlanta’s most presti-
gious Black neighborhood as Jim Crow closed
in around him.
A.J. Baime centers the first two thirds of his
vigorous biography, “White Lies: The Double
Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest
Secret,” on the first 12 years of White’s
confrontation with that brutal regime. His
breakthrough came two weeks into his time
as an NAACP staffer, when his boss, the
incomparable James Weldon Johnson, sent
him to investigate a lynching in tiny Estill
Springs, Tenn. White arrived in town claiming
to be a traveling salesman. In short order, he
was sitting in the general store, chatting up
the locals who assumed that he was as White
as they were. By nightfall, he had gathered all
the horrifying details that made his resulting
exposé, published in the NAACP magazine,
the Crisis, a sensation.
It was the start of a remarkable run, which
Baime recounts with the vividness it deserves.
Shortly after his Tennessee story appeared in
print, White slipped across the color line
again to report on an even more appalling
lynching in Georgia. The next year, he infil-
trated the mob that had killed as many as 200
Black farmers in a racial pogrom in rural
Arkansas. In May 1921, he spent a terrifying
night patrolling the still-smoldering ruins of
Black Tulsa with some of the White men who
had set the neighborhood to burning. And
during a few days in backcountry South
Carolina in 1926, he uncovered the local
authorities’ complicity in a savage triple
murder.
From that darkness, he dreamed of making
A vigorous examination of ‘Mr. NAACP,’ who passed as White
WHITE LIES
The Double Life of Walter
F. White and America’s
Darkest Secret
By A.J. Baime
Mariner Books.
3 84 pp. $30HISTORY REVIEW BY KEVIN BOYLE
GORDON PARKS /FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Walter White,
executive secretary
of the National
Association for the
Advancement of
Colored People, in
19 42.Kevin Boyle teaches American history at
Northwestern University. His most recent book is
“The Shattering: America in the 1960s.”A
feminist activist and labor lawyer,
Linda Hirshman has tried cases before
the Supreme Court; she has served as a
distinguished professor of philosophy and
women’s studies; she has written best-selling
works about contemporary movements for
progressive social change: “the 50-year epic
battle against sexual abuse and harassment”;
“the triumphant gay revolution”; “a manifes-
to for women of the world” — to quote the
celebratory subtitles of three of her books.
With “The Color of Abolition: How a Printer,
a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation,”
Hirshman turns her attention to a 19th-cen-
tury social movement that she deems “a
crucial landmark of moral progress”: the
campaign to abolish slavery. Inspired by her
one-time teacher, the great historian David
Brion Davis, to regard it as “an astonishing
historical achievement,” she seeks new mean-
ing and inspiration for our own time from a
moment when individuals not only came
together to do the right thing but also
ultimately succeeded in bringing about slav-
ery’s demise.
Originally, Hirshman intended to title her
book “Black and White: How William Lloyd
Garrison and Frederick Douglass Defeated
the Slave Empire.” This would be a trium-
phal story that combined an examination of
the “mechanics of activism” — the how —
with narrative emphasis on the who, the two
extraordinary men who could draw the
general reader into the broader and often
complex history of abolitionism. At a time
when we “in the here and now” are
considering the potential and challenges of
interracial activism, the past might provide
a new perspective. During her research,
however, the “history gods” surprised her
with a third character to add to her tale,
Maria Weston Chapman, antislavery orga-
nizer and editor, who Hirshman believes to
have been heretofore “substantially over-
looked.” Her book evolved into a depiction of
the ties among “a threesome,” and the
“creation, duration, and impact of their
alliance to abolish slavery.”
Initially regarding her discovery as “femi-
nist research gold,” Hirshman was soon
disillusioned by “shocking” letters in which
Chapman revealed the “casual racism of the
privileged class” as she sought to manage
Frederick Douglass’s role within the Garriso-
nian wing of the abolition movement. Chap-
man’s imperiousness, her efforts to control
Douglass — what he pointedly referred to as
her “overseership” — and her willingness to
regard Douglass as a tool rather than a full
human being are vividly portrayed. But
Hirshman casts these distressing realities as
more than simply a challenge to Chapman’s
bona fides as an inspirational agent of “moral
Lively depiction of abolition dissects its competing philosophies and strategies
ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT REVIEW BY DREW GILPIN FAUST
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/ASSOCIATED PRESS ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES
Frederick Douglass
moved from the
Garrisonian wing of
the abolitionist
movement to one
embracing political
action.William Lloyd
Garrison pushed
moral suasion.were at work. Douglass’s own experiences,
including the purchase of his freedom by
British abolitionists and the founding of his
newspaper, “The North Star,” gave him new
perspectives, as did the shifting political
landscape and the appearance of the Liberty
and Free Soil parties. As Douglass himself put
it, he came to recognize by 1855 that the
anti-political tenets of Garrisonianism of-
fered abolition “no intelligible principle of
action.” As he revised his views of politics and
the Constitution, he forged his own path. He
was his own prime mover.
Hirshman ends her book with the descrip-
tion of a new alliance: Douglass and Lincoln:
the “fragile hope of a Black and white
movement toward equality, resting on these
two extraordinary men.” But as she recogniz-
es, it “would have to wait.” She reminds us of
how racial equality eludes us still.Drew Gilpin Faust is the Arthur Kingsley Porter
University professor and President Emerita at
Harvard University. She is the author of “This
Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil
War.”