quality:corruption
Walter Francis White was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for a quarter of a century, from 1929 until 1955. He directed a broad program of legal challenges to racial segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. White first joined the NAACP as an investigator in 1918, at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson. He acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary and traveled to the South to investigate lynchings and race riots. Being light-skinned, at times he was able to pass as white to facilitate his investigations and protect himself in tense situations. White succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP in an acting capacity in 1929, taking over officially in 1931, and led the organization until his death in 1955. He joined the Advisory Council for the Government of the Virgin Islands in 1934, but he resigned in 1935 to protest President Franklin D. Roosevelt's silence at Southern Democrats' blocking of anti-lynching legislation to avoid retaliatory obstruction of his New Deal policies. White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. He worked with President Harry S. Truman on desegregating the armed forces after World War II and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this. Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up its Legal Defense Fund, which conducted numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.