No, the new nonfiction film Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP is not about the lead character in AMC’s crime drama, Breaking Bad. But the name of the protagonist played by Bryan Cranston in the long-running TV series could just as well be a knowing nod to the true-life equal rights champion of the same name. Cranston’s character was a high school chemistry teacher who also happens to be a meth manufacturer and dealer. Similarly, the real Walter White appeared to be one thing, but was actually another.
White was born in Atlanta in 1893 to mixed-race parents, and was the grandson of an enslaved person. Though his blue eyes and blonde hair made him easily able to “pass for white,” White firmly identified with the African side of his ancestry and went on to parlay his appearance to “go behind enemy lines” in order to expose white supremacy. He would go undercover and infiltrate white mobs, eliciting confessions about their organizing terrorism campaigns and then reporting them to the public through the then-fledgling National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1918, White relocated to New York City to serve as the NAACP’s secretary assistant.
The nearly two-hour, fact-packed Forgotten Hero serves a dual purpose: In addition to providing a comprehensive biography of White, the documentary also chronicles what has arguably been America’s leading civil rights organization and its struggle for equality.
W.E.B. Du Bois looms large in this historical production as an NAACP co-founder and editor of its monthly magazine The Crisis, the influential author of 1903’s The Souls of Black Folk, and a scholar who taught at the historically Black Atlanta University. Du Bois became friends with the White family, but, as Forgotten Hero relates, his increasing militancy put him at odds with the NAACP and with Walter himself, who became the organization’s executive secretary in 1929.
No hagiography of White or of the NAACP, the documentary evenhandedly depicts the group’s strength and weaknesses, its triumphs and setbacks. It’s interesting to learn that muckraking journalist Ida B. Wells—who pioneered the reportage on lynching that White would continue, often at great peril to himself—parted company with the NAACP.
According to Forgotten Hero, the NAACP dropped the ball when it came to one of the biggest racial injustices in African American history, the Scottsboro Boys. These were the nine Black teenagers charged with raping two white women in Alabama, who were swiftly convicted, with eight of them sentenced to death in 1931. The documentary states that the image-conscious, more middle class-oriented NAACP and White were wary of the case, as the nine proletarian adolescents had illicitly boarded a freight train, which during the Depression was a widespread practice among the poor known as “hoboing.”
Meanwhile, the Communist Party USA—which the film’s narrator, actor Joe Morton, calls “a rising civil rights organization”—spearheaded the Scottsboro Boys’ legal defense. Thus began a rivalry that lasted decades between the NAACP and the more leftwing communists, which militantly supported equal rights for Black Americans. (Du Bois, who left the NAACP during the 1930s and split with White, eventually joined the CPUSA late in life in 1961.)
In addition to reporting on lynching and setting the NAACP on a legal strategy to combat racism, White was also the sparkplug for the organization’s entering the political fray, which had not been as vigorously pursued since Jim Crow laws had disenfranchised so many Black people in the South. Possibly the country’s most prominent African American outside of sports and show business during the Depression, White was friendly with Eleanor Roosevelt, who facilitated Walter’s meeting with FDR at the White House. It was the first such reception of a Black leader since their cousin, Teddy Roosevelt, invited Booker T. Washington to the Executive Mansion in 1901.
White’s efforts to lobby Franklin Roosevelt to publicly support an anti-lynching law and other civil rights measures were unsuccessful, due to the President’s fear of losing Dixie Democrats’ votes. But after the United States entered World War II, Walter successfully urged FDR to allow Black Americans to work in the defense industry. Amid the rising voting power of Black people, President Harry Truman ended segregation in the armed forces in 1948.
An anti-lynching law wasn’t enacted until decades later, when President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act on March 29, 2022.
White remained the NAACP’s executive secretary until 1955, although his power inside the organization, which experienced faction fights, had declined over the years. In addition to Du Bois, another top rival who emerged within the group was Thurgood Marshall, NAACP’s chief counsel and chief counsel in the case which won the historic school desegregation ruling of Brown v. Board of Education with a unanimous Supreme Court ruling. (In 1967, Marshall became the first Black Justice appointed to serve on the highest court in the land.)
Ironically, White lost support within the pro-integration organization he led for thirty-six years because he divorced his African American wife and married a white woman, Poppy Cannon, in 1949, when interracial marriage was rare and illegal in many states.
In 1955, nine months after White’s death, longtime NAACP activist Rosa Parks defied segregation laws by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger, spurring the Montgomery Bus Boycott and igniting the Civil Rights Movement. The direct action tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Freedom Riders, and others shook the institutions of apartheid in the South—and, according to the documentary’s narration, “eclipsed the NAACP.”
Control of the movement passed from the NAACP to other organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. By the late 1960s, the SNCC changed the “N” in its name from “Nonviolent” to “National” and the leadership of the Civil Rights Movement moved on to more militant advocates of “Black Power,” including the Black Panthers.
Walter White, says Wayne State University history professor Kidada Williams in the film, is “one of the unsung heroes of the twentieth century.” Forgotten Hero restores his status among the pantheon of civil rights leaders. Skillfully blending archival footage, photos, and original interviews with contemporary historians and relatives of the film’s subjects, co-directors Rob Rapley and Michelle Smawley have created a vivid, invaluable history of one of the nation’s most significant equal rights organizations.
However, these veteran documentarians might have missed one intriguing point about their subject: Walter White’s great-grandfather may have been enslaver William Henry Harrison, who went on to be elected U.S. President in 1840. Now, that’s unforgettable!
Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP premieres Tuesday, February 25, 2025, 9:00-11:00 p.m. ET on PBS, PBS.org and the PBS App.
