CHAPTER 12

Walter F. White, The Fire in the Flint, and Persistent Struggle

There have been many riots in the United States and England recently, and immediately following the war of democracy; there will be many more as coming from the white man. Therefore, the best thing the Negro of all countries can do is to prepare to match fire with hell fire.1

In the wake of what James Weldon Johnson called the “the bloody summer of 1919”, faith was fast diminishing that sanguine race romances such as Fleming’s Hope’s Highway represented a suitable response to the postwar epidemic of racial violence. Beliefs in moral suasion and millennialism suffered serious setbacks and were being supplanted by concerted literary efforts to expose the excesses of white racism unflinchingly so as to foreground the necessity of communal organization. The resultant literary portraits of the postwar era reflected, in the words of Howard Odum, “a new realism and a “new frankness and courage to face facts without fear, excitement, or apologies”.2 For while it was generally perceived that the war had set in motion an auspicious “quickening” of “racial consciousness”, it became also widely understood that the struggle for basic civil rights had just begun.3 Thus, it seems only befitting that Walter White’s first foray into the realm of literature resulted in a novel of political

1 Marcus Garvey, “Blackman All Over the World Should Prepare to Protect Themselves”, in Negro World, 11 October 1919, 1. 2 Quoted in Waldron, Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance, 39. 3 Kenneth Robert Janken, White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP (New York: The New Press, 2003), 14. 264 Embattled Home Fronts awakening that critically reevaluates the impact of World War I on “race relations, racial violence, and a nascent black consciousness in south Georgia”.4 As US war mobilization was gearing up in late 1917, twenty-four- year-old Walter White found himself at a crucial juncture in his life. Young, well educated, and ambitious, White had just become a founding member of the Standard Loan and Realty Company and his professional career looked very promising indeed. A respected member of Atlanta’s prosperous black middle class, he had also made a name for himself by establishing the local NAACP branch and leading a vigorous publicity campaign to improve the city’s floundering black school system. This civic engagement had brought White to the attention of James Weldon Johnson, who was “impressed with the degree of mental and physical energy he [White] seemed to be able to bring into play and center on the job at hand”.5 Shortly after Johnson was appointed acting secretary of the NAACP, White received an unexpected offer to serve as one of the organization’s assistant secretaries. White, obviously flattered, expressed his appreciation, but hesitated to accept the offer. Financial considerations aside, the war abroad seemed to afford a better opportunity to prove himself a hero and to advance the race in the eyes of a skeptical nation. With the benefit of hindsight, White recalls in A Man Called White how he caught the fever of patriotism and was “induced” to apply for the segregated officer-training program:

While I debated [Johnson’s] offer, a “flying squadron” of intensely patriotic young Negroes came to Atlanta during the course of a Southern tour to induce Negroes to volunteer for the Negro officers’ training camp which the War Department under pressure was planning to open at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. For the first time in history, the city of Atlanta permitted Negroes to use the city’s auditorium for a meeting to whip up patriotism. Some of us were invited to sit on the platform. When an eloquent appeal for volunteers was made, I found myself springing to my feet as one of the first to volunteer.6

4 Ibid., 104. 5 Ibid., 27. 6 White, A Man Called White, 36.