RACES: The Colored Man's White

  • Share
  • Read Later

(2 of 2)

Last week more than 3,000 people of all races, headed by New York's Governor Averell Harriman, attended Walter White's funeral in Harlem, and President Eisenhower mourned a "vigorous champion of justice and equality for all our citizens." A Louisville newspaper eulogized him; the Missouri House passed a resolution of sympathy. As Walter White died, his old enemy Jim Crow was dying too.

*White never knew or cared what percentage of his ancestry was Negro, though Harvard Anthropologist Earnest Hooton estimated it at i/64th. In most states, he was legally a white man, and even in some areas of the Deep South, e.g., the Carolinas, White would have passed as a white under the miscegenation laws.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. Next Page