Tag: Walter Francis White (1893–1955)

In the winter of 1918, just weeks after Walter White began a job at the New York office of the NAACP, a black man was brutally tortured, then burnt alive, in a small town in Tennessee. Blond, blue-eyed and exceptionally light-skinned, White was African-American, and though he had often used his improbable looks to travel undetected through the segregated South, on that bleak February day he accepted a new and potentially deadly mission: to get on the next train down to the small Tennessee town, pose as a white traveling salesman, and stay there until he discovered who committed the crime.” With these actual events as a starting point, Dyja paints a tense and complex portrait of a dying Southern town and of a remarkable man risking his life to unlock its secrets. White works his way into both the good-old-boy network of the town and the besieged African-American community, moving back and forth between white and black, getting closer to the truth of the lynching while trying desperately to hide the truth of who he really is. Everything, though, is not as it seems, and as he struggles to establish guilt and innocence in a foreign landscape, he must also confront his own questions of identity. When another lynching suddenly looms, Walter White must decide just how much he will sacrifice to save a black life and the white souls of Sibley Springs.