Publishers Weekly
★ 11/29/2021
Historian Baime (Dewey Defeats Truman) delivers a captivating portrait of civil rights activist and novelist Walter White (1893–1955) and the fight to end anti-Black violence and racial discrimination in the U.S. Born into a family of “light-skinned Negroes” in Atlanta, White had blue eyes, pale skin, and blond hair. (“The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me,” he wrote in his autobiography.) He took an executive position at the NAACP in 1917 and went undercover as a white man to report on the Red Summer of 1919, the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, and other outbreaks of racial violence in the South. Baime seamlessly interweaves White’s harrowing investigations with his life in Harlem, where he was at the epicenter of a flowering of a Black arts and activism scene that included Claude McKay, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and delves into the NAACP’s unsuccessful campaign to get an anti-lynching bill through Congress, tensions between the civil rights group and the U.S. Communist Party, and the fallout from White’s decision to divorce his wife for a white woman in 1949. Filled with vibrant period details and lucid explanations of legal and political matters, this is a riveting portrait of a complex and courageous crusader for racial equality. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
[An] urgent, much needed biography.” — New Yorker
“Vigorous…. Baime recounts [White’s work] with the vividness it deserves.” — Washington Post
"White should rank alongside Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as a founding father of the civil rights era. Yet he is all but forgotten today. That oversight gets an overdue correction in A.J. Baime's engrossing new biography, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret." — Los Angeles Times
"Electrifying... In White Lies, the latest deeply informative and exquisitely paced addition to a body of work...Baime aims to deliver White's astonishing story from undeserved obscurity." — Chicago Review of Books
"A captivating portrait of civil rights activist and novelist Walter White... Filled with vibrant period details and lucid explanations of legal and political matters, this is a riveting portrait of a complex and courageous crusader for racial equality." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Baime ably depicts White's lifelong Zelig-like abilities... The author brings us directly into White's fascinating world... A well-constructed life of a man who, largely forgotten, deserves pride of place in civil rights history." — Kirkus Reviews
"Baime tells White’s story with verve, clarity, and perspicacity.... A riveting profile of a little-studied Black civil rights leader." — Library Journal
“A. J. Baime is a master storyteller and this is his finest work—a thrilling story and a stunning, smart, invaluable piece of American history that helps us better understand a forgotten hero and better understand the question of race in America. An extraordinary book.” — Jonathan Eig, New York Times best-selling author of Ali: A Life
“White Lies, A. J. Baime’s well-researched and riveting biography of Walter F. White, should be required reading not only for NAACP leaders across America, but for any student of US history and Black leaders in the fight for civil rights. This book is a profound accounting of a pivotal time in our nation and of a man who helped shape its course. Far too many people have never heard of Walter. Or they only know precious little of his contributions to the cause. Now, no one has any excuse.” — Richard Rose, president, Atlanta branch of the NAACP
“Race is the central question of American history, and Walter White is the riddle within. Far less well-known than he should be, Walter’s dangerous investigations for the NAACP throughout the Jim Crow South changed the way Americans viewed the awful practice of lynching, which surely would have been Walter’s fate if his true identity were ever discovered. A. J. Baime’s White Lies finally gives this American hero his due. Impossible to put down, both thoughtful and gripping, White Lies proves that no one writes American history better than Baime.” — Jeffrey A. Engel, director, Center for Presidential History
"A.J. Baime tells White’s remarkable story in “White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret.” Sure, it’s the biography of one man, yet it’s also a history of racism in America." — New York Daily News
"Today the history books tend to omit mentions of [Walter] White. Other attempts to bring this character to the modern era, mostly academic volumes, have fallen on similarly deaf ears... None of this stopped A. J. Baime... Baime’s book conveys the highlights of White’s life without bogging readers down in the details... It’s nothing short of amazing to see, for the first time, White grace the mainstream." — Air Mail
“In White Lies, Baime engagingly points the spotlight on one of the most significant figures in American history, whose story deserves to be far more widely known.” — Booklist
"Baime's thoughtful and gripping biography will hopefully help White get his historical due." — Arlington Magazine
"The color line becomes an intriguing, complex story in A.J. Baime’s well-told narrative of a 'race man' who lived in two worlds and bucked the demands of both." — New York Sun
New Yorker
[An] urgent, much needed biography.
Jonathan Eig
A. J. Baime is a master storyteller and this is his finest work—a thrilling story and a stunning, smart, invaluable piece of American history that helps us better understand a forgotten hero and better understand the question of race in America. An extraordinary book.”
Jeffrey A. Engel
Race is the central question of American history, and Walter White is the riddle within. Far less well-known than he should be, Walter’s dangerous investigations for the NAACP throughout the Jim Crow South changed the way Americans viewed the awful practice of lynching, which surely would have been Walter’s fate if his true identity were ever discovered. A. J. Baime’s White Lies finally gives this American hero his due. Impossible to put down, both thoughtful and gripping, White Lies proves that no one writes American history better than Baime.
Washington Post
Vigorous…. Baime recounts [White’s work] with the vividness it deserves.
Chicago Review of Books
"Electrifying... In White Lies, the latest deeply informative and exquisitely paced addition to a body of work...Baime aims to deliver White's astonishing story from undeserved obscurity."
Richard Rose
White Lies, A. J. Baime’s well-researched and riveting biography of Walter F. White, should be required reading not only for NAACP leaders across America, but for any student of US history and Black leaders in the fight for civil rights. This book is a profound accounting of a pivotal time in our nation and of a man who helped shape its course. Far too many people have never heard of Walter. Or they only know precious little of his contributions to the cause. Now, no one has any excuse.
|Los Angeles Times
"White should rank alongside Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as a founding father of the civil rights era. Yet he is all but forgotten today. That oversight gets an overdue correction in A.J. Baime's engrossing new biography, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret."
New York Daily News
"A.J. Baime tells White’s remarkable story in “White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret.” Sure, it’s the biography of one man, yet it’s also a history of racism in America."
Air Mail
"Today the history books tend to omit mentions of [Walter] White. Other attempts to bring this character to the modern era, mostly academic volumes, have fallen on similarly deaf ears... None of this stopped A. J. Baime... Baime’s book conveys the highlights of White’s life without bogging readers down in the details... It’s nothing short of amazing to see, for the first time, White grace the mainstream."
Los Angeles Times
"White should rank alongside Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as a founding father of the civil rights era. Yet he is all but forgotten today. That oversight gets an overdue correction in A.J. Baime's engrossing new biography, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret."
New Yorker
[An] urgent, much needed biography.
Booklist
In White Lies, Baime engagingly points the spotlight on one of the most significant figures in American history, whose story deserves to be far more widely known.
Arlington Magazine
"Baime's thoughtful and gripping biography will hopefully help White get his historical due."
Library Journal
01/01/2022
Baime (The Arsenal of Democracy) writes a biography of Walter Francis White (1893–1955), a Black American civil rights activist who directed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1929 to 1955. White (who was blue-eyed and blond but identified as Black) cut his teeth as an undercover investigator of lynchings. He sometimes passed for white to gain the confidences of racist murderers and witnesses and expose crimes in the newspapers, Baime writes. Later, succeeding his mentor James Weldon Johnson as leader of the NAACP, White quintupled its membership to 500,000, refocused the association on fighting for civil rights through the courts and via political lobbying, and helped persuade President Harry S. Truman to mandate racial equality in the U.S. military. White wrote six books and figured prominently in the Harlem Renaissance, but despite these achievements, White has been sidelined by scholars and the public, Baime argues, perhaps in part due to the scandal of his marriage to a white woman in 1949. Baime tells White's story with verve, clarity, and perspicacity. The result holds its own with more scholarly biographies of White from Kenneth Janken (2003) and Robert Zangrando and Ronald Lewis (2019). VERDICT A riveting profile of a little-studied Black civil rights leader.—Michael Rodriguez
Kirkus Reviews
2021-12-15
Sturdy biography of a Black journalist, writer, and reformer who moved easily, if sometimes stealthily, between two worlds.
Walter Francis White (1893-1955) was born in Atlanta to light-skinned Black parents whose multiracial heritage spoke to the complex genealogies of the Old South. “My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond,” White would later write. “The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.” The absence of those traits allowed White and his family to survive the waves of lynchings that plagued the South. In his early 20s, he moved to New York, where he worked as an investigator and sometime journalist, often returning to the South posing as a White man to examine racially motivated murder cases. Baime ably depicts White’s lifelong Zelig-like abilities: He was at some of the signal events of his time, taking his place at the lead of the Harlem Renaissance, doing gumshoe work in the immediate aftermath of the Tulsa Massacre, weathering the Red Scare, and accumulating scores of friends. The author brings us directly into White’s fascinating world, in which Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson were frequent guests at salons White held in Harlem, while “George Gershwin debuted Rhapsody in Blue on Walter’s piano.” Active in civil rights as a leader in the NAACP, White pressed Franklin Roosevelt to support activist legislation to advance Black causes, which Roosevelt did not do willingly, fearful that “he would offend a power base of his own party, the Democrats’ Solid South.” Fortunately, Eleanor Roosevelt reached out to express her support, trying to persuade her husband to do the right thing—and adding another friend to White’s long list. He died too young, and he was almost immediately pushed into the back ranks of the civil rights movement, although he was the primary architect of an anti-lynching bill that has yet to clear the Senate, thanks to the opposition of Rand Paul.
A well-constructed life of a man who, largely forgotten, deserves pride of place in civil rights history.
