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Books by Walter White
The Fire in the Flint (novel,1924)
/
Flight
(novel,1926) /
Rope
and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929)
How far the Promised Land?
955) /
A
Man Called White (autobiography,1948).
*
* * * *
Books on Lynching &
Racial Violence
The Chronological
History of the Negro in America (1969) /
Strain of
Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (1975)
But There Was
No Peace: The
Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction
(1984) /
Lynch Law
( 1905) /
An American Dilemma
(1944)
The Crucible of Race:
Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation
(1984) /
Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
(1989)
Rope and Faggot
( 1929) /
The Tragedy of
Lynching (1933) /
Race Riot in East St,
Louis (1964) /
Urban Racial Violence
(1976)
/
Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders
(1968) /
Violence
in America (1969) *
* * * *
How Far the Promised Land?
By Walter White
Reviewed by J. Patrick O'Connell "Our Constitution is color blind, and
neither know nor tolerates classes among citizens . . ."
wrote Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan as he dissented
in the 1896 Plessy versus Ferguson decision which established
the separate-but-equal theory in race relations. It took
fifty-eight years for the Supreme Court to get around to
repairing the damage. In 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren
announced for the Court that Plessy versus Ferguson was
overruled because segregation of children deprived them of
"equal education opportunities."
The author of How Far the Promised Land? is the late
Walter White, Executive Secretary of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People from 1918 until his death,
March 21, 1955. He presents an excellent chronicle recording the
"advances made by Negro Americans during the last fifteen
years. . . ." Wisely he summarizes the situation since the
Plessy decision. In general, the book is a remarkable briefing
of the racial aims, gains and mistakes of the past quarter
century. It includes annotations and index.
Respectable gains are to be reported in all areas of the
fight for equality with the exception of the "sordid story
. . . of Negro housing," says White. He records the
strategies which led to the many legal victories, the switch in
NAACP policy from the fight for equal facilities to an attack on
segregation, and the struggles on the national, state, and local
levels for inclusion in appropriation bills effective
provisions against discrimination.
In a chapter entitled, "Sunday at
Eleven" White remarks: "Not until the pressures of
court decisions and world pressures of opinion on the issue were
exerted . . . did a discernible crack begin to appear in the
wall of church segregation." He compliments Archbishop
Joseph E. Ritter of St. Louis, Bishop Vincent Waters of Raleigh
and Archbishop Robert E. Lucey of San Antonio on their recent
policies. But he complains of the "pattern of almost total
segregation" among the "fifty-six million American
protestants." And stating that a majority of Cicero,
Illinois, rioters and Chicago Trumbull Park Homes rioters were
Catholic, he declares that "without effect were efforts to
persuade Samuel Cardinal Stritch to speak out publicly, if only
to remind his communicants of the Pope's encyclicals about race
prejudice and the edict of the Society for the Propagation of
the faith that hate of another person because of color is a
mortal sin."
Regardless of the validity or lack of
validity of the preceding charges, White's doctrinal comments
betray his ignorance of Catholicism. It is unfortunate that Mr.
White's rare ventures into "philosophizing"
persistently expose him to refutation and lessen his
effectiveness.
Source: Books on Trial (14) 1955-1956
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