How NAACP's Walter White Risked His Life to Investigate Lynchings

For Walter White, growing up Black and being able to “pass” as white empowered him to take on two identities that aided his work with the NAACP exposing racial injustice in the United States.

White was born blonde-haired and blue-eyed in 1893 in Atlanta, Georgia, to a family descended from enslaved Black people and white plantation owners. He grew up in an era in which the “one-drop” rule was enforced—a law that categorized anyone with one drop of Black blood in the family line as a Black person regardless of having a far greater percentage of European ancestry. Despite his European lineage, the future civil rights activist grew up as an African American man. His mother and father, both born enslaved, became middle class, earning degrees and working as a teacher and postal worker, respectively.

White came to understand that, despite his pale skin, he was “a Negro, a human being with an invisible pigmentation which marked me a person to be hunted, hanged, abused, discriminated against, kept in poverty and ignorance in order that those whose skin was white would have readily at hand a proof of their superiority,” as he wrote in his 1948 autobiography, A Man Called White.

WHITE'S FAMILY FACES ATTACK DURING ATLANTA RACE MASSACRE

His identity as a Black man was never more clear than on September 22, 1906, the first day of the Atlanta Race Massacre. The carnage unfolded when a white mob, increasingly fearful that upwardly mobile Black residents were threatening the social order of Jim Crow, killed dozens of African Americans over unsubstantiated allegations of assaults on white women by Black men.

White, in his memoir, recalled when his father heard that a white mob was headed to the home where “that [n—] mail carrier lives” to burn it down. As his mother and sisters hid in the rear of the home, 13-year-old White held a shotgun in the front parlor with his father, ready to target any intruders. The mob retreated before attacking White’s house, but after the riot, White swore he would always stand up to racial oppression.

Jelani Cobb, New Yorker staff writer and Columbia Journalism School professor, says White’s identity was shaped by a long tradition of “voluntary Negroes,” a term coined by Black history scholar David Levering Lewis. “White was shaped by his background in Atlanta, his Black neighborhood and Black church,” says Cobb. “His family also made the political choice that they would never hide or shirk their identity or treat it as shameful.”

WHITE INVESTIGATES LYNCHINGS

After graduating from Atlanta University, White lobbied to save a Black public high school and established a local NAACP chapter, when his work caught the attention of NAACP founder W.E.B. Du Bois and Executive Secretary James Weldon Johnson. He was soon offered a position as assistant secretary at the NAACP’s headquarters in New York.

The United States was in the middle of a lynching scourge when White arrived in New York in 1918. The NAACP had tallied 3,224 lynchings between 1889-1918, mostly targeting African Americans. White hardly had two weeks to settle at his new job before he left for Tennessee to investigate a lynching. From there, White, as he writes, “started a phase of work for the association which neither it nor I had contemplated when I was employed."

Investigating riots was a dangerous mission. To go undetected, White often pretended to be a white salesman or a white journalist, depending on the circumstance. For one of his first operations, investigating the hangings of 10 men, as well as the brutal lynching of a pregnant Black woman, White casually engaged a local merchant whom he suspected had participated in the murder. 

“As his manner became more and more friendly I ventured to mention guardedly the recent lynchings. Instantly he became cautious—until I hinted that I had great admiration for the manly spirit the men of the town had exhibited,“ White recalled in a 1929 article for American Mercury. Once the merchant felt he was in safe company, he freely shared his racist beliefs and enjoyment of the woman’s lynching, White added.

During the Red Summer of 1919, White posed as a white journalist from Chicago while investigating a race massacre in Arkansas when he received a warning from a fellow Black man who knew his true identity. Word had gotten out, he was told, and a white mob was after him. White caught the next train out of town. The NAACP office staff, who had heard White had been lynched, sighed with relief when they saw him return.

A COMPLICATED LEGACY

Walter White, former executive secretary of the NAACP, offers his views on an anti-lynching bill before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, circa 1940. Bettmann / Getty Images

In 1931, White took over as NAACP executive secretary, urging President Franklin D. Roosevelt and later President Harry Truman to make statements against lynching and segregation. Most notably, White unleashed an ambitious agenda during his tenure that focused on turning the tide for Black Americans through Congress and courtrooms. 

He hired a young Thurgood Marshall to defend wrongfully accused Black people against charges of inciting race riots, empowering Marshall to start the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, filing lawsuits to desegregate government offices, the military and public schools, eventually leading to the groundbreaking case Brown v. Board of Education.

In 1955, White died at age 61 from a heart attack, leaving behind a complicated legacy. He may have achieved advances in racial justice, but his ability to straddle both racial lines at his convenience remained controversial among some African Americans. 

“Soon after White died, a new generation of African American leaders emerged, and for these leaders his pale complexion was an inconvenience,” wrote A.J. Baime in White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret. But the impact of White’s civil rights work was reflected in the many tributes he received upon his death.

As New York's African American newspaper The Amsterdam News wrote, “White’s cocky aggressiveness stayed with him as long as he lived—as did his boyhood vanity. But it was these very qualities that helped to make him the best lobbyist our race has ever produced, and one of the very best of any race."

Adrian Brune is a London-based American journalist who has written about everything from marathoning in the Middle East to searching for Shakespeare’s true likeness in paint. A native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, she has long followed Walter White and the history of U.S. race massacres.

Captive Running

After five years as a political prisoner in an Iranian jail, Anoosheh Ashoori had almost given up hope.
Then he found running.
He completed this year's London Marathon to raise awareness of the struggles of ordinary Iranians at a time of massive political upheval. 

WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY ADRIAN BRUNE

As he runs loops around London’s Greenwich Park, Anoosheh Ashoori’s mind is often in two places: the metropolitan surroundings on a clear autumn day, and the stark walls of Evin Prison just outside of Tehran, Iran.

It's just over five years since Ashoori, 68, first found himself inside the notorious interrogation and detention center for political dissidents — and almost exactly five years since Ashoori tried to take his own life out of despair and fear for his family. But somehow in the midst of his ordeal with the regime, the encouragement of his fellow inmates and two books saved his life and set him on his current path: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami and Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor. 

“I would be in the prison doing my running and dreaming of being out in the park or with my family,” says Ashoori, a slight, bald man with a neatly trimmed mustache, wearing  a Hostages International t-shirt and sporting a neoprene knee brace for an achy tendon. “Now I am out here and imagining my friends next to me. 

“It’s a bit… what is that movie? It’s a bit like ‘American Werewolf in London’ when you are two people at once, or trying to see the comedy through the horror.” 

Sentenced to 10 years for spying in 2017, Ashoori, a British-Iranian entrepreneur who moved to the UK 20 years ago, was released with Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe in March 2022 after the UK paid a £400 million debt to the Iranian government. He completed the last of his training runs for the London Marathon on October 2nd with his son, Aryan, who was signed up but who could not run the marathon due to a Covid-19 diagnosis. Together they are raising money for Hostage International and Amnesty International, the two NGOs most involved with his family’s effort to free Ashoori. 

“I think a marathon is very similar to the process our family went through…” Aryan Ashoori has written on his TCS London Marathon donation page. “The step-by-step nature of the run and the need to focus on the present moment is similar to the day-to-day coping mechanism that we developed throughout our quest. The only difference is that we can train and prepare for it this time.”

The family’s quest for its patriarch’s freedom began, in earnest, nearly two weeks after Ashoori’s disappearance in August 2017. Ashoori, an engineer who was honored in the 1990s by the Iranian government and then-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani for his invention of seismic-resistant concrete, had returned to Tehran to visit his aging mother. “After about 10 days there, I went to the market to have the zip of my suitcase fixed. When I reached the bottom of the hill where she lives, a car cut me off,” Ashoori says, as he sips his coffee. 

In his recollection, four men jumped out – agents of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) – and handed him a piece of paper before he was told to put on a blindfold and place his head in the lap of one to disorient him. “It was a warrant for my arrest. They had accused me of spying for the Israeli government,” Ashoori says. After two weeks of interrogation, followed by solitary confinement in a 4ft by 6ft cell with lights on 24/7 and the din of screams and moans, the MOIS confiscated Ashoori’s computer devices and turned him over to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IGRC) which held him for another two weeks. 

“One of the intelligence officers said he was as close to me as my own jugular vein,” Ashoori says. “I replied, ‘good, then you know you won’t find anything on me.’” But Ashoori was more worried about his wife and two children back in England. “If [the intelligence service] could kill Shapour Bakhtiar, [the former Iranian prime minister killed in Paris], they could get to anyone,” he says. Agents assured Ashoori they could, after showing him multiple photographs of his wife and daughter, Elika. 

The once heavy-set man decided he had one option to get himself and his family out of this situation. He would commit suicide. First Ashoori carved a shiv out of a plastic spoon. When guards saw the blood and took away his blankets for warmth, he opted for a hunger strike and went 17 days without food, taking as little water as possible to avoid a stroke. 

“Because of knowing who my dad is – very selfless, always optimistic – I never thought he would do something that would destroy us,” says Elika Ashoori. “To know that a regime could bring someone so positive to such a level caused me to reach my lowest moment. The level of rage within me was so much.”

Two things changed in this time. One: Ashoori was handed Murakami’s and Frankl’s books from fellow prisoners; and two: his family decided to go public with his detention. “I was moved to a new cell with three men and – Middle Eastern culture favors the guest – they kept saying, ‘if you do not eat, we will not eat.’ In that way they coaxed me back to health,” Ashoori says. Eventually, he started joining the other men in the yard for daily exercises, running for two minutes solid, then ten minutes, then 30 and so on… until he reached two hours and 20 minutes. “We had cakes and tea to celebrate.” 

Meanwhile, Ashoori’s family took a cue from Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of Zaghari-Ratcliffe, and started to undertake “empty chair” protests opposite Downing Street. “Because my dad was so apolitical, we didn’t say anything. We didn’t want to poke the regime,” says Elika Ashoori. “I was against that from the beginning and my one regret is that we didn’t go bigger sooner. I told my mother we cannot afford to be nice about this; we have to be loud; we have to be ruthless. We didn’t turn into activists overnight, but in hindsight, if we hadn’t been vocal he wouldn’t have got out.”

Ashoori’s UK lawyers also lobbied the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office – and former Foreign Secretary, now Prime Minister, Liz Truss – for diplomatic protection. By that time, the Iranians had openly linked the release of both Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Ashoori to the money owed to Iran by the UK for reneging on a mid-1970s weapons deal that went unfulfilled after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

On the day Ashoori was released, he was still advocating for more names to be added to the flight manifest, among the dozen or so PhDs, artists, and writers who used to gather in Ashoori's corner to read, carve wood, exercise and talk. But at Mehrabad Airport, having exhausted his appeals, he boarded a nearly empty Omani Air Force plane with Zaghari-Ratcliffe at one end and him on the other. They finally spoke about their oredal when they landed at RAF Brize Norton. 

For three to four months, Ashoori says he was simply so “overjoyed at being released” that he took in whatever he missed — full English Breakfasts and his favorite beer — and rebuilt his body. When the London Marathon gave him and his son special dispensation to run, he began training in earnest: a routine that the retiree has said has helped ground him and stave away the inevitable anxiety that often comes from torture. While not aiming for a particular personal best, Ashoori nonetheless notched a 2:19 half marathon over the summer. 

While his daughter says Ashoori is not the same man as when he left that August day, she added that since he has been back, “he is so driven himself,  we are learning from him — getting inspired from him. 

“One of the hardest things in the past three years was to humanize my dad because of his background, his color, his former country. To see all the other people get behind him now is truly amazing — it’s inspiring.” 

On Sunday, October 2, Anoosheh Ashoori finished the marathon in 5:28:28 wearing his prison uniform, which he had smuggled out of Iran for the occasion, along with 3,000 pages of notes for a memoir. All in all, he raised £20,000 for his charities.

The battle to preserve Uzbekistan’s greatest art collection is moving online

"Gathering Cotton" (1931) by Alexander Volkov, the founder of Uzbek Avant Garde. The artwork is one of hundreds on display at the Nukus Museum

25 October 2021

Text: Adrian Brune

Claims of mismanagement have dogged the Nukus Museum for decades, as officials and art lovers fight between preserving Igor Savitsky's avant-garde art collection in the desert, or bringing its masterpieces to a wider audience. Now, a new project is putting tens of Savitsy's greatest works online — but the battle for the museum's future is far from over.

In early 1950s, Russian-born Ukrainian Igor Vitalievich Savitsky was on an archeological dig close to the Aral Sea. There, he started to stumble across old artworks that had been squirreled away: “paintings rolled up under the beds of old widows, buried in the family trash, in the dark corners of artists’ studios, and sometimes, even patching a hold in the roof,” Savitsky wrote to his family. Many were treasures dating back to Russia’s 1930s avant-garde, when artists had rebelled against state-enforced socialist realism in the arts. But, by creating work that did not conform to government ideals, doomed many of their works to destruction. Savitsky soon “ended up with a collection that no one in the Soviet Union would dare exhibit.”

Savitsky ultimately stashed the work inside his own home — a ramshackle two-story house in the heart of Nukus, in northwest Uzbekistan — and opened it to art buffs from across the world until perestroika, the political movement to reform the Soviet party, took hold in the early 1980s. Today, those same paintings form the basis of the Karakalpak State Art Museum, a grand state museum that houses the 90,000 items from Savitsky’s collection.

Currently, it’s the physical museum — also known as the Nukus Museum — that draws thousands of visitors to this remote corner of Uzbekistan every year. But now the Friends of the Nukus Museum (FoNM) have started the arduous task restoring, digitising, and categorising Savitsky’s acquisitions, of which 900 are on display on a new website. The project, as well as a planned contemporary art biennial and a tour of paintings to the United States, has been designed to “attract contemporary artists from around the world” and add Nukus to a “universal cultural heritage”, according to Tigran Mkrtychev, the former head of Moscow’s Roerich Museum of Oriental Art, who was named the Savitsky’s new director in 2019. “The Nukus Museum has a big problem with [the] restoration of [its] works,” he says. “We want to attract experts from around the world so that they can help create a restoration school.”

More importantly for many, this digital access also effectively engineers an end to the prospect of relocating the Savitsky treasure trove to the Uzbek capital of Tashkent — a prospect which has long loomed over the institution. “The Russian museums can’t live with the idea that such a wonderful collection was taken out of Russia and to this provincial place in Uzbekistan — God knows where,” says Savitisky’s former confidante and the Nukus Museum’s first director, Marinika Babanazarova, in a 2011 documentary on the Savitsky, The Desert of Forbidden Art.

But discussions on relocation were never simply a sign of injured pride. The newest museum structure, built in 2003, still does not have enough room to put all of its works on display, and remains in almost consistent disrepair. When I visited the Karakalpak State Art Museum, the paintings spoke to me of the yearning of Uzbek and Soviet artists to learn from the Western world, emulating the likes of George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton and Max Ernst, while putting their own spin on photographic realism, surrealism, and dadaism. Yet the artworks were hung in random pairings, among disjointed galleries and with scarcely an alarm system in sight, let alone a security guard.

The Nukus Museum has endured a significant amount of dissonance in recent years. The museum’s third new director in four years, Gulbahar Izentaeva, was ousted in summer 2019 in favour of Mkrtychev, who also worked as a fellow for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is now the fifth overseer of the Savitsky collection in just four years.

Prior to this rapid turnover, it was Babanazarova who headed “the Louvre of the Steppe” for more than 30 years. Then, in 2015, the Uzbekistani government accused her of involvement in the theft of five original paintings, worth around $225,000, and their replacement with fakes. She strenuously denies the claims. “The authorities were looking for reasons to get rid of me for years. They wanted their own people in the museum, not people loyal to Igor Savitsky and his mission,” Babanazarova said in an open letter to the Uzbek Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF). She claimed the story amounted to a smear campaign. “They were angry with me because I wouldn’t do what they wanted. There is no real evidence against me.”

Babanazarova had previously refused efforts to sell or distribute pieces in the Savitsky collection, especially after an article by The New York Times in 2011 had brought the museum under new media focus. “We had collectors coming from the West with their bags full of money, saying, ‘Why don’t you sell one or two paintings?’ [But] these artists found shelter in Nukus; selling them was not even thinkable to us,” she says in The Desert of Forbidden Art.

After Babanazarova departed, the museum loaned out 250 pieces to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow as part of a test run. Russian president Vladimir Putin visited, along with Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev.

A pastoral scene by Uzbekstani artist Nikolay Karakhan. Currently on display at the Nukus Museum

Now that trend seems set to continue. Mkrtychev announced that a US delegation is set to visit the Nukus Museum later in 2021, with the possibility of a Savitsky loan to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “We wanted to send a good portion of the Savitsky Collection on tour to “show all [its] magnificence… in Europe and the United States.

“If God gives the strength, all will be well and the Nukus Museum will move from the top 10 unknown museums that you must visit to the top 10 in the world that everyone knows,” he said in a statement.

It will still be a struggle to put the Nukus Museum on the global art map. At present, a visit to the museum is about a two-hour flight or a 17-hour overnight train ride from Tashkent. But Savitsky devotees believe that such a journey is a small price to pay, and that the museum’s remote location is a homage to the spirit of its founder.

“For now, the near future of the Savitsky remains dependent on two balancing factors: its good karma with the Karakalpak regional authorities, and Uzbekistan President Mirziyoyev’s “open visa” programme”

After all, during the heyday of Soviet censorship, Savitsky would routinely disguise thousands of priceless paintings as simple luggage before loading them on trains and trucks for “archeological expeditions” to Nukus, according to the documentary. Even after Stalin and his successors Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Alexei Kosygin softened, Savitsky regularly put himself on the line for his collection. When a Soviet delegation declared that one of Savitsky’s favourite pieces — “Fascism is Advancing” by Uzbek artist Vladimir Lysenko — was anti-Soviet and therefore “degenerate”, he hid it for mere hours before putting it on the wall again. “It was too great a work of art to hide,” he wrote at the time.

Savitsky, who had come from a wealthy family of lawyers, saw “works by artists who stayed true to their vision at a terrible cost,” says his friend, Alla Efunni. “He had one suit on the hanger for visits to his bosses; the rest was not important to him: where to live, what to eat, his health, women, money. He did not care at all, except to pay the people he was buying the art from.” Savitsky continued to collect money from the state for “archeological expeditions” and gave it to the hungry widows of artists such as Sergei Bogdanov, a Moscow-educated painter whose self-portraits in “oriental robes” dazzled Savitsky; Alexander Volkov, whose paintings of cotton picker showed despair as the crop ruined central Uzbekistan; and Lyudmila Bakulina, who depicted industrial landscapes.

Ultimately, the “expeditions” that paid — and covered up — for Savitsky’s collecting were responsible for his demise. To clean pieces to bring back to Moscow, Savitsky used formaldehyde, which eventually destroyed his lungs. Forced to take up residence inside a Moscow hospital, doctors nonetheless gave Savitsky permission to make day trips for art’s sake. In the last weeks of his life, Savitsky collected two more containers of paintings and graphics, bringing his total to 44,000. He died in Moscow in 1984 at the age of 69, leaving historians to reconstruct the narrative of the Nukus Museum from diaries and letters in the state archives and through declassified KGB files.

"City" (1919) by Nikolay Grigoriev. Currently on display at the Nukus Museum

Activists hope that the creation of a digital open archive will provide a middle ground between two extremes: protecting Savitsky’s legacy and the museum’s unique location, while bringing the collection itself to a wider audience who will care for it. “When M.M. Babanazarova was fired, and a prosecutor checked on the alleged substitutions and theft of works… in the museum, the world media repeatedly expressed their fears for the future of the collection,” wrote the curators Boris Chukhovich and Svetlana Gorshenina. “It was concern for the preservation of the integrity of the museum collection that led to the establishment of the Alerte Héritage Observatory website which hosts the digital archive and the initiation of the Museum’s open public catalog project.

For now, the immediate future of the Savitsky remains dependent on two balancing factors: its good karma with the Karakalpak regional authorities, which allows it to show work critical of the Soviet and Islamist eras; and Uzbek President Mirziyoyev’s “open visa” programme to promote Silk Road tourism, an initiative to bring foreign tourists to the area. By keeping the Savitisky Collection near the Silk Road city of Khiva and the Aral Sea, the Karakalpak government makes the Nukus Museum a destination in which visitors don’t just “exit through the gift shop”, but get a real sense of Uzbekistan away from its major metropolises, Babanazarova says.

Most of all, those who love the museum hope to keep alive its founder’s singular goal, best articulated by Savitsky himself: “I like to think of our museum as a keeper of the artists’ souls; their works the physical expression of a collective vision that could not be destroyed.”

The Nukus Museum has invited its constituents, both professionals and amateurs, to use — and contribute to — the public open catalog Alerte Héritage, by far the most complete collection of reproductions of the works of the Nukus Museum ever published.

Racing the Clock to Help Women Runners in Afghanistan

Stephanie Case, the founder of NGO Free to Run, is working to get staffers and Afghan runners to safety.

Stephanie Case is used to making appeals. As the Canadian born-and-bred UN lawyer and founder of the Afghanistan running non-governmental organization (NGO) Free to Run, it’s part of the job.

But on August 15, Case posted an ask she might have never predicted, even as the United States and NATO forces made good on their promise to withdraw all forces from the embattled country as the Taliban entered Kabul: “Please help, the window of opportunity for us to get our (female-led) team to a safe location is closing fast.”

"For the last ten days, my kitchen table has turned into an operations centre, acting as a focal point for comms with Afghans on the ground and special forces from multiple countries throughout the day and night—responsibility for such efforts should never devolve down to this level,” Case told Runner’s World. “Those who have been evacuated— team members who are at risk, including female leaders and women’s rights activists, paralympic coaches, athletes with disabilities and others—still have a tough rough ahead as they navigate their way to their new homes, a process that could take many months. Free to Run is doing everything it can to ensure that our Afghan families have the resources they need, whether they be in Afghanistan, Qatar, Ukraine, Italy, France, or elsewhere.”

Case is not alone in her invocation. As reports spread that the fundamentalist group had, indeed, not been living up to its public promises for a peaceful transition and the protection of women’s gains—and as women in sporting groups such as cycling, climbing, skiing, football, and running started burning their own equipment to avoid harm’s way— many female NGO founders jumped into action. They are now working around the clock to not only evacuate their female staffs, but also regroup and resupply their charges when those women reach safe footing elsewhere.

“[In July], I flew back to Kabul to meet with our staff and participants. I wanted to let them know first and foremost that Free to Run will always stand by them, and to hear from them what they needed from us … in the face of such uncertainty,” Case wrote in a blog post. “The strength of our program has rested in our ability to adapt and respond. We have always been led by the needs of our participants and this will not change.”

For Case, an ultrarunner who founded Free to Run in 2014 as a way to use running to foster women’s well-being in regions of conflict, the first priority was to mobilize all potential resettlement sponsors, establish a JustGiving page to receive donations, and start pushing through the paperwork for exit papers and visas.

“We acted early, taking precautionary security measures concerning our offices, equipment and documentation,” Case wrote, whose background with the UN in both Gaza, South Sudan, and most recently, Kabul, gave her a context from which she could sense impending calamity. “A Taliban spokesperson has indicated that the group will respect the rights of women, and NGOs will be able to operate, but we will need … to shift, to adapt, and to change.”

Free to Run had been recently preparing for the Marathon of Afghanistan in October. The Marathon of Afghanistan is an annual race that took place from 2015 to 2019 near Bamyan—an area in the center of the country about 115 miles from Kabul known for its dramatic cliffs, bright blue lakes, caves and citadels, and the huge statues of the Buddha, before the Taliban destroyed them in 2001. The marathon, run by a travel agency called Untamed Borders, had steadily grown and added shorter racers to increase the popularity. At least 40 percent of the field were women, coming from more than a dozen Afghan provinces, in addition to a wide range of international countries.

The Marathon of Afghanistan, which varied its course and location from year to year—and kept identifying information privileged—also inspired a documentary, The Secret Marathon, which debuted in Canada in March 2019. It tracks the story of Zainab, the first Afghan woman to run a marathon in Afghanistan, and legendary marathon runner, Martin Parnell, who vowed to support her right after reading her story.

Case won’t say much more about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan to protect the people involved with Free to Run. But the ultrarunner who is widely noted in the running community for her grit and tenacity ended her blog on this note: “There will be a way and we will find it with a bit of patience, creativity, and sensitivity.” She mentioned the phrase “we will not give up” three times.

How You Can Help Afghan Refugees

1. Donate

Case has set up JustGiving page to help evacuate and resettle the Afghan runners, and to ensure Free to Run’s ability to continue their ground-breaking programs. Currently, Case has raised $50,000 out of $100,000 requested. Free to Run also has the ability to set up a one-time or recurring donation through the Free to Run website or directly through Paypal.

2. Be a Free to Run Ambassador

Just this past summer, Free to Run launched an ambassador program, in which supporters received placement in the New York City Marathon and other marathons for raising $1,000 a year and wearing the NGO’s logo in races.

Also, if the country in which you live is not accepting Afghan refugees, call your local officials, parliamentary representatives, and others to tell them you support resettlement.

3. Volunteer your time and skill sets

Refugees need lots of services in their new countries: airport pick-ups, apartment set-ups, meal deliveries, and especially, trauma counselors, and immigration and human rights lawyers. This website founded by the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services directs people to needs and locales.

4. Amplify Afghan voices

Find appropriate—and non-identifying—stories about Afghans, their accomplishments, and their hopes, fears, and dreams across social media, but ensure that names are not used and faces are obscured. The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, in partnership with Vital Voices, has set up a special fund to provide emergency evacuations, housing, resettlement, visa applications, and other emerging priorities through a 20-year-strong network of women activists.

Employee of the Month

REVIEW ARTS & CULTURE

 March 16, 2016

Catie Lazarus’s new talk show asks all the right “wrong” questions about work

By A.M. Brune

Smantha Power had already withstood a tough day: over at the United Nations, she presented a draft Security Council resolution against North Korea that had created the toughest US sanctions regime in more than two decades. Back at the US Mission across the street, she signed off on an internationally brokered, yet very shaky, cease-fire agreement for Syria amid widespread doubts that it would bring peace to the fractured nation.

And at her Waldorf Tower penthouse on Park Avenue, her son Declan, six, had been complaining about her work schedule again: “Why is it always, Putin, Putin, Putin,” she recalled for a packed house at Joe’s Pub. But Catie Lazarus, host of the Employee of the Month show, on which Power appeared last month, saved her toughest question for the end of the interview.

“You once called Hillary Clinton a monster. I want to know, is she really a monster?” Lazarus asked Power. Power paused for thought and took her microphone: “We national security folk, we’re supposed to stay out of the thicket of politics,” she said diplomatically.

Lazarus served up a one-liner: “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m struggling over whether to vote for the monster I know and the monster I don’t.”

The line was archetypical Lazarus: adorably innocent with a hidden edge — or agenda. By playing on a curiosity and awe with all things social, cultural, and political, while simultaneously lampooning them, Lazarus has taken her Employee of the Month show (EOTM) – described by Lazarus as a show about work and the “special snowflakes who love what they do” – from relative obscurity to a sell-out show every month at Joe’s Pub. Among her big “gets”: Jon Stewart just after announcing his departure from The Daily Show; former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson revealing her tattoos; Lin Manuel Miranda performing the hip-hop Hamilton mix tapes; and most recently Samantha Power breakdancing.

“I created the type of talk show I want to watch,” Lazarus said after the show. “At least in the US, interviews on talk shows often feel like commercials for celebrities to shill their latest product. People, like Jon Stewart and Ambassador Power, who are highly selective about what types of interviews they do are deluged with their work and may find the pat questions from typical press junkets and glitzy talk shows mind numbingly painful…I ask questions my guests typically don’t get asked, offer a platform to speak candidly and have a bit of fun.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Powers, gets on her groove at an ‘Employee of the Month” show, previously at Joe’s Pub.

While the US Department of State portrayed Power’s appearance as just a regular stop – “Ambassador Power has worked with The Public Theater in the past on events surrounding performances of Eclipsed and Hamilton…of course she was inclined to do EOTM,” a spokesperson said – Lazarus had her eye on the controversial author and statesman for a number of years.

“I rarely invite politicians as they rarely engage in genuine conversations publicly,” said Lazarus, who interned at Voice of America while genocide unfolded in Kosovo and Burundi. “Ambassador Power made a name for herself critiquing the US government, but then chose to work within it. She’s also become a shrewd politician, willing to negotiate with Putin, even when her kids are fed up…a quintessential Employee of the Month Award winner.”

Although in hindsight, comedy may have seemed like a natural path for Lazarus – a descendant of the Midwestern Lazarus department store chain that folded into Macy’s – after finishing Wesleyan University in 1999, she enrolled in a doctoral program for Psychology. Following an impromptu improv lesson from Tina Fey at an Empower Program conference in DC, Lazarus dropped out of her degree and started doing comedy open mic nights at Stand Up New York. Duly emboldened, she went on to win standup contests across the city and perform storytelling at The Moth, The Rejection Show and Upright Citizen Brigade’s Asssscat, which features improv between UCB regulars and actors from well-known television shows and movies.

The off-the-cuff Asssscat most influenced Lazarus’s irreverent show. With more than 250 interviews since she began EOTM as a podcast in 2011, a turning point nevertheless took place in April 2015 when Stewart came on to talk about directing Rosewater, leaving Comedy Central and being fired from Woolworth’s by his brother.

“It’s so fun when people do stuff you might not know they can do. Martha Plimpton read this hilariously bad poetry she’d written for these pharmaceutical advertisements. Gloria Steinem tap-danced and is truly an excellent dancer. Bobby Cannavale sang his favorite karaoke song,” Lazarus said. The comedian books famous people almost solely by word of mouth, gaining references often from previous appearances.

In addition to the interviews, EOTM has a MC, Jelly Donut, a beatboxer named Shockwave and a house band led by Eric Biondo, all of whom play foil to Lazarus’s gags. She always opens with a monologue, usually a schtick on “cutting-edge employment news” – using PowerPoint. This time, before Power came on stage, she quipped about the new American Girl doll “Melody,” a black doll who is a “singer and a civil rights activist before the age of five.” Between bits, the band argued over who owned the intern.

Lazarus took Power back to her days as a journalist, producing a copy of her infamous book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (after announcing that it had gone out of print) and traced Power’s trajectory to UN Ambassador. “There are times when I wish I could have been heard more, but as anyone who’s had a boss knows, it’s hard to do what you want sometimes,” Power said.

“At the end of the day, however, I know President Obama wants me in the room duking it out and having a voice.”

After Lazarus’s asked Power to show off her talent, Power broke it down to “Rapper’s Delight,” which received a standing ovation and “prizes,” including a “Shakespearean Insult” mug and a Park Slope Food Coop bag. Lazarus’ third and fourth Employees of the Month, Tunisian singer Emel Mathlouthi and mockumentarian Michael McKean, “may not have known of one another’s work, or might seem different only on the surface, but are interconnected or are one another’s spirit animal,” she said. Indeed, Samantha Power had been an extra in a made-for-TV movie, A Father’s Homecoming, that McKean did in the 1980s. “It’s not one you’ll find on Netflix,” he joked after he and Lazarus watched her favorite scene from This is Spinal Tap.

“I live for genuine conversations,” said Lazarus, who handed out personalized “Employee of the Month plaques at the end of the show. “Every job comes with crap, but it’s fascinating to hear the particular perks, pleasures, perils and perversities of people’s particular paths.”

Inside COVID Bubble, New York Empire Win First Ever WTT Title

It was the forehand smash heard round the tennis world. And it was so unbelievable, it required a Hawk-Eye glance.

At 20 games to 20 and six-points-all in the World Team Tennis championship match, winning came down to one point in the final set: women’s doubles. Veteran doubles player Bethanie Mattek-Sands took her place at the net, while her partner, Sloane Stephens, of the Chicago Smash lofted the ball skyward. The New York Empire’s Coco Vandeweghe set her feet, took her racquet back and — against partner Nicole Melichar’s better judgment — ripped a down-the-line forehand that nicked the back of the baseline.

Cheers went up around Center Court, Creekside at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia. Then silence. The Smash had decided to challenge. 

“I could hardly put in thoughts or words what was going on — it was Star Wars out there,” said Empire Coach, Luke Jensen. “Genie Bouchard was hitting a ball to save her face, Kamau substituted Sloane, Nicole was flying around the net, and then Sloane  hits a bomb to save match point. I called a time out and Coco was like ‘I’m taking next serve’. 

New York Empire player Coco Vandeweghe after she hit the World Team Tennis championship shot (above) and being embraced by teammates Nicole Melichar and Jack Sock (below).

“Bethanie is then at the net with her ankles and instincts and Coco unleashes the beast right past her. Just the way the world is, I could go on and on how it could have gone sideways, but it didn’t,” Jensen added. Hawk-Eye confirmed the “in” call. The New York Empire had won its first King Trophy and the $500,000 purse. 

In five years, the New York franchise, put together in 2016 as an expansion team, has come from the very bottom of the league to the top through three coaching changes, three venue moves and several roster switch-ups, including absent marquee stars. But after an exhaustive three weeks and 66 matches in a tennis “bubble” at the Greenbrier, the Empire’s match marked many “firsts”: the first time in WTT’s 45-year history that a championship match came down to one point; the first season in which all the matches were held in one location because of Covid-19; and the first professional tennis played with spectators in the U.S. since early March.

The “formula worked in this little laboratory of what’s possible,” said Jensen, who finished his second year at the helm of the Empire with a second berth in the WTT finals. Both Jensen and the team attributed a large measure of the Empire’s success to the addition of returning professional player Kim Clijsters, who also acted as the team’s assistant coach, manager, ball shagger, towel giver and ultimate court supporter, according to Jensen. 

Kim Clijsters after winning a point for the New York Empire during a World Team Tennis match in July.

Clijsters, although sidelined for some matches, chalked up big singles victories — following an eight-year hiatus from professional tennis  — against WTA No. 60 Bernarda Pera of the Washington Kastles, WTA No. 4 Sofia Kenin, the 2020 Australian Open champion, of the Philadelphia Freedoms, WTA No. 52 Danielle Collins, of the Orlando Storm, and WTA No. 37 Stephens, the 2017 US Open champion. Pairing up with Empire veteran Neal Skupski for mixed doubles, Clijsters helped secure clutch victories over Taylor Townsend and Fabrice Martin of the Freedoms, Jessica Pegula and Ken Skupski of the Storm, and Rajeev Ram and Mattek-Sands of the Smash.

“It’s tough sometimes to keep the momentum going, especially after I thought I was finished with  mixed doubles,” said Clijsters after she came off the bench to beat Monica Puig and lock in the Empire’s 25-17 win over the Las Vegas Rollers mid-season. “Obviously, I am 37-years-old, so I know what I have to do to get in the mindset, but physically it’s not always easy. 

But to get the Empire to that playoff spot, Jensen had to tinker with the team camaraderie.

Vandeweghe and Melichar had originally signed with the San Diego Aviators in March, but in an 11th-hour deal on the Sunday night before the season’s last week, Jensen traded Empire players Kveta Peschke and Sabine Lisicki for the doubles pair. “It’s not in the tennis culture to trade or substitute, so you don’t want them happy about it, you want them to say, ‘I can win, coach.’ But for the franchise you’ve got to at least get in the playoffs,” Jensen said.

Teammates Bethany Mattek-Sands and Sloane Stephens firing up during the tiebreak against the New York Empire.

The acquisition quickly paid off. In her first match for the Empire, Vandeweghe racked up 13 crucial games in three of five sets over the Orange County Breakers. In her second, she rallied from four games down and bested Freedoms’ Sofia Kennan in women’s singles. “My Uncle Kiki (former New York Knicks player) sent out a mass email down in his bubble in Orlando saying, ‘Coco’s playing for New York now!’” Vandeweghe said after the match. 

Once the Empire sealed the fourth spot in the playoffs, Jack Sock became the star of the day as he and Vandeweghe took the Empire to an early lead by winning mixed doubles, 5-1, and with Skupski, men’s doubles. With losses in both women’s singles and women’s doubles, Sock delivered once more, defeating ATP No. 24 Taylor Fritz, to take the Empire to the championship. 

“They played like they had nothing to lose and we played like we had everything to lose,” said Freedoms’ longtime coach Craig Kardon. 

The New York squad jumped out to a quick start in the final against the Smash. The mixed-doubles team of Jack Sock and Vandeweghe and the men’s doubles team of Sock and Skupski brought the Empire to 10-6 lead (5-2, 5-3). But Smash rookie Brandon Nakashima reeled off a 5-0 win against Sock to swing the match in favor of Chicago, 11-10. 

New York Empire Coach Luke Jensen waves around his lucky Billy Baru Wilson Jack Kramer Autograph racquet — the first racquet he ever used — and shouts his approval after the team’s win on Sunday.

“I think I would chalk that up as my worst set of the three weeks, and unfortunately it came on the most important day,” Sock said. With Clijsters still sidelined, Vandeweghe returned to the court to face Stephens in the fourth set of women’s singles. Stephens capped off a 5-3 victory to push the Smash lead to 16-13.

The King Trophy still remained near the reach of either team, as Mattek-Sands and Genie Bouchard faced Vandeweghe and Melichar, who had won a previous matchup 5-1 when they played as San Diego Aviators. It wouldn’t be as easy the second time.

Each team held serve to tie at 3-3, before the Empire broke Mattek-Sands’ serve to lurch ahead 4-3 and pull the team to 19-17. The Empire had the chance to win the set and force extended play, but Melichar double-faulted at 40-love. The Smash rallied to force a set tiebreak at 4-4 and had the momentum to capture an easy win and call it a day, as it fell on the Empire to not only win the set tiebreak, but also the next two games to tie the Smash’s overall score at 20-20 and finally compel a match first-to-seven-point super tiebreak.

The chase to seven points began with Chicago subbing in Stephens for Bouchard. New York went up 2-0 after Vandeweghe served. The Smash evened with Stephens’ serve. Mattek-Sands pushed Chicago ahead 5-3. Vandeweghe-Melichar knotted the score at 5-all, then 6-all, before Stephens served to Vandeweghe, whose knees hit the ground when she heard the word “in” from the baseline.

Billie Jean King, co-founder of World Team Tennis and the longtime owner of the Philadelphia Freedoms, waves to the crowd before presenting the King trophy to the New York Empire.

“They didn’t call an out… I was thrilled, but then the fact that (the Smash) were challenging (the call), we were like ‘oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no’ and then it was just pure joy. It was just incredible,” Melichar said

“I mean I’ve never been under that kind of pressure, ever,” Vandeweghe added. “It really accentuated what World TeamTennis is: the team vibe, team energy, people picking each other up when they’re down. I had so much fun out there.”

“A flip flop in the middle of the match… you couldn’t ask for any more than that,” said WTT CEO Carlos Silva, who dealt with weather, Covid testing, accommodation, press and managing players inside quarantine for a month. “And Coco’s winning forehand was like a walk-off home run, a buzzer-beater. My heart is still pounding.”

WTT owners have yet to take stock of the season, Silva said, but already plans are in the works for year-round events. “The results just continue to build on what we have been saying: the format was exciting, we had to grow the audience. The ESPN, CBS and Tennis Channel deals did that.” The final was watched by 500,000 people, according to CBS Sports, which broadcast it starting at noon.

Also, as the tournament season ground to a halt, the WTT had all of its marquee players for the entire season — a draw that also brought in viewers, Silva said. WTT owners are thinking big: expanding to 10 or 12 teams, and building such things as an Empire court on a Hudson River pier then looking to Europe to bring the sport global again after 2021.

“WTT has always found innovation, whether it’s the coaching, the cheering, the format,” said Jensen who affirmed his commitment to the Empire. “Is it the wave of the future? I think so. Tennis is a slow establishment, whereas Billie Jean and World Team Tennis is the movement.”

Recommit to streets for us all

Every May, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine holds its annual “Blessing of the Bicycles” in which New York cyclists have their wheels consecrated — this year, on Facebook.

In 2019, the blessing didn’t seem to work, as the number of deaths stacked up to an all-time high of 29. But in June, cyclists had reason to hope: a proposal for a five-borough, 425-mile network of protected bike lanes. Experts say the project would resolve the city’s current debacle by physically separating the lanes with elevated curbs.

I disagree. I have been cycling the city from 2001, when getting “doored” was a rite of passage, through Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Safe Streets. From behind my handlebars, I can see that nothing will work to keep cyclists safer — not protected lanes, not signals, not citations — until New Yorker commuters of every stripe change their “Me First” attitude, for which the city is infamous.

I understand “Me First.” I can fall prey to the stake-your-ground attitude one acquires when pushed aside in a city of millions. I am even guilty of running occasional red lights and cutting off slower cyclists. But consider this: I am riding 18-20 mph in traffic and looking out for the errant car-share or middle-of-the-street pedestrian to apply enough force for a split-second brake.

Space for bikes, too. (Luiz C. Ribeiro/New York Daily News)

Otherwise, I am hit, hurled onto the street with a heap of metal on top of me. While I ride, when I am not thinking of my burning legs; I am thinking about getting out of the way.

Last year, getting out of the way on my daily commute meant using greenways or dodging Ubers and taxis pulling into the bicycle lanes. Post-pandemic, I have switched tacks, avoiding the greenways altogether. The main reason: Citi Bike.

In March 2019, Citi Bike operated 14,500 bicycles from 900 stations in four boroughs. That meant, at any given time, a tourist unfamiliar with Citi Bike particulars, a phone-pedaler or newbie rider — almost all of them without helmets — crossed my path. Citi Bike is looking to triple its inventory and add at least 1,000 electric-powered bikes. This strikes fear in my heart.

The second reason I have chosen the car-lined streets: pedestrians. When I am in cycling kit, I avoid the sidewalk. When I am laced in running shoes, I strictly stay out of the bike lanes. When pedestrians and runners use bicycle lanes, especially during rush hours, they cause bottlenecks. Bottlenecks cause wrecks.

There is a remedy to this transportation/recreation free-for-all, but it will require, as the Dutch call it, “woonerven” (living streets). In the Netherlands, kids are introduced to cycling by their schools, most by age 10 or 11. Simultaneously, Citi Bikers and other bike renters should take a skills course and pass a test before they take the pedals. This removes Citi Bikes from the grip of tourists and learners.

Secondly, New York needs to keep building real, protected bicycle lanes — wide enough to allow for cyclists of all speeds to travel in harmony, not painted-on roadways that run alongside parallel parking spaces. And although 0.5% of Dutch cyclists wear helmets, every cyclist in New York should be required to wear a helmet until the streets are safer; helmets cut the risks of severe traumatic brain injury by half.

Finally, a deputy transportation commissioner in charge of alternative transport would mark a sea change. This administrator could enact “We First” bike lane regulation, monitor the addition of Citi Bikes and safeguard the regulation of other motorized objects in bike lanes. The office could even oversee a force of park police that would pull over (now sidelined) Revel scooters on greenways, deter un-helmeted bicyclists from texting and keep pedestrians from group-walking in bike lanes — some of the things I encounter daily.

Unless some of these things are enacted, in lieu of blessing bikes each year, bikers that show up at St. John the Divine might as well be painting theirs white — to place as memorials.

The Black Investigator Who Went Undercover as a White Man in the Jim Crow South

On a hot September day in 1919, Walter Francis White found himself running for his life.

In the two days since he had been in Elaine, Arkansas, White had seen the bodies of dozens of black men and women strewn across dirt roads. The ones who were lucky enough to still be alive remained hiding in the cotton fields.

White ducked down an alley, then picked up speed along the railroad tracks. Breathless and weary, he reached the station and climbed onto the platform just as the conductor announced the final call for the doors.

As recounted in White’s autobiography, A Man Called White, the conductor gave White an odd look before asking him why he was leaving before the fun began. “There’s a damned yellow nigger down here passing for white,” the conductor explained. “When they get through with him, he won’t pass for white no more!” he cackled.

What the conductor didn’t know was that the last-minute passenger he was talking to was in fact the very man he was talking about. White later wrote in his autobiography, “No matter what the distance, I shall never take as long a train ride as that one seemed to be.” When he finally set foot back in New York, his colleagues at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sighed with great relief.

Walter White is one of the most important yet overlooked civil rights leaders of the 20th century. He played a key role in the Harlem Renaissance and led the NAACP to its zenith as its executive secretary. But what makes White stand out is the unusual method he used to achieve racial justice. His biggest secret? He was a biracial man who passed for white in order to help the NAACP investigate some of the greatest racial atrocities in post-Reconstruction America, helping to establish the organization as a veracious force for African-American justice and liberty.

In 1919, White was on assignment in Arkansas investigating the Elaine Massacre: the state-sanctioned murder of dozens of black sharecroppers under the order of Arkansas Governor Charles Brough. At the time, the Arkansas farming industry was dominated by white landowners, and black sharecroppers — frustrated by low wages — had formed the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. That September, the union met in a local church to discuss an upcoming lawsuit against white landowners, but their meeting was interrupted by gunfire from white vigilantes. The sharecroppers returned fire in self-defense. A white security officer was killed, and the town’s deputy sheriff was wounded.  

The body of a black person slain during the Elaine Massacre in Arkansas in 1919. (Photo courtesy the Arkansas History Commission)

When the news reached the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock, Brough declared the event an insurrection. He called up 500 Arkansas National Guard soldiers from Camp Pike and instructed them to kill any black person who refused to surrender immediately. More than 200 African-Americans were murdered and an additional 200 were tortured and imprisoned. A century later, the Elaine Massacre remains the bloodiest occurrence of racial violence in Arkansas history and one of the deadliest in U.S. history as well.

Sharecroppers in Elaine, Arkansas, being rounded up by troops and taken to a detention area, after they formed a union that was seen as a threat to white farmers. (Photo courtesy the Arkansas History Commission)

White traveled to Arkansas to advocate for those imprisoned sharecroppers. He planned to meet with the local sheriff and report back to the NAACP. But it was not safe for a black man to freely roam around Arkansas. So White devised a plan. He obtained fake press credentials through personal contacts, and impersonated a Chicago Daily News reporter, hoping everyone would assume he was white.

But right before his meeting with the sheriff, his plan backfired.

As White recounted in his memoir, while he was walking down the street, he was overtaken by a black man who whispered, “Mister … I don’t know what you are down here for, but I just heard them talking about you — I mean the white folks — and they say they are going to get you.” With that warning, White started sprinting to the train station and never looked back.

Walter White was born in Atlanta in 1893. His maternal grandmother is believed to have been the illegitimate child of William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States and a slaveholder. White’s father, George, a postman, also had white ancestry. In the book Walter White: The Dilemma of Black Identity in America, author Thomas Dyja notes that while Walter grew up going to white schools, he always knew that he was different than his peers — and so did they. His white classmates threw rocks at him, while black peers often mocked him for his light complexion. But on September 22, 1906, White would understand that despite the lightness of his skin, he was not white.

A headline splashed across the front page of The Atlanta Evening News — “Bold Negro Kisses White Girl’s Hand” — would initiate the Atlanta Race Riot. The story sparked outrage, and mobs of angry white men began to attack African-American communities. In A Man Called White, White recalls watching a disabled shoe shiner being beaten until he died in a pool of his own blood. “We saw clubs and fists descending to the accompaniment of savage shouting and cursing,” White wrote. “A voice cried [out] ‘there goes another nigger!’”

Cover of “Le Petit Journal” depicting the race riots in Atlanta, Georgia, October 1906. The bottom title reads: “The Lynchings in the United States: The Massacre of Negroes in Atlanta.” (Image courtesy Bibliothèque Nationale de France via Wikimedia Commons)

White’s father, George, purchased a rifle, and as the mob neared the Whites’ home, he and his son positioned themselves at the parlor windows. George ordered Walter “not to shoot until the first white man stepped on the lawn, and once that man did, not to miss.”

“In that instant, there opened up within me a great awareness,” Walter White wrote. “I knew then who I was. I was a Negro, a human being with an invisible pigmentation which marked me a person to be hunted, hanged, abused, discriminated against, kept in poverty and ignorance in order that those whose skin was white would have readily at hand a proof of their superiority. … Yet as a boy there in the darkness amid the tightening fright, I knew the inexplicable thing — that my skin was as white as the skin of those who were coming at me.”

White never fired his gun that night. Just as the mob approached the lawn and the young man took aim, a salvo of gunshots thundered from a brick building next door. A group of the White family’s friends had staked out a position to protect the popular postman’s family, and White was saved from pulling the trigger — as well as the fate that likely would have befallen him had he fired.

After graduating from Atlanta University in 1916 and working as an insurance salesman, White caught wind of the Atlanta school board’s decision to close the only black public high school in the city. He decided to establish a local chapter of the NAACP in Atlanta to fight it. When NAACP Field Secretary James Weldon Johnson came to Atlanta, he was so taken with White that he hired him to be his assistant at the New York headquarters.

Young Walter Francis White at the beginning of his career, in March 1918. (Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

In February 1918, word reached the NAACP that a mob had brutally tortured, shot and lynched a black sharecropper named Jim McIlherron in Estill Springs, Tennessee. NAACP leaders met and discussed sending a protest letter to Tennessee Governor Thomas Rye, but they worried that a letter alone would not gain the attention that these incidents warranted. During the meeting, White made a decision that would launch and define his career: He sought permission to go undercover and make a firsthand investigation.

NAACP Executive Secretary John R. Shillady shut down the notion immediately. What would happen to White should Southerners discover that he was biracial and impersonating a white man to investigate on the behalf of the NAACP? White persisted, and eventually, Shillady relented. By the next day, the upstart activist was setting out on a mission that neither White nor the NAACP had ever previously even contemplated. White went undercover.

In Walter White: The Dilemma of Black Identity in America, Thomas Dyja describes how White assumed the identity of a land buyer when he stepped into Estill Springs’ center of activity: the town’s local general store. White had no intention of asking direct questions about the lynching, but before he could even approach the topic, it came to him. Members of the lynch mob were gathered around a fire crackling in the store’s stove, boasting about the details of the lynching. White, seated unassumingly near the men, got the full, gory details, right down to the moment when McIlherron was doused with coal fluid and prodded with a hot iron for 30 minutes until he died.

An anti-lynching banner outside the NAACP headquarters in New York. (Photo courtesy Library of Congress)

White would encounter many more difficult moments in this new line of work, as he gained an up close look at the casual callousness behind these vicious crimes. Once, while investigating a lynching in Georgia, he ran into the leader of the lynch mob while shopping in a general store. The mob leader, unaware of who White really was, recounted the whole event, chuckling and slapping his thigh throughout the entire story and declaring the lynching to be “the best show, Mister, I ever did see.” Throughout the conversation, White could barely contain his nausea.

White’s undercover investigations continued, providing valuable details to the NAACP in the battle to end lynching, which affected nearly every corner of the United States, but was most prevalent in the Deep South states where White traveled. (The Equal Justice Initiative’s 2015 report on Lynching in America revealed that more than 4,000 African-Americans were lynched in 12 Southern states between 1877 and 1950.) The NAACP published White’s reports and shared them with media outlets, including The Nation, where White published his seminal account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. White summed up that event as such: “A hysterical white girl related that a nineteen-year-old colored boy attempted to assault her in the public elevator of a public office building of a thriving town of 100,000 in open daylight. Without pausing to find whether or not the story was true … a mob of 100-per-cent Americans set forth on a wild rampage that cost the lives of … between 150 and 200 colored men, women and children; the destruction by fire of $1,500,000 worth of property … and everlasting damage to the reputation of the city of Tulsa … ”

In the aftermath of the Tulsa Race Massacre, smoke engulfs buildings and the sky on Archer Street, 1921. (Photo courtesy Oklahoma State University-Tulsa Special Collections and Archives)

“How much longer will America allow these pogroms to continue unchecked?” White asked in his article. “There is a lesson in the Tulsa affair for every American who fatuously believes that Negroes will always be the meek and submissive creatures that circumstances have forced them to be during the past three hundred years.”

The City of Tulsa will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the massacre in May 2021, and it has commissioned the Oklahoma Archeological Survey to dig up a mass grave that many suspect contains the remains of dozens of black people killed in the massacre.

“The Black Dispatch” newspaper reports on the aftermath of the Tulsa Race Massacre, June 1921. (Image courtesy Oklahoma Historical Society)

White worked his way up from investigator to assistant national secretary to eventually leading the NAACP, serving as its executive secretary from 1929 to 1955, working on many prominent legal cases. Unfortunately, White didn’t get to fully realize his vision. He died 10 years before the 1965 Civil Rights Act, and America today is still struggling to execute the vision of racial equality that White dreamt of. But in 2018, two prominent African-American senators stood on the podium of the Senate floor to introduce a federal anti-lynching bill, which would mark a sort of culmination of White’s work.

Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker’s Justice for Victims of Lynching Act seeks to classify any bodily harm on the basis of racial discrimination as a federal hate crime. “With this bill,” said Senator Harris, “we finally have a chance to speak the truth about our past and make clear that these hateful acts will never happen again.” The Justice for Victims of Lynching Act passed the Senate unanimously. On February 26, 2020, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, a revised version of the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act, passed the House of Representatives, by a vote of 410–4. Because of the minor difference between the bill that passed the House and the one that passed the Senate in 2019, the bill must once more be passed by the U.S. Senate before it can go to the president for his signature and become law.

Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, Washington, D.C., June 1942. (Photo by Gordon Parks via Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records)

Walter Francis White’s work on anti-racism and civil rights propels our current conversation about race in America forward. He was born into an ancestry that could not fully call itself white or black, but he fully embraced his African-American heritage. And instead of taking advantage of the privilege that came with his mixed race, he used it to unearth significant truths about black lives in the darkness before civil rights became a rallying cry.

Following his death, the Amsterdam News wrote that White’s “cocky aggressiveness stayed with him as long as he lived — as did his boyhood vanity. But it was these very qualities that helped to make him the best lobbyist our race has ever produced.”