- Coming up on "American Black Journal," we're gonna preview a new "American Experience" documentary about Walter White, an early leader of the NAACP whose story is seldom told.

Plus, Reverend Dr. Wendell Anthony and Heaster Wheeler are here to talk about the NAACP past and present.

Stay right there.

"American Black Journal" starts right now.

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(upbeat music) - Welcome to "American Black Journal."

I'm your host, Stephen Henderson.

A documentary about a relatively unknown civil rights hero airs on "American Experience" at 9:00 tonight right here on Detroit PBS.

It's called "Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP."

Now White was the head of the NAACP from 1929 to 1955, but his story has not really been told.

The film traces White's life as one of America's most influential Black men.

Let's take a look at a preview.

(dramatic music) - [Interviewer] Exactly what have you accomplished?

- I think a good deal.

Take the armed services.

White and Negro troops were segregated.

That's been eliminated, and we have- - [Male] Walter White was the best lobbyist for the NAACP ever.

- [Male] He was a phenomenon, he was everywhere.

- [Female] One of the unsung heroes of the 20th century.

- [Male] He brought a kind of energy that was just extraordinary.

- [Male] Walter White makes the NAACP into a national player.

- [Male] The question is, why is he forgotten?

(quiet music) - [Male] In the early 20th century, life for African-Americans in the South had been changing for the worse for decades.

It led to this call to fight for equality for African-Americans.

- The NAACP is providing the infrastructure for people to mount protests.

The talent that came into that organization, it's remarkable, it's historic.

- You had W.E.B.

Du Bois, phenomenal communicator, Charlie Houston, spectacular legal mind, and Thurgood Marshall, the ultimate legal rock star.

- [Male] Walter White was the front man, and I had the legal side.

(dramatic music) - [Male] Walter White was the direct descendant of an enslaved woman.

- [Male] He is very light-skinned, indistinguishable from white Americans.

- [Female] He used his appearance to go into places where lynchings had happened.

- [Female] And he gets the inside story.

- [Male] Walter White's investigations made lynching a national issue.

(crowd applauding) - There is no justifiable reason for discrimination because of race or color.

- [Male] White built the NAACP as a powerful lobbying organization.

- Because that was how you effected change.

- [Female] The NAACP laid the foundation for the movement that we see in the 1960s.

- The NAACP is the story of a nation that is perpetually trying to become a better thing, and the people who are trying to define what that better thing might be.

(dramatic music ending) - Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation's oldest civil rights organization.

The association has led the struggle in fighting injustices related to voting, employment, segregated public facilities, and so much more.

Joining me now are Reverend Wendell Anthony, he is president of the NAACP Detroit branch, and Heaster Wheeler, a former executive director of the Detroit NAACP, and current member of the executive committee.

Guys, welcome to "American Black Journal".

- Thank you.

- Thanks Steve.

- It's great to have you here.

- Always glad to be here.

- Yeah, so this documentary about Walter White reminds us of the work that he did almost a hundred years ago now, beginning almost a hundred years ago.

We're in 2025.

We're still talking about so many of the same things.

We can't get past it.

Talk about the legacy, but then also just the work now.

- Well, first of all, thanks for having us.

When you think about the NAACP Stephen, you have to think of Walter White, W.E.B.

Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, the Spingarns, William Monroe Trotter, and so many others.

But Walter White in particular is an interesting individual.

He did so much for the NAACP.

The fact that he succeeded, James Weldon Johnson.

One of the things that makes White stand out is because of his color.

He was a high yellow individual.

- Yeah, yeah.

- He could pass for being white.

He could talk white, go white, be white.

And at the same time, he was Black.

He went into areas where you and I and Heaster could not go for obvious reasons.

On one such occasion, you know, he went and investigated the Tulsa situation, and he was riding with deputies.

And the deputies, one of the deputies said, "Well, we're gonna have some fun tonight.

We can kill somebody, and ain't nobody gonna to say anything."

He got that kind of data.

He was instrumental in helping to facilitate the civil rights focus in terms of the anti-lynching piece in particular.

He worked with Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who was concerned about that.

And he helped to usher in an era of civil rights and laws as an advisor to President Roosevelt.

Eleanor Roosevelt was a member of the executive board for the NAACP back in the day.

And so they had relationship.

Relationships are important.

So he was able to, when they made, when Roosevelt made executive orders, particularly as it relates to Black folk, Walter White was instrumental in helping to construct those kinds of initiatives.

So he was a very, very important person that a lot of people don't know about, but they need to know about.

- And I'll put extra emphasis on the fact that he was a light-complected black man.

- Yeah.

- And it was very, very strategic over the course of the years because of America's racial hierarchy.

Very often, light-complected Black folk could get in and out of places Brown-complected Black folk like us, could never have.

- Or dark chocolate.

- Or dark chocolate, there you go.

But even Hudson's here locally, the only Black folk that could work for Hudson's back in the thirties, forties and fifties, had to be light-complected, and the best they could be were elevator operators.

But let me pause for a second just to acknowledge the NAACP's birthday too.

Today we celebrate 116 years.

I think that's especially significant.

- Absolutely.

- And the more things change, the more things remain the same.

We need the NAACP today as much as we needed it 116 years ago.

But Walter White has to be contextualized because he came along at the exact same, you can't talk about Walter White without talking about Marcus Garvey.

- Right.

- You can't talk about Walter White without talking about the Harlem Renaissance and the poetry in the African-American experience.

Many of us just saw "Ruby", for example, it came to downtown Detroit, the music hall.

- Yeah.

- The story of Ruby McCollum was being written when Walter White was executive director of the NAACP in the early fifties.

So all of these situations are relevant, and they're all connected, but it was particularly strategic that he was light-complected.

We still live a racial hierarchy today.

- Right.

- There are certain things that we don't talk about or don't acknowledge, but colorism is just as significant as racism and sexism today.

- Yeah.

Well, I was reminded very disturbingly of the racial hierarchy recently when I saw pictures of Elon Musk standing next to Donald Trump, the President, in the Oval Office.

Elon Musk had a ball cap on and you know, was carrying a kid around, and things.

- [Heaster] Privilege.

- And you know, remember when Barack Obama- - [Wendell] Privilege.

- He wore a tan suit one day.

- [Heaster] Yes, and they want to impeach him.

- People went crazy.

That's a little thing, but it's not- - I don't know if we have enough time to talk about all of the dynamics of this Elon Musk/Donald Trump thing.

- But see Stephen, that's not a little thing, that's a major thing.

- It's major, that's right.

- Here's a guy that spent almost $300 million to elect this man and to put him in office.

Now he's standing in the Oval Office with his kid running around like he's outside on the playground.

- Privilege.

- Black suit, coat, black cap, in the Oval Office.

Trump's sitting there listening to him as he is espousing what he's doing to the federal government of this country.

He is from South Africa.

He's an Afrikaner.

- [Stephen] Yes.

- Good point.

- And by the same token, they have just stopped supporting aid to South Africa, and one of the priorities of refugees will be the Afrikaners from South Africa coming to America because they cannot get the same kind of juice that they got during the apartheid system.

So the NAACP, looking at all these executive orders, looking at DEI being nullified.

- Yeah.

- At the same time, we have all these people that are being appointed and affirmed by the U.S. Senate to lead the defense department, to lead the health department, to lead the national department of intelligence, to lead the FBI, none of whom are qualified.

What do you call that?

Is it DEI or is it WEI, white exclusivity and inclusion?

So I mean, we've got some situations here, Stephen.

- And thanks for that Rev.

I think it's especially significant too, though, that we tell the whole story.

The greatness of America is reflected in our right to protest for right.

- [Stephen] Absolutely.

- America itself was born out of protest.

So you can't talk about the success of America unless you talk about the fact that women specifically are the primary beneficiaries of all things diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But very often we tend to racialize.

If I say terrorism, we think of one group.

If I say poverty, we think of one group.

If I say criminals, we think of one group.

So when we say diversity, equity, and inclusion, we think of Black folks.

So we've racialized the issue.

But everybody's catching hell in all of this confusion and chaos, and that's by design.

So they've got racist extremists looking at the fact that Black folk are making progress when in fact it's their wives and their daughters that are making progress.

- It's everybody else, right.

- Do you follow me?

So we've gotta tell the whole story.

- You know, the frustration that I feel right now is that you can't even have the conversation about there being this racial imbalance, right?

The assumption that gets made with all of these statements, all of these moves that they're making is, well, things are equal.

Things would be equal if Black people would just stop complaining about it.

- Yes, just stop complaining about it.

Man, but the average brother I know, Black man, just for the record, Black brother, Black man, their blood pressure's five or ten points higher than the average white man.

- Right.

- Because you know that a chance encounter with a rogue police officer can be a death sentence.

- Yeah.

- We know that today in America.

We have a different conversation with our sons than white America will ever have to have with their sons.

You follow me?

We know that everything relevant to the criminal justice experience is rooted in the disparity that African-Americans live, from, like I said, contact and conflict with police, to prosecutorial priorities, to sentencing disparities.

- Applying for a mortgage.

- It goes on and on.

- Everything.

- So, you know, there's a work that we must do if America were ever to live up to its greatness.

- And it's not either or, Stephen, it's both.

And when you raised the issue about should we engage dealing with all the stuff that's going on, that was the same issue back in the day that W.E.B.

Du Bois had.

- Same with Booker T. Washington.

- Booker T. Washington and the Atlanta Compromise talked about.

Well, civil rights are not something we should be dealing with.

- [Stephen] Wow.

- We should be dealing with up you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will, use your hands, do the vocational things, with education.

W.E.B.

Du Bois was talking about, we need to push for civil rights, we need to do voting rights.

Both of them were correct.

- [Stephen] Right, right.

- We need to do all of that.

And even in 2025, people are saying, well, you shouldn't say nothing about this.

Just let him do what he's going to do.

Let's wait for the midterms, let's wait for the next four years.

In the meantime, we're catching hell.

In the meantime, people will be put of the country.

In the meantime, the education department might be eliminated.

In the meantime, U.S. aid not only to Africa, but to South America, central America and Europe is impacted.

And so in the meantime, we have a person who's basically threatening that he won't get out office, and maybe I need to run for a third time.

He's serious about that.

- He's serious about it.

- And people need to check him for that.

And we have a Congress that has abdicated its responsibility to check him.

Thank God for the courts.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- But the bottom line is that some of this stuff is going to the Supreme Court, and the issue there is what they're going to do when Trumpism comes back to you.

- And to your point, Dr. King taught us that gradualism leads to stand stillism.

It doesn't really matter who's uncomfortable, because if you live racism every day, that's about as uncomfortable as it gets.

It can't be more uncomfortable than talking about it.

- Right.

- And we've learned over the years that people who don't learn to talk well together will never really learn to work well together.

So I think we've gotta continue to push the envelope around these kinds of conversations.

And I think diversity, equity, and inclusion has done a good job of helping people learn how to talk.

And then advocacy and public policy priorities really should be research-based.

All of the research will substantiate the need for this fight.

- Right.

So another thing I worry about is that most of this now is a backlash effect, right?

- [Heaster] Yes, sir.

- I remember when Barack Obama was elected.

- You went right there.

- I wrote a column that said that as happy as I was about this incredible milestone, that I worried about what would come after.

What would be the bounce back?

So we've been living with that for 13 years now.

Now that Trump is reelected, DEI, which, you know, gained steam on the back of George Floyd's death, murder.

- That's exactly right.

- At the hands of police.

- Good point, all connected.

- Right, and so it's almost like I can't figure out what we're supposed to do.

What should we do to make sure that progress doesn't end up punishing us in the long run?

I don't know what the- - That's part of the challenge.

But we have to continue to fight.

We have to resist and persist.

Resist meaning that we have to deal with what is legal and what is not legal.

- Yeah.

- We have to take him to court.

We have to push our leaders, Congressional and Senatorial, be they Democrat or Republican.

We're gonna have to get in the street, the court.

Everybody gotta get in this battle because it's not gonna be won by just a single effort.

It's gonna take all of this.

When we think about DEI as an example, and you use DEI to say that's what caused the planes to crash over Washington, DC.

DEI is what's killing us or destroying us.

- How ignorant.

- But there's no evidence to reflect upon that.

So I'm simply saying that the battle has to be fought on all fronts.

If Walter White was here today, I'm sure what he would be doing.

He would be engaged.

Martin Luther King Junior would be engaged.

He would still put pressure on the presidency, but he would also be in the streets and in communities with us.

History reflects that.

So people who are wondering, what can I do, we just had two big forums about what you need to do.

- Public mass meeting, yes sir.

- You need to contact your elected officials.

You need to press them, hold them accountable.

You need to get involved in organizations that are working, trying to fight this stuff.

You need to text, send mail, emails.

You need to visit people.

You need to organize, don't agonize.

We have power.

Don't allow yourself not to be empowered.

We have the power.

When people step up, things step back.

Trump did not back away from that executive order to eliminate funding of USAID because he felt good.

The court stepped in.

- [Stephen] The courts said no.

- And people call their Congressional officers to say, look, you better deal with this because this is hurting our people.

We have people overseas who are in fact working to help this country, who are providing food and soft diplomacy, so they say, to make sure that we have a relationship.

- I think the NAACP contribution to the success of America is so significant because it was rooted in protest and demonstration.

I never thought we would be back at a moment where protest and demonstration will matter.

It matters now more than ever.

We need to take to the streets.

I love a good protest, honestly.

It's just something about it.

In fact, Steve, I hate to tell you, but I actually have a picket sign in my trunk.

Man, if I'm driving down the street and I see people standing up for something, man, I just park around the corner and get out with my protest sign.

I just think it's necessary though.

We've gotta push the envelope.

And we know what righteousness looks like.

This current president, he's not operating under a mandate.

It was not a landslide.

It's a divided country.

And we need the kind of inspired leadership that can build bridges, not erect all these wedges and barriers.

So it's a difficult moment.

But the NAACP is necessary now more than ever.

- What do we do about the people who voted for Donald Trump?

- [Wendell] Yeah.

- Who were voting against their own interests?

And I'm not just talking about African-Americans.

- [Heaster] Of course.

- I'm talking about poor whites.

- [Heaster] They didn't even want Obamacare, people with no teeth, people who were suffering all types of diseases.

- He did very well among people who, this is gonna sound terrible, but who should have known better.

- Yeah.

- And so what do we- - But racial privilege trumped common sense.

You follow me?

A lot of poor white people don't really know how bad they have it.

They assume that some Black person got a job that they deserve.

- Who got it better, right.

- But Lyndon Johnson said it very well when he was working with Dr. King and talking about civil rights, trying to push the bills through.

He said, "If you take the poorest white man and put some money in his pocket, and you talk about Black people in a way that is despairing, then even the poorest white man will vote against himself to hurt the Black man.

Lyndon Johnson said that.

And so one of the most difficult challenges Dr. King had was when he went to Appalachia and he was talking about white people who were poor, saying you need to work in coalition with us.

We have the same interests.

And they did not do that.

When he was in jail, he talked to the jail to say, look, y'all need to be fighting with us because you have low wages, you don't have healthcare.

We're fighting for you.

They could not understand that.

And so the reality is you have to do both.

You have to let folk know.

We have folk who are friends in the Arab community, in the Latino community.

The forums that we just had, had both groups there.

I ain't hating on them.

I'm disappointed that they voted the way they did, or did not vote at all, because we didn't have to be here.

- Right.

- I'm disappointed with some Black folk.

We didn't have to be here.

Elections have consequences.

So we're saying register and then vote, and make sure that you are doing your homework to vote right.

So we can be mad at each other and argue with each other, but the bottom line is we all in the same boat right now.

- And that's why we- - And it's gonna take everybody to push this thing to shore.

- And that's what I mean when I say the work we must do.

We must continue to work in coalition.

If you put this thing in historical perspective though, Stephen, think about it.

From 1619 to roughly 1865, Black folk were in slavery, abject slavery.

- Property.

- Property, no rights that anybody were bound to respect.

That's roughly 250 years.

From 1865 to 1965, you had Jim Crow segregation legalized, but Black folk were still fighting for their own insurance companies, their own churches, their own schools.

That progress was born out of protest.

And then from 1965 to today, you're really only talking about 60 years of something else.

- Yeah, right.

- 60 years of something else.

When I was a kid, every document that came from the government said we're committed to equal opportunity.

And then we had something called affirmative action.

Then we had something called diversity, equity, and inclusion.

All of that was designed to be inclusive, to allow for everybody to tap into the greatness of America.

We still have that potential, but we've got some work to do.

- We got it.

And one of the things we should never forget is our history, because in the thirties, during the Great Depression, when Black folk were migrating to Detroit from the South, they had to go to an area on the east side called Black Bottom.

- Black Bottom, yeah.

- But in that instance, out of that pain, Steve, came gain.

We had 130,000 people that were living in the Black Bottom area.

It was Black Bottom because of the soil.

The French named it that because of the soil.

And we made it Black Bottom.

You had Black beauty parlors, Black barbershops, Black churches, Black funeral homes, Black restaurants out of the necessity to work together.

- So important.

- It came out of that pain.

It was a gain.

And so let's not think we are powerless at this moment.

- And I think it's important too, Reverend, let me just build up on what he said.

This moment, that's all this is, is a moment.

We've lived long enough to know that this guy has concreted a terrible place in history.

But it's but a moment.

- Right.

- Goodness will prevail.

- We always persevere.

- Goodness will prevail.

- That's the legacy and the lesson of Walter White.

- Way more good people than bad people.

- You know, your show is called "American Black Journal".

There's a journal that's progressive.

- It goes a long time.

- That we have.

And there's a pathway that we can still chart.

- All right, guys.

Always great to talk to you.

- Is the time up?

That's it?

- Yeah, I know, I always try to make more time for you.

- I don't know why you brought him here, because he took up my time.

- He took up half of your time, he did.

- No, no, he had to catch his breath, so I just jumped in when he (inhales).

- He gave you a break, that's right.

Thanks for being here.

- Thank you so much, Stephen.

Appreciate you, my man.

- So that's gonna do it for us this week.

You can find out more about our guests at AmericanBlackJournal.org.

And as always, you can connect with us on social media.

Take care, and we'll see you next time.

(soft jazz music) - [Announcer] From Delta faucets to Behr paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support also provided by the Cynthia and Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit PBS.

- [Announcer] DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit PBS.

Among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan-focused giving, we support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Learn more at DTEFoundation.com.

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