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Ironically, Walter White's pale skin got him into the Negro movement. In 1918 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People wanted an investigator who looked white enough to circulate among crowds at lynchings, and young White, recently graduated from the Negro Atlanta University, was well qualified for the job. Founded nine years before as the result of a disastrous race riot in Abraham Lincoln's home town of Springfield, 111. the N. A. A. C. P. was then a smallish but idealistic organization with a masthead of big names, among them liberal Editor Oswald Garrison Villard and famed Boston Lawyer Moorfield Storey.
The Association published The Crisis, later to reach its peak of influence under the editorship of Atlanta University's scholarly VV. E. Burghardt Du Bois.* It circulated a news service to the Negro press, which now numbers over 200 papers and magazines. It lobbied for Negro legislation, and, when a post-War wave of lynchings carried off ten returned Negro soldiers in 1919 (two of them burned alive), it began to spend an increasing amount of its energy promoting State and then Federal anti-lynching laws. Palefaced Negro White did his job well. He talked to members of mobs that executed some 40 lynchings. Occasionally he had to evade such triumphant questions as "Well, how would you like to have your daughter marry a nigger?" Once, while investigating a race riot, in Arkansas, he narrowly escaped a mob who had heard he was a Negro investigator, breathlessly boarded a train only to have the conductor say: "You're leaving too soon—they're locking for a yellow nigger." He helped the N. A. A. C. P. publish the first case history of lynching, covering 3,224 cases between 1889 and 1918. And as assistant to N. A. A. C. P. Secretary James Weldon Johnson, he sat in the Senate gallery and heard the Dver Bill talked to death in 1922.
In Rope & Faggot, which he wrote in France on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1927-28, Author White maintained that the long tradition of U. S. vigilantism has finally narrowed down to the Southern Negro, not to protect Southern womanhood as was usually claimed (he found rape charged in less than one lynching in five*), but to shackle and harry a growing economic competitor. Rope & Faggot also maintained that lynch law dated back to Colonial days when a Quaker named Charles Lynch sat as magistrate in an extra-legal court at what is now Lynchburg, Va., to try horse thieves, to the 18305 when a St. Louis judge, aptly named Lawless, advised a jury that mob murder was "beyond the reach of law." The N. A. A. C. P. record still is that after 99.4% of U. S. lynchings, sheriffs had reported with melancholy unanimity: no arrests, no indictments, no convictions.
Lobbying-When James Weldon Johnson retired to teach literature at Fisk University in 1930, Walter White succeeded to his $5,000 job and a Federal anti-lynching law officially became Item No. 1 on the N. A. A. C. P. schedule. The White argument, ceaselessly drummed into Negroes and white legislators alike, was that while talk is long, the rope is short —that in the 13 years between the Dyer filibuster and the filibuster that wrecked the Wagner-Costigan bill, mobs had lynched with practical impunity more than 290 U. S. Negroes.