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Lot 193
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Eleanor Roosevelt honors NAACP National Secretary Walter White
Eleanor Roosevelt honors NAACP National Secretary Walter White
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Description:

Roosevelt Eleanor
Rare Autograph Letter Signed “ Eleanor Roosevelt” as First Lady, 1p, 8” x 10.5” (visible). [May 1944, no place] To Mr. [Walter Francis] White. Double matted with a photograph of Mrs. Roosevelt and attractively framed to 20” x 17”. In apparent fine condition. 


In full “ I want to add my words of appreciation & gratitude to this twenty-fifth anniversary of your service in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. What you do for your own people is indirectly done for us all, since, when conditions are bad for the colored they are usually bad for the white as well. You have been patient & courageous & inspired others to unselfish service & I send you my best wishes for many more years of profitable work.” 

The May 26, 1944, edition of The New York Times headlined “600 Pay tribute / to Walter White / Willkie and Mrs. Roosevelt Join / in Honoring Him for 25 Years’ / Service to Negroes.” In part, “Wendell Willkie and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt joined last night with 600 citizens and civic leaders of all parties and faiths in paying tribute to Walter White at a dinner in the Hotel Roosevelt in celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his service as secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People … Mr. Willkie gave $5,000 from the Wendell Willkie Trust Fund, established with the proceeds of his book ‘One World.’ It was his first public appearance since his withdrawal from the contest for the Republican Presidential nomination [he had been his party’s nominee against FDR in 1940]. Mrs. Roosevelt, who brought the President’s greetings to Mr. White, added her praise of the Negro leader, by saying that he always had known how to grasp victory from defeat…” Photocopy of the article is included. 

Undoubtedly, Mrs. Roosevelt personally presented the letter here offered to White expounding on her praise since she was, ostensibly, speaking at the dinner representing her husband, the President. “After Walter Francis White (1893-1955) graduated from Atlanta University in 1916, the son of Madeline and George White left his job selling insurance and joined the Atlanta branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the influential civil rights organization he would eventually lead through four decades of the twentieth century. Able to ‘pass’ as white because he was light-skinned with blue-eyes, and armed with boundless wits and energy, White became the NAACP's foremost undercover investigator of Southern lynchings, and he personally traveled thousands of miles every year between 1918 and 1927, and reported first-hand on forty-one lynchings, eight race riots and at least two major cases of peonage.

 "‘I Investigate Lynchings,’ a 1929 piece by White in H.L. Mencken's ‘The American Mercury,’ is an overview of this decade of his investigations, reports that had appeared in the NAACP's monthly ‘The Crisis,’ or were serialized in major African American newspapers like the ‘Chicago Defender’ and ‘Pittsburgh Courier,’ and which had reached national audiences through periodicals such as the ‘New Republic,’ ‘American Mercury’,’ Nation’ and ‘Saturday Evening Post’… 

“In 1931 White succeeded James Weldon Johnson as the national secretary of the NAACP, and he would later chronicle much of that important organization's mid-century struggles for civil rights in his autobiography and in the posthumously published ‘How Far the Promised Land?’ (1955). In July 1943, White and NAACP Special Counsel Thurgood Marshall co-authored ‘What Caused the Detroit Riot?,’ an analysis of the June 1943 race riot that left thirty-four people dead, twenty-five of them black. In 1944 and 1945 During World War II, White visited the European, North African and Pacific theaters of war, sending back to the ‘New York Post’ and other periodicals accounts of what he saw, including his analyses of the experiences of black servicemen on American military bases, much of which he later described in ‘A Rising Wind: A Report on the Negro Soldier in the European Theatre of War’ (1945)…” [Georgia Writers Hall of Fame]


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