White Lies Quotes

“The sooner you people find that you can't depend on David and the Lord," Darrow said, "but get busy yourselves, the better off you will be. If the Lord was going to do anything for you, he would've done it already." (Clarence Darrow)”
― A.J. Baime, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret

“While Washington advocated for education, vocation, and submission to the white elite, Du Bois wanted equality and power — everything that was promised to all Americans in the nation’s founding documents.”
― A.J. Baime, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret – An Investigative Biography of Passing, Lynching, and Civil Rights Activism

“Johnson also liked to talk to his new protégé about leadership. He was full of maxims that sounded almost biblical, such as, “Of the real leader the people some day become aware, and say: This man serves well, let us follow him.” Johnson believed that leadership was best imagined as two forces pulling against each other: radicalism that motivated people with fresh ideas, and conservatism, to balance the radicalism with rational decision making.”
― A.J. Baime, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret – An Investigative Biography of Passing, Lynching, and Civil Rights Activism

“After that night I knew I never wanted to be a white man,” he concluded. “I knew which side I was on.”
― A.J. Baime, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret – An Investigative Biography of Passing, Lynching, and Civil Rights Activism

“White supremacists had taken control, and the key to keeping it was the ballot box. “Those who have been determined to maintain a degraded status for the Negro,” Walter later wrote, “have shrewdly concentrated on taking from him his most potent weapon and defense — the right to vote.”
― A.J. Baime, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret – An Investigative Biography of Passing, Lynching, and Civil Rights Activism

“The central figure is Walter Francis White, born in Atlanta in 1893 and raised there as well. Both of Walter’s parents came from enslaved families in Georgia, and while they were African American, they had skin so pale, they and their children could have passed for white. “I am a Negro,” Walter himself explained. “My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.” The family’s complexion represented a shameful truth: that generations of enslaved families were born out of illicit encounters between Black women who had no rights to their bodies and white male slave owners, who had full legal impunity. Walter’s great-grandmother on his mother’s side, in fact, birthed six children in the 1830s, fathered by her owner, William Henry Harrison, who later became president of the United States.”
― A.J. Baime, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret – An Investigative Biography of Passing, Lynching, and Civil Rights Activism

“As my father lay dying in a jimcrow hospital in Atlanta he put into words for my brother and me the faith which had sustained him throughout his life. “Human kindness, decency, love, whatever you wish to call it,” he said, “is the only real thing in the world. . . . It’s up to you two, and others like you, to use your education and talents to make love as positive an emotion in the world as are prejudice and hate. That’s the only way the world can save itself.” — Walter White, A Man Called White”
― A.J. Baime, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret – An Investigative Biography of Passing, Lynching, and Civil Rights Activism

“senator from South Carolina Cole Blease: “In the South we believe that white supremacy is a part of the Christian religion.”
― A.J. Baime, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret – An Investigative Biography of Passing, Lynching, and Civil Rights Activism

“Walter Francis White was cocky. Harlem loved him for it, even if some folks wondered why he said he was Afro-American. Physically, he was not only white, he was . . . one of the whitest white men ever to have an octoroon for a grandfather.”
― A.J. Baime, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret – An Investigative Biography of Passing, Lynching, and Civil Rights Activism