The day Walter White was buried in 1955 the New York Times called him "the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington." For more than two decades, White, as secretary of the NAACP, was perhaps the nation's most visible and most powerful African-American leader. He won passage of a federal anti-lynching law, hosted one of the premier salons of the Harlem Renaissance, created the legal strategy that led to Brown v. Board of Education, and initiated the campaign demanding that Hollywood give better roles to black actors. Driven by ambitions for himself and his people, he offered his entire life to the advancement of civil rights in America.
About the Author
Thomas Dyja is the author of novels (Play for a Kingdom, which won the Casey Award in 1998 for the best baseball book of the year; Meet John Trow, and The Moon in Our Hands), nonfiction (Only Connect, with Dr. Rudy Crew, about reforming our schools), and children's books, and has edited a number of books of biography. A graduate of Columbia University, he lives in New York City.
