![]() In other words, he could pass for white, and he did. White’s parents were both pale-skinned African Americans who had descended from enslaved families in Georgia. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.” My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. In the opening sentences of his autobiography, he wrote: “I am a Negro. It is an understatement to say that White was an unusual individual. Having had a role in persuading Truman to establish a Civil Rights Commission, White sensed that the president was ready to take another step forward toward the promotion of civil rights.Īccording to White’s autobiography, he told Truman that a speech at the Lincoln Memorial on the last day of the NAACP’s 38th annual convention would tell the world that America was committed to narrowing the margin between “our protestations of freedom and our practice of them.” The NAACP leader was surprised when Truman accepted on the spot. The idea for the president’s speech had been originated by Walter White, who had managed in April to score an appointment with Truman in the Oval Office. He had grown up in Missouri, formerly a slave state, with grandparents on both sides who had enslaved Blacks, a mother who refused to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom and a vocabulary that included the “N-word” and similar racial slurs throughout his presidency. Truman was an unlikely advocate of civil rights for African Americans. An expectant crowd of 5,000 - a sea of Black and white faces - awaited him, arrayed in front of and along both sides of the reflecting pool.
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