White Lies

September 1, 2021

In Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, CNN anchor Avlon addresses President Abraham Lincoln's conciliatory vision regarding the post-Civil War era, aiming to show how it influenced activists from Nelson Mandela to Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. (75,000-copy first printing). The New York Times best-selling Baime's White Lies profiles Black civil rights activist Walter F. White, who figured largely in the Harlem Renaissance and the NAACP while leading a dual life as a reporter investigating racial violence in the South because he could pass for white (40,000-copy first printing). Chapin, The President's Man, here recalls his years as personal aide, special assistant, and finally deputy assistant to President Richard Nixon as the 50th anniversary of Watergate looms. In African Founders, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Fischer shows that enslaved Africans brought with them skills ranging from animal husbandry to ethics that profoundly shaped colonial and early U.S. society (100,000-copy first printing). A conservative gay reporter who has received awards from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, Kirchick dug through multitudinous declassified documents and interviewed over 100 people to write Secret City, which profiles the impact of the LGBTQ+ community on Washington, DC, politics since Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. A multi-award-winning journalist and professor emeritus at Champlain College, Randall intends to show that not only were The Founders' Fortunes pledged in support of the Revolutionary War but that concerns about their fortunes helped prompt it. A professor of art crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Thompson is an acknowledged expert in the national debate surrounding Smashing Statues--should controversial public monuments be pulled down or allowed to stand? Journalist/author Thompson ( Kickflip Boys) uses newly released records to tell the story of Patrick and Bridget Kennedy, who fled Ireland's Great Famine for Boston, MA, and became The First Kennedys, founders of a political dynasty.

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Starred review from November 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.

January 1, 2022
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.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2022
Walter Francis White, a leading civil rights advocate of the twentieth century, was, in his own words, an "enigma of a Black man occupying a white body." White passed in order to fight crime and to be an agent of change. His astonishing story starts with an Atlanta race riot he witnessed as a teen. This led him to the NAACP and to his mentor, James Weldon Johnson, as well as to W. E. B. DuBois, in addition to his sometimes difficult interactions with Marcus Garvey. The author chronicles how White used his appearance to infiltrate Klan groups in the South and expose perpetrators of lynchings, visiting crime scenes at great risk to his safety. His investigations often found that there were more murder victims than newspapers reported. Eventually, some Klan members caught on and put the word out against him, which exposed him to even greater risk of harm, but, in spite of the high personal costs, White continued fighting against white supremacy and racial injustices. 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.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.